Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers 9048558352, 9789048558353

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Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers Edited by Rebecca Copeland

Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers

Japan Documents Handbooks This series focuses on the broad field of Japanese Studies, aimed at the worldwide English language scholarly market, published in Tokyo in English. Each Handbook will contain an average of 20 newly written contributions on various aspects of the topic, which together comprise an up-to-date survey of use to scholars and students. The focus is on Humanities and Social Sciences. Titles in this series: Handbook of Higher Education in Japan (edited by Paul Snowden) Handbook of Confucianism in Modern Japan (edited by Shaun O’Dwyer) Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transition (edited by Forum Mithani and Griseldis Kirsch) Handbook of Japanese Christian Writers (edited by Mark Williams, Van C. Gessel and Yamane Michihiro) Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (edited by Rebecca Copeland) Forthcoming titles in this series: Re-examining Postwar Japanese History: A Handbook (edited by Simon Avenell) The Annotated Constitution of Japan: A Handbook (edited by Colin P.A. Jones) Handbook of Environmental History in Japan (edited by Tatsushi Fujihara) Handbook of Sport and Japan (edited by Helen Macnaughtan and Verity Postlethwaite) Handbook of Japanese Martial Arts (edited by Alexander Bennett) Handbook of Japanese Public Administration and Bureaucracy (edited by Mieko Nakabayashi and Hideaki Tanaka) Handbook of Crime and Punishment in Japan (edited by Tom Ellis and Akira Kyo) Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan (edited by Paola Cavaliere and Junko Otani) Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Diplomacy: The 2010s (edited by Tosh Minohara) Handbook of Japanese Feminisms (edited by Andrea Germer and Ulrike Wöhr) Handbook of Japan’s Environmental Law, Policy, and Politics (edited by Hiroshi Ohta) Handbook of Japanese Games (edited by Rachael Hutchinson) Handbook of Human Rights and Japan (edited by Tamara Swenson) Handbook of Europe-Japan Relations (edited by Lars Vargö) Teaching Japan: A Handbook (edited by Gregory Poole and Ioannis Gaitanidis) Handbook of Russia-Japan Relations (edited by Kazuhiko Togo and Dmitry Streltsov) Handbook of Women in Japanese Buddhism (edited by Monika Schrimpf and Emily Simpson) Handbook of Japanese Security (edited by Leszek Buszynski) Handbook of Japanese Tourism (edited by Hideto Fujii) Handbook on Japanese Civil Society (edited by Simon Avenell and Akihiro Ogawa) Handbook of Japanese Labor Practices: Changing Perceptions (edited by Robin Sakamoto) The Advent of Sound in Japanese Cinema: A Handbook (edited by Sean O’Reilly) Handbook of Global Migration and Japan (edited by Shinnosuke Takahashi and Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi) Handbook of Work and Leisure in Japan (edited by Nana Okura Gagne and Isaac Gagne) Handbook of Japanese Aesthetics (edited by Melinda Landeck)

Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers Edited by Rebecca Copeland

Amsterdam University Press

First published 2022 By Japan Documents, an imprint of MHM Limited, Tokyo, Japan.

MHM Limited gratefully acknowledges K.K. Nihon Bunken Shuppan, and its ownerpresident, Mr. Sumio Saito, as the originator of the imprint “Japan Documents” and declares here that it is used under license and with the kind permission of Mr. Saito. Cover design, layout, and typography: TransPac Communications, Greg Glover isbn

978 90 4855 835 3 e-isbn 978 90 4855 836 0 nur 617 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Table of Contents Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Preface: The Color Red Rebecca Copeland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Introduction: When Women Write Rebecca Copeland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Part 1: Expanding Genre and the Exploration of Gendered Writing 1

When Women Write History: Nogami Yaeko, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Nagai Michiko Susan W. Furukawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2

Writing Within and Beyond Genre: Ōkura Teruko, Miyano Murako, Togawa Masako, Miyabe Miyuki, and Minato Kanae and Mystery Fiction Quillon Arkenstone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

3

Feminist “Failed” Reproductive Futures in Speculative Fiction: Ōhara Mariko, Murata Sayaka, and Ueda Sayuri Kazue Harada. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Part 2: Owning the Classics 4

Tales of Ise Grows Up: Higuchi Ichiyō, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Kawakami Mieko Emily Levine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

5

Japanese Women Writers and Folktales: “Urashima Tarō” in the Literary Production of Ōba Minako and Kurahashi Yumiko Luciana Cardi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

6

Women and the Non-human Animal: Rewriting the Canine Classic—Tsushima Yūko, Tawada Yōko, Matsuura Rieko, and Sakuraba Kazuki Lucy Fraser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Part 3: Sexual Trauma, Survival and the Search for the Good Life 7

Writing Women and Sexuality: Tamura Toshiko and Sata Ineko Michiko Suzuki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

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Voicing Herstory’s Silence: Three Women Playwrights—Hasegawa Shigure, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Dakemoto Ayumi Barbara Hartley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

9

Writing Women’s Happiness in the 1980s: Labor and Care in Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko, and Yoshimoto Banana Nozomi Uematsu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

10 Risky Business: Overcoming Traumatic Experiences in the Works of Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi David S. Holloway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Part 4: Food, Family, and the Feminist Appetite 11

Watching the Detectives: Writing as Feminist Praxis in Enchi Fumiko and Kurahashi Yumiko Julia C. Bullock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

12 Food as Feminist Critique: Osaki Midori, Kanai Mieko, and Ogawa Yōko Hitomi Yoshio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Part 5: Beyond the Patriarchal Family 13 “The Mommy Trap”: Childless Women Write Motherhood—Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Murata Sayaka Amanda C. Seaman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 14 Women and Queer Kinships: Matsuura Rieko, Fujino Chiya, and Murata Sayaka Anna Specchio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Part 6: Age is Just a Number 15 Beyond Shōjo Fantasy: Women Writers Writing Girlhood—Yoshiya Nobuko, Tanabe Seiko, and Hayashi Mariko Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 16 Writing the Aged Woman: Enchi Fumiko and Tanabe Seiko Sohyun Chun. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 17 Humor and Aging: Ogino Anna, Itō Hiromi, and Kanai Mieko Tomoko Aoyama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Part 7: Colonies, War, Aftermath 18 Women and War: Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko Noriko J. Horiguchi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 vi

Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers

19 Women and Colonies: Shanghai and Manchuria in the Autobiographical Writings of Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko Lianying Shan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 20 Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami Davinder L. Bhowmik. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Part 8: Environment and Disaster 21 Writing Human Disaster: Hayashi Kyōko, Ishimure Michiko, and Kawakami Hiromi Rachel DiNitto. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 22 Teeming Up with Life: Reading the Environment in Ishimure Michiko, Hayashi Fumiko, and Osaki Midori Jon L. Pitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Part 9: Crossing Borders: Writing Transnationally 23 Women and the Ethnic Body: Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil Christina Yi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 24 Transnational Narratives and Travel Writing: Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Takako, and Yi Yangji Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389

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Contributors Tomoko Aoyama, an honorary associate professor at the University of Queensland, Australia, is the author of Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), co-editor with B. Hartley of Girl Reading Girl in Japan (Routledge, 2010), co-editor with L. Dales and R. Dasgupta, Configurations of Family in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2015), and co-translator of two novels of Kanai Mieko, Indian Summer with B. Hartley (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Oh, Tama! with Paul McCarthy (Kurodahan Press. 2014). Her most recent publications include “Food, Humor, and Gender in Ishigaki Rin’s Poetry” (2018) and “Ame no Uzume Crosses Boundaries” (2018). Quillon Arkenstone received a PhD in Japanese literature from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His research focuses on the transnational development of literary genres in modern Japanese and Korean literature, specifically proletarian literature, travel literature, and the colonial and metropolitan mystery fiction of the prewar period. He lives in Boston, MA. Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, assistant professor of Japanese literature at Purdue University, is completing the manuscript Haunting Images: Illustration, Book Design, and Visuality in the Literature of Izumi Kyōka, which explores the intersection of text and image in the fiction of one of Japan’s most important modern writers. He has published an article on Natsume Sōseki, book design, and art nouveau and another article on the intersection of photography and literature in turn-of-the-20th-century Japan. Davinder L. Bhowmik, associate professor of Japanese at the University of Washington, Seattle, teaches Japanese language, literature, and film. Her research specialization is regional fiction, particularly from Okinawa. Major publications include Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (Routledge, 2008) and Islands of Protest: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book on postwar literature and militarism in Japan. Julia C. Bullock, professor of Japanese Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction, 1960–1973 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) and Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media (University of Michigan Press, 2019). With Ayako Kano and James Welker, she also edited the essay collection Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). She is currently at work on a monograph exploring the translation and reception of the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir in postwar Japan. Luciana Cardi, associate professor at Kansai University, specializes in comparative literature and her research interests include contemporary Japanese literature, Anglophone Contributors

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literatures, gender studies, and fairy-tale studies. She is the co-editor with M. Murai of Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and has published in journals and edited volumes such as Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture (Lexington Books, 2020), Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia (Brill, 2018), and Marvels & Tales (2013). Sohyun Chun, a lecturer in the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Nagoya University, Japan, is preparing “Speak up: Elderly Women’s Voices in Japanese literature and Culture,” under the auspices of a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science grant. This work focuses on uncovering dynamic narratives by and about elderly women that challenge the doom-and-gloom approach to old age more commonly considered. Her research and publishing interests include Enchi Fumiko, narratives of aging, the environment, and gender. Rebecca Copeland, professor of modern Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), editor of Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), and co-editor with Melek Ortabasi of The Modern Murasaki: Selected Works by Women Writers of Meiji Japan 1885–1912 (Columbia University Press, 2006), among other works. She has also translated the works of Uno Chiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, and Kirino Natsuo and has recently completed the novel The Kimono Tattoo (Brother Mockingbird, 2021). Rachel DiNitto, professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literary and cultural studies at University of Oregon, is the author of Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008) and Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019). Currently her research focuses on the literary and cinematic responses to the 2011 disaster, as they take shape in nuclear and environmental narratives. She has published widely on the films and manga of this disaster and postwar Japan. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, associate professor of Japanese language and literature at Vassar College, is the author of Age of Shōjo: Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Girls’ Magazine Fiction in Japan (SUNY Press, 2019). Her areas of research include Japanese women’s literature, girls’ magazine culture, and manga created by women. She has co-edited Shōjo Manga Wandārando with Kan Satoko and Takeuchi Kayo (Meiji Shoin, 2012) and Manga!: Visual Pop-Culture in Arts Education with Masami Toku (InSEA Publications, 2020). Lucy Fraser, senior lecturer in Japanese at The University of Queensland, Australia, is the author of The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid” (Wayne State University Press, 2017). Her research focusses on fairy tales, fantasy, and folklore in Japanese and English, with a particular interest in girl cultures and animal-human relationships. She has translated literary work by Tsushima Yūko and Kawakami Hiromi, and literary and cultural studies criticism by renowned Japanese scholars. x

Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers

Susan Westhafer Furukawa, associate professor of Japanese and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Beloit College, where she also directs the Japanese program, is the author of The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Historical Fiction and Popular Culture in Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022). Her research focuses on the intersections of history, literature, and popular culture, and she has published several articles and a monograph, on this topic. Kazue Harada, associate professor of Japanese at Miami University Ohio, is the author of Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures: Women’s Speculative Fiction in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2021). Her research focusses on contemporary Japanese speculative and science fiction with an exploration of gender and sexuality. Her articles have appeared in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, Japanese Language and Literature, and Japanese Studies. Barbara Hartley, currently an honorary researcher with the University of Queensland in Australia, writes extensively on issues related to girls and women in modern Japan, particularly in the context of literary studies. She also researches visual representations of women and girls and representations of Asia and Asian women in modern Japanese narrative and visual material. Her recent publications include “The Fantastical Space of Exile in Tawada Yōko’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” in Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature edited by Mina Qiao (Lexington Books, 2022). David S. Holloway, former assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Rochester, is the author of The End of Transgression in Japanese Women’s Writing: Gender, Body, Nation (Routledge, forthcoming). He taught courses on Japanese literature, popular culture, and gender. His research focused on contemporary Japanese fiction with emphasis on gender and sexuality. He published widely in this field before his tragic death on June 25, 2021. Noriko J. Horiguchi, associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Tennessee, is the author of Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which analyzes how women figured in the expansion of the national body of the empire. In addition, she has several articles and book chapters in comparative literature, colonial studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, film studies, and food studies. During her tenure at UT, Horiguchi has also held visiting scholarships at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University and visiting associate professorships at Kobe University and the University of Pennsylvania. Emily Levine, a doctoral candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, is currently writing her dissertation on representations of female sexuality and pleasure in modern Japanese women’s literature, focusing on Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Keiko-san Series.” She is primarily interested in the ways in which the series’ namesake protagonist, Yamada Keiko, experiences and negotiates her own pleasure in Kurahashi’s diverse and highly intertextual worlds. Jon L. Pitt, assistant professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, is the translator of Itō Hiromi’s Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Contributors

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Books, 2023) and the host of the podcast Nature : Mono. His research looks to bring the study of Japanese literature and cinema into conversation with the field of critical plant studies. Amanda C. Seaman, professor of modern Japanese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004) and Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). A scholar of modern women’s literature, genre fiction, and gender studies, her publications include translations of Japanese women’s literature, writings on Japanese popular culture and Japanese food culture. Her current research explores the representation of illness and the afflicted in postwar Japanese literature, film, and popular media. Lianying Shan, associate professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, teaches courses in Japanese language, literature, and East Asian literature and culture. She has published articles on Japanese women writers, Japanese language literature by immigrants, Japanese colonial literature, and East Asian cinema. She is currently working on a book manuscript on postwar Japanese literature about Manchuria. Besides Japanese literature she is also interested in Japanese pop culture and its reception and adaptation in China. Anna Specchio, assistant professor (RDTb) of Japanese Language and Literature at the University of Turin, works on contemporary Japanese women’s literature. She translated the works of Iwaki Kei, Sakuraba Kazuki, Hayashi Mariko, Matsuura Rieko, Kashimada Maki, and Yagi Emi into Italian. She authored papers on Ogawa Yōko, Hayashi Mariko, Murata Sayaka and Matsuura Rieko, and she is co-editor with M. Cestari, G. Coci, D. Moro of the volume Orizzonti Giapponesi: ricerche, idee, prospettive (Aracne, 2018). Michiko Suzuki, associate professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, is the author of Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2010). She has published on topics relating to modernity, gender, sexuality, early 20th-century sexology, women writers, and kimono history and culture. She has a forthcoming monograph, Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film (University of Hawai’i Press). Nozomi Uematsu, lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, in the School of East Asian Studies, is a comparative literary scholar working in Japanese and English literature and culture. Her research focuses on contemporary women’s writing, children’s literature, film adaptations and animated films. Her interests include gender and sexuality in neoliberalism, and the relation between women’s happiness and freedom through labor (reproduction and employment). She has published articles on Yoshimoto Banana (2017) and Studio Ghibli’s Howls Moving Castle (2021), and forthcoming will publish an article on female masochism in Kōno Taeko and Angela Carter. Christina Yi, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, is a specialist of modern Japanese-language literature and culture. She is the author of Colonizing xii

Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers

Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018). She was also the co-editor for a special feature on Zainichi (resident) Korean literature and film for Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019) and co-editor for the edited volume Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in the Japanese Empire (forthcoming from University of Hawai’i Press). Hitomi Yoshio, associate professor of Waseda University, specializes in modern Japanese literature with focus on women’s writing. She is working on the book manuscript, The Birth of Women Writers: Authorship, Publishing, and Translation in Modern Japan. Her most recent publications are included in the edited volumes, Sekai bungaku to shite no shinsaigo bungaku (Post-Disaster Literature as World Literature, 2021) and The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature (2022). She is the translator of Imamura Natsuko’s This is Amiko (forthcoming from Pushkin Press), and numerous short stories and poems by Kawakami Mieko.

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Preface: The Color Red Rebecca Copeland

“I need to ask you to select a cover color,” Mark Gresham, Managing Director of MHM Limited, reminded me in an email message. I had just submitted the completed manuscript of the Handbook on Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers. I opened the attachment he sent and looked over the various colors. To my disappointment, an earlier editor had already claimed the pretty purple. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a purple person. I brightened when I discovered there was another in a lighter shade. Then the red caught my eye. Japanese women have long been tied to the color red. When a woman steps into a space typically dominated by men, she is referred to as “kōitten,” a single splash of red in a field of grey (or sometimes green). The vibrancy of her red color distinguishes her as singular and, despite her attractiveness, out of place. In the late-19th century, when male writers began to take up more and more of the pages in the journal Jogaku zasshi (Women’s education magazine), editor and educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu inaugurated two issues. The White Covers (or otsu no maki) catered to these young men, providing room for their literary experiments, translations, and critical essays, while The Red Covers (or kō no maki) was assigned to women writers and featured articles on domestic science, marriage advice, and stories for children. I chose “red” for the cover of this Handbook in recognition of the way the color has often been used to categorize women in Japan. I do so in response to Iwamoto Yoshiharu’s sequestering of women into journal issues that limited their field of vision largely to the domestic sphere. The women writers discussed in this Handbook are as likely to write beyond and against domesticity as they are to write within it. The chapters herein demonstrate their creativity and the wealth of writing among them, thus opposing the notion of “kōitten,” the one lone talent. These women have long occupied spaces earlier thought to be off limits. Through their presence, they have stretched the boundaries of their chosen genres and styles.

Contributors So, too, have the scholars who authored these chapters. They have transformed their academic spaces, pushing the study of Japanese literature and Japanese women writers further and further into the intellectual mainstream. Of course, not all of our contributors specialize in the study of gender or women’s writing. Even so, each one brings a multitude of approaches to the reading of modern and contemporary Japanese women’s writing. Our contributors represent a wealth of nationalities and educational traditions in North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Many of our contributors are senior scholars in the field who have a proven record of publication on Japanese women’s writing. Others are rising stars, from graduate students to newly-tenured professors, who are producing works that will define the

Preface: The Color Red

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field for years to come. Clearly, we can look forward to more and greater activity, exploration, and innovation in the field.

In tribute to a scholar lost too soon David S. Holloway was such a scholar on his way to opening new doors to the study of Japanese women’s writing before his death on June 25, 2021. David was a tenure-track assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester, where he also directed the East Asian Studies program and taught core courses in the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. At the time of his death, he had six peer-reviewed publications to his name with additional works under consideration. He had recently finished the manuscript The End of Transgression in Japanese Women’s Writing: Gender, Body, Nation and saw it placed under contract with Routledge. His monograph reads the works of Kirino Natsuo, Sakurai Ami, and Kanehara Hitomi against the backdrop of Japan’s lost decade and its culture of precarity. Always timely with his assignments, David had submitted his draft for the Handbook, “Risky Business: Overcoming Traumatic Experiences in the Works of Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi,” just weeks before he passed away. David was my student, working with me first on his undergraduate major and later his Ph.D. degree. He was a sensitive, thoughtful soul with a sly, at times quirky, sense of humor. A lively and energetic teacher, his students loved him. I loved him, and so did his colleagues. It is my privilege to include David’s chapter in this volume, a chapter that speaks to the strategies for overcoming trauma and finding one’s ibasho (belonging place). David has found his in this legacy of scholarship.

Acknowledging legacies There are other legacies that underpin a Handbook like this. The chapters here represent the work of individual scholars, certainly, but also of their mentors and professors, too many to name. One forerunner who I would like to single out is Chieko Mulhern. Her 1994 Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood Press) provides a model of inspiration. Mulhern, then a professor of Japanese language and literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, went out of her way to call on junior scholars to help her supply the fifty-eight biographical and critical profiles of Japanese women writers from the premodern to the modern. I was excited to be included in her call. Hers was my first publication. Many women writers have emerged since Mulhern’s sourcebook, but her work remains a tremendous resource for those seeking substantial information on Japanese women writers. I learned a lot from Professor Mulhern. Her approach to her subjects was clear and concise—a section for biography, a section of textual overview, and one or two close readings. This Handbook differs. Instead of a single entry per author, these chapters group authors around discreet topics and place different writers in conversation with one another. What this Handbook loses in biographical detail, it gains in a sustained critical regard of an author’s work in the context of other authors from different eras. Still, I feel this Handbook is

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possible because of scholars like Chieko Mulhern and her contemporaries Noriko Mizuta, Kyoko Selden, and others. I acknowledge the giants who came before me, also too many to name. I am grateful to my professors, who encouraged my pursuit of women’s writing and who continued their support of me long, long after I left their classrooms: Van Gessel, Donald Keene, and Edward Seidensticker. I would like to thank all those who guided me in my earlier explorations of women’s writing: Laurel R. Rodd, Sally Hastings, and Esperanza Ramirez-Christenson. I thank my graduate cohort at Columbia University, mostly women, who underscored the importance of female friendships during the intellectually and emotionally challenging enterprise of combining dissertation work with trying to live a life, particularly Joanne Bernardi, Joan Ericson, Eileen Mikals-Adachi, Marleen Kassel, Carolyn Morley, and Jane Pette. Certainly, I thank all the scholars who contributed to this Handbook. Their careful attention to detail, cheerfulness in meeting deadlines, willingness to contribute their expertise are all deeply appreciated. And to those scholars who could not join the team, I thank them for their recommendation of others. I am grateful to my neighbor scholar, Laura Miller, who is always ready for a convivial, fun, and encouraging brainstorming session. Further from home, my friend Jan Bardsley, ever enthusiastic about this project, provided no end of support and advice, reading drafts quickly and closely. In closing, I acknowledge Managing Director of MHM Limited, Mark Gresham, who has been extremely easy to work with. Mark was always quick to respond to queries, offering information when asked but largely allowing great latitude and creativity. The perfect mix of support and encouragement.

Matters of Style Name Order Japanese names are given in Japanese name order (surname first/given name last) unless the individual writes in a Western language. In that case, Western name convention applies. Translations Many of the works referred to in this volume are available in English translation but not all. Although all titles by the authors who are the focus of the chapters are rendered in title-case, asterisks designate works that are translated into English. Titles without an asterisk are not available in translation (as of publication). All translations of excerpts from these works are provided by the chapter author unless otherwise noted. Long Vowels In Japanese some “vowels” have long sounds, resulting in a lengthened pronunciation. When the vowel is an “o” or “u,” this lengthening is represented by a macron, or dash above the vowel, except in cases of well-known places (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto) or terms commonly used in English. If a Japanese person is known in English by a non-standard Romanization, we default to that preference.

Preface: The Color Red

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Introduction: When Women Write Rebecca Copeland

Japanese women writers have been much in the news lately, garnering international attention for their presence on the lists of some of the most celebrated literary prizes. Ogawa Yōko (2020) and Kawakami Mieko (2022) for example, have both made the shortlist for the International Booker Prize hosted in the United Kingdom. Similarly, Tawada Yoko (2018) and Yū Miri (2022) received the National Book Award and Matsuda Aoko won the World Fantasy Awards in 2022, both awards based in the United States. Not only have these writers been feted for their works in translation, at home as well Japanese women writers are winning recognition for their literary talents, regularly securing Japan’s most coveted awards: the Akutagawa Prize, the Naoki, the Noma, and more. This confluence of both national and international acceptance has led some readers to assume Japanese women writers are finally finding their voice, as if they had no voice before the 21st century. Nothing could be further from the truth. Japanese women have been writing since the beginning of Japanese writing. Acknowledgement of their contributions to the literary world has waxed and waned over the centuries, guided by attitudes towards the prestige and even propriety of women’s work. Influential as poets and storytellers, aristocratic women writers contributed to the earliest literary aesthetics in Japan. By the modern era, or the late 19th century, amid the increase in women’s literacy, new forms of print media, and increasing education for girls, the demand for women’s writing grew. But this interest also carried with it caveats. Expected to adhere to appropriate presentations of femininity, women felt pushed to adopt gender-specific styles. Their work was to fill a gap in the literary sphere by writing about what men supposedly could not write. They were meant to celebrate women’s issues, women’s experiences, and in a voice appropriate to women, because these were attainments beyond the masculine ken. For example, in 1908 a group of well-known male writers, each in a position to mentor aspiring women writers, had the following to say: [W]e do not expect men and women to produce identical works. Women’s writing, in fact, is not particularly essential. But even so they should be encouraged to participate in the literary world in some measure, and their participation should provide that which is moderate and feminine and nothing more. (Oguri, et. al. 2006, 36)

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Women writers who followed these expectations were often passed over by critics who deemed their works less serious, less important. Those unable or unwilling to write “like women” were often criticized for stepping beyond their sex, putting on airs, and masquerading inappropriately. To make certain women understood their place in the literary world, male gatekeepers consigned them to the realm of “joryū sakka” or “woman-style writer.” What was the woman’s style? For the most part, as noted above, it was a style that allowed for the gentle melancholy of a life in struggle, a life that bemoaned the injustices of the family system, or mourned the passing of traditional aesthetics and did so in a measured and muted way, never overly critical or uncomfortably passionate. More importantly, the woman’s style was defined by what it was not. It was not to engage in political protest, historical research, or undue philosophizing. Women’s writing was to model modesty, purity, and lyrical quietude. Despite these ideals, women writers from the 19th century to this day have consistently crossed into territory deemed unseemly. They have written of violence in graphic detail, for example. They have explored non-marital, non-reproductive, asocial sexuality. They have penned portraits of women actively pursuing individual interests in defiance of family needs. They have questioned what it means to be “Japanese” as well as what it means to be “a woman.” They have interrogated the viability of biological frameworks for female identity, creating female characters who grow penises, for example, or who deny the standard markers of their assigned sex. Some have even challenged the primacy of the species, spinning imaginative stories of species-crossing interaction. They have freely stepped into genre fiction traditionally ascribed solely to men, and they have contested the stability of “text” as well, creating literary works that easily engage with manga, film, and other new technologies. Following wartime devastations and defeat, the early postwar years saw Japan embrace a rhetoric of returning to its heritage as a peaceful nation of culture wherein newly independent women embodied the democratic promise of a nation righted. More and more women writers took seats on prize and editorial committees, ensuring that the “woman’s voice” was in a position to determine literary taste. The term “joryū sakka” gradually slipped into disuse. Indeed, women’s ascendancy on the literary stage was so prominent at the time, male critic Okuno Takeo quipped in the 1970s that literature was rapidly becoming a woman’s “territory.” He surmised that the literary world would soon need to establish a special prize just for men. Almost simultaneously, though, woman writer Setouchi Harumi scoffed that anytime one or two women made a name for themselves, claims arose that women were taking over. “Because writing men far outnumber women, the activity of two or three women writers always seems strikingly conspicuous” (Setouchi 2006, 62). The conspicuousness of Japanese women writers on the world stage does not, therefore, mean that differences of gender have been eliminated in the literary arena, or in fact that they should be. Women and men may not actually write differently, but they are read differently. That difference makes a handbook of this kind essential. How are they read differently? Marketing practices, standard categorizations, and even shelving in bookstores frame readers’ awareness of a writer’s gender, just as they make readers attentive to a writer’s race, ethnicity, and first language. With that awareness comes a set of expectations about the way a writer writes and the subject of their writing. To a large degree, we still expect women writers to write about family, to push against social barriers, and to produce intimate portrayals of female embodied experiences. We also expect women writers to “be women,” a category that has grown more and more contested with new appreciations of gender fluidity and the questioning of heteronormative imperatives. Nevertheless, because writers often internalize xx

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reader expectations, we find when we read “women writers” as a collective, they do share practices and approaches in common. We also find that their writing often pushes against these very expectations. In the sections below, let us consider both what women writers in modern Japan have shared collectively and what they have resisted.

Handbook organization The authors of the chapters in this Handbook introduce and analyze works by modern and contemporary women writers that coalesce loosely around common themes, tropes, and genres. By eschewing a linear chronology, as well as a biographical focus, this volume enables readers to appreciate the way particular subjects and concerns recirculate over time, deepen and develop. Some may thin and grow less relevant. For example, as Amanda C. Seaman notes in her chapter, the animosity towards children in postwar works by women grew less virulent as the birth rate in Japan dropped and women enjoyed greater autonomy over their reproductive bodies. But childbearing as a pressure point never eases completely, as is clear in the discussion Kazue Harada offers in her chapter on speculative fiction and failed futures. This thematic approach to women’s writing helps readers see how certain issues unique to women and female-identified writers demand consideration even as the times change. Putting writers from different generations in conversation with one another likewise reveals the diverse ways they have responded to similar subjects. Whereas women writers may have shared concerns—the pressure to conform to gendered expectation, the tension between family responsibility and individual interests, the quest for self-affirmation—each writer elects different approaches. Contrary to traditional critical categories, this diversity demonstrates that there is no “woman’s style,” no essential “woman’s voice,” even no stable category of “woman.” As readers will see in the chapter overviews below, we have writers who elect memoir and autobiographical approaches, while others prefer to erect fabulous fictional worlds. Some engage with the literary classics—whether Japanese, Chinese, or European— and invest their works with rich intertextual allusions. We have writers who travel and those who stay put. There are writers who grapple with colonialism, militarism, nationalism, and industrialization; and those who position their characters in school-girl dream worlds. And, we have writers whose worlds coalesce around heteronormative expectations and those who celebrate nonconformity and fluidity. Even within the body of works of a single woman writer there are multiple styles and manifold interests. For this reason, a number of individual writers appear in several different chapters in this volume. Both Kurahashi Yumiko and Murata Sayaka appear in three chapters. A few other writers, such as Enchi Fumiko, Tanabe Seiko, and Matsuura Rieko, appear in two. Most writers appear only once. Reading writers in proximity to others offers nuance and perspective. It is important to keep in mind that this Handbook is not intended to be comprehensive. In fact, there is a greater emphasis on postwar works than prewar, a fact motivated by the presence of significant studies of late-19th, early-20th-century writers. Although a few of the chapters engage with poetry and drama, for the most part the Handbook focuses on prose fiction. Inevitably, there are important writers who are not mentioned. To some extent choices were driven by the availability of English-language translations to represent the selected writers and by the specific interest of the participating scholars.

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Readership and goals Although a number of the works discussed are not translated into English, most are, making the Handbook an accessible resource for readers both with and without Japanese language skills. The goal of the Handbook is not to cover everything but to cover enough to provide readers access to the creativity, versatility, and concerns shared by modern and contemporary women writers. This Handbook therefore builds a foundation upon which readers may then make their own judgments and launch their own investigations into the writers and works introduced in these pages as well as those that are not. The following brief synopses of each chapter offer a roadmap to this fascinating terrain.

Expanding genre and the exploration of gendered writing Mystery fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction have all long been considered the bastion of men. Mystery fiction requires a gritty engagement with the more sordid, criminal aspects of society; historical fiction entails research and an objectivity long associated with the masculine mind; and science fiction necessitates a systematic organization of knowledge as well as a prodigious imagination deemed too difficult for women. When these generic forms first took root in Japan, male writers dominated. But it was not long before women, too, began to stake their claim to the forms. Our first section looks at their foray into historical fiction, mysteries, and speculative fiction. In “When Women Write History” Susan W. Furukawa explores the way Nogami Yaeko, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Nagai Michiko flouted genre and gender biases by writing historical fiction—pushing the boundaries of the genre as they did so. Under their efforts, historical fiction expanded to include more intimate portraits of important personages in a way that refused hagiography, especially of famous men. Womenauthored historical fiction is, one might say, more balanced and nuanced as a result, often putting women at the center. In “Writing Within and Beyond Genre,” Quillon Arkenstone argues that women writers worked in the realm of mystery fiction from the genre’s inception. Discussing the works of Ōkura Teruko, Miyano Murako, Togawa Masako, Miyabe Miyuki, and Minato Kanae, he shows how women writers pushed the genre in unexpected directions, destabilizing notions of order, erasing the distinction between crime and justice, and inventing the new category of iyamisu or “disgusting mystery.” Women writers have expanded the boundaries of science and speculative fiction, too. In “Feminist ‘Failed’ Reproductive Futures in Speculative Fiction,” Kazue Harada offers an analysis of the works of Ōhara Mariko, Murata Sayaka, and Ueda Sayuri. Their works show how the post-apocalyptic failure of the human race to survive actually allows women writers, and their readers, an opportunity to imagine new futures and to “generate meaningful understanding of the past and ongoing issues and of how to engage in the future.”

Owning the classics Appreciating the marketability of the “woman writer” and wishing to have in Japan what England had in the Brontës and France in George Sands, late 19th-century publishers in Japan eagerly made space for the woman writer, then known by the lofty term “keishū sakka”

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or lady writer. At the same time, these gatekeepers were not keen to encourage a writing equal to the modernizing efforts of men. They longed for a revival of the courtly women writers, hoping for “a modern Murasaki” or “a Meiji Shōnagon.” In other words, they assigned women writers the nearly impossible task of writing modern works with the attitude and approach of a classical court lady. Women should perform as a repository of the past, keeping elegant native traditions alive while men experimented with foreign forms. Mindful of their rich literary history, many women writers, such as Meiji writer Higuchi Ichiyō, successfully integrated classical tropes in their contemporary works. When they did, the elegance of the past was often held in sharp contrast to the depravity of the present. The aspirations of the past for romantic love were shown to be foreclosed in the present, when even dreams were lost in the rush to utilitarianism. Modern women working with classical stylistics produced parodic, even subversive stories. A number of the chapters in this volume show how women have used classical tropes, fairytales, and traditions to tell very modern stories of betrayal, sexual desire, and fantasy. For example, in “Tales of Ise Grows Up” Emily Levine explores the way three women writers from the 19th century to the 21st—Higuchi Ichiyō, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Kawakami Mieko—appropriate a particular episode from the 10th-century Tales of Ise, noting: “If women are the inheritors of the classical tradition, then they have proven the elasticity of that lineage. They have not remained trapped behind screens of elegance; rather, they have used the allusive power of the classics to tell new and modern stories.” Aside from the extraordinary ingenuity in these women’s re-tellings we also find these threads from the past bind women in a “remarkable intertextual web” of sisterhood drawn from the commonality of a shared embodied experience. Similarly, “Japanese Women Writers and Folktales” Luciana Cardi’s chapter, offers a deeply resourced textual analysis of the way modern writers Kurahashi Yumiko and Ōba Minako engage with the Urashima Tarō folktale. On the one hand, Ōba redraws Urashima Tarō’s jeweled box as “emblematic of the thirst for knowledge and the human desires that have triggered the invention of the atomic bomb and can threaten the future of humanity.” Kurahashi, on the other hand, finds in the folktale a metaphor of her own journey “into a surreal, cross-cultural world populated by the characters of East Asian and European folklore.” European classical traditions and Japanese folktales surface in Lucy Fraser’s “Women and the Non-human Animal: Rewriting the Canine Classic.” Delving into the works of Tsushima Yūko, Tawada Yōko, Matsuura Rieko, and Sakuraba Kazuki, Fraser explores the way women writers rewrite “canine classics,” or male-authored adventure tales featuring dogs, wolves, and other canine creatures. Fraser analyses how their appropriations reflect “the shifting relationships of human and non-human animals in Japan in the context of modern nation building, colonization, war and its aftermath, changing ideas of gender and other social norms, and global mobilities of cultural products, ideas, and people.”

Writing as resistance In a way, all writing by those in minority positions enacts a resistance. Whether she means to or not, whenever a woman takes up her pen to write, she challenges a social and literary expectation that figures “writer” as male and “human experience” as masculine. The works by earlier women writers tended to be subtle in their protests, even when the writer was

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consciously aiming to be critical. The subterfuges they used to mute or moderate their attacks were easily overlooked or misread. But postwar women writers actively and intentionally challenge gendered stereotypes, often in ways meant to shock readers. Japanese literature scholar, Sharalyn Orbaugh, in her contribution to the 1995 groundbreaking collection The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, articulates the various strategies writers have adopted to write against patriarchal systems, or “the dominant economies of power.” The first is descriptive. The woman writer “describe[s] the current configurations of power, exposing the harm done through them.” The second is to “invert the hierarchy of value, to valorize the object/passive side of the equation.” And the third is to “reverse the gender coding of the hierarchical power roles. Instead of being silent, women can speak; instead of being the objects of others’ gaze, they can use their eyes; instead of being killed, they can kill; instead of being dominated, they can dominate” (Orbaugh 1995, 123–24). The authors described in the sections above who avail themselves of mythic retellings, appropriations of the classics, and inventions of speculative worlds largely adhere to Orbaugh’s “more systematic approach.” What of the writers who use other strategies? In the sections below, we explore ways in which women have turned to writing for feminist critique.

Sexual trauma, survival, and the search for the good life Modern women writers often imbue their works with deeply emotive protests against a sexual economy that leaves women outside the circles of power and traumatized. At the same time, many, while exposing the harm to women, also gesture towards a longed-for equilibrium and happiness. Michiko Suzuki’s discussion of Tamura Toshiko and Sata Ineko, “Writing Women and Sexuality,” focuses on the way these writers treat female desire during the pre- and interwar era of sexual repression and circumspection. The works Suzuki examines, while foregrounding the restrictions placed on female expression and the real dangers to those who explore liberatory practices, nevertheless celebrate “female voices, challenging the status quo, and producing a multifaceted view of women’s sexuality.” Hasegawa Shigure, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Dakemoto Ayumi, the playwrights in Barbara Hartley’s chapter “Voicing Herstory’s Silence,” present female characters who have been victimized by discriminatory practices and sexual violence but who nevertheless survive to share unspeakable stories in an effort to, in Takemura Kazuko’s words, preserve “something missed, erased, plundered by nation states and dominant cultures.” The stories they share convey to witnesses (audiences and readers) the deleterious effect of social inequities along with the female characters’ ineffable strength to endure. Thus, they conform to Orbaugh’s first strategy for writing against “dominant economies of power.” They delineate the damage, producing sympathy in their audiences. In the postwar milieu, the agent of repression relinquishes its sharply-defined contours, as the family system shifts towards a more modern and urban nuclear model. Even though the family structure changes, many of the residual problems remain and do so in form that is less visible and in some ways more insidious. In their chapters, Nozomi Uematsu and David Holloway bring readers into this postwar milieu. The characters in the stories they analyze are captivated by new opportunities that promise to open avenues to women for self-determination and happiness. In “Writing Women’s Happiness in the 1980s,” Uematsu considers the works of Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko, and Yoshimoto Banana. The

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characters in their stories travel, they explore new identities, they seek careers. But the lives they create often fall short of their dreams. American husbands turn out to be as patriarchal as Japanese, jobs are unfulfilling, and attempting self-establishment outside the confines of their family leaves them lonely. The authors of these stories, therefore, depict the way Japanese women navigate the fraught terrain of postwar liberation and learn to live beyond the Cinderella myths of happy-ever-after. Holloway’s “Risky Business: Overcoming Traumatic Experiences” focuses on two writers from two different generations, Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi, who both write of the traumatic precarity suffered in the wake of Japan’s recession. Just as the nation is mired in the dreams of the past, so are the characters in these stories, who suddenly find themselves with no place to be, no ibasho. The institutions that had once given life meaning, the family, the school, the workplace, are no longer stable sources of identity. Women characters must learn to trust their own inner compasses to lead them to new, fulfilling relationships.

Food, family, and the feminist appetite As noted above, many women writers use their literary position actively to voice discontent. In their chapters, Julia C. Bullock and Hitomi Yoshio describe several such writers. In “Watching the Detectives,” Bullock shows the way Enchi Fumiko and Kurahashi Yumiko, though distinctly different writers, use their creative works to pose sharp critiques of patriarchal power structures while simultaneously imagining subversively liberatory worlds where appetites might be indulged. Both writers, in keeping with Orbaugh’s presentational strategy, produce narratives with a “dual structure”: while their protagonists ultimately yield to the systems that hold them in check, the authors are nevertheless able to “critique this submission by demonstrating the devastating cost to the protagonist that it requires. Conventional women’s roles are thus disciplinary structures that must be resisted.” In “Food as Feminist Critique” Hitomi Yoshio takes up three writers, Osaki Midori, Kanai Mieko, and Ogawa Yōko, and shows how they “challenge the archetype of woman as the nurturing maternal body.” Although the three writers represent different historical eras, the stories they pen share in their efforts to resist and undermine maternal domesticity. The women they describe are disorderly, non-maternal, and in one case, wracked by homicidal ideation. Each story meditates on food, suggesting the tie between the maternal body as the site of nourishment and comfort. Yet, in each story, the food that feeds transforms handily into unpalatable objects that disgust and even endanger. In the hands of these writers, “food can also be a site of creative expression to articulate feminist rebellions toward gender norms and patriarchal oppression.”

Beyond the patriarchal family While the family has long been the source of identity in works of Japanese writers, it has also been the site of limitation and confinement. Representing the microcosm of the larger modern nation, the family binds individuals to socially expected behaviors and gendered roles. Author Kometani Foumiko, as described in the section above, demonstrates how the delimiting factor of the family is consistent whether in Japan or the United States. Patriarchal

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structures deny female freedoms and tie women to reproduction and care-work. One way to avoid the pitfalls of family demands, therefore, is to refuse to mother or, more actively, to construct queer families. In “‘The Mommy Trap’: Childless Women Write Motherhood,” Amanda C. Seaman explores the startling and often brutal ways authors Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Murata Sayaka depict characters who refuse to mother. In their works, family life, particularly childbearing is “incompatible with or antithetical to women’s autonomy and agency.” Even so, as Seaman shows, their characters long for “connection with others, and for a meaningful and nurturing sense of partnership in which autonomy does not exclude openness.” Other women writers find this kind of human connectivity in the creation of kinship bonds that surpass blood relations or socially sanctioned partnerships. Anna Specchio’s “Woman and Queer Kinships” discusses the way Matsuura Rieko, Fujino Chiya, and Murata Sayaka challenge the insistence on family as a “fundamentally heteronormative and reproductive unit.” These writers enter the stage just as the primacy of the nuclear family has collapsed and the myths of “masculinity” and “femininity” as essential values have begun to unravel. In the aftermath, these writers explore the possibilities of “new non-binary, gay, lesbian, transsexual, and queer subjects” who establish healing communities of acceptance and autonomy.

Age is just a number Thriving on the edges of the patriarchal family system are the shōjo—or young girl—and the rōjo—or old woman. The girl carries latent within her the promise of the future mother and must be protected. The granny represents the exhaustion of that possibility and is expendable. Existing on either end of childbearing both shōjo and rōjo occupy a position of moratorium or a pause in the cycle of reproduction that allows the possibility of fantasy, escape, and self-indulgence. In her chapter “Beyond Shōjo Fantasy: Women Writers Writing Girlhood,” Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase analyzes how an adolescent girl’s liminality frees her power of imagination. At the same time, her inexperience leaves her vulnerable to manipulation by educators and media intent on preparing her for gendered roles in the family. The authors Dollase discusses, Yoshiya Nobuko, Tanabe Seiko, and Hayashi Mariko, however, invent feisty protagonists who have other ideas. They turn their rebellion towards the construction of new dreams, converting “their immaturity into originality and strength.” At the other end of the spectrum, Sohyun Chun, in “Writing the Aged Woman,” shows how the elderly also flout the system. Enchi Fumiko and Tanabe Seiko create deeply complex characters who see their advanced age, not as a handicap but as the catalyst for selfaffirming memories and powerful fantasies. Their characters indulge in inner worlds that buffer them from the stigmatizing gaze that would position the elderly as social burdens. Likewise, Tomoko Aoyama’s “Humor and Aging” reveals the way Ogino Anna, Itō Hiromi, and Kanai Mieko use humor and parody both to destabilize the stereotypical regard of the elderly and soften the acerbic critique that follows. These writers, like Kurahashi Yumiko mentioned earlier and Ōba Minako, avail themselves of classical allusions, intertexts, and a hybrid approach—stretching the boundaries of their genres as they stretch their readers’ understanding of contemporary social values.

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Colonies, war, aftermath One of the largest family structures facing women in 20th-century Japan was the family of the nation. Women were deeply engaged in Japan’s empire building as both collaborators and resistors. The fate of Japan’s foreign and domestic policies profoundly affected women. In her chapter “Women and War” Noriko Horiguchi charts the complicated and contradictory roles women writers had during the development of Japan’s empire expansion, colonial endeavors, and military aggression. Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko, the two writers she discusses, “refused the ideological assignments that subjected their minds and bodies to nation-building, and yet became active and sometimes aggressive participants in the creation of empire and its war efforts.” In “Women and Colonies,” Lianying Shan explores the way Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko avail themselves of the autobiographical form to bring order to their young and often traumatic memories of childhoods in the colonies. They ground their stories in the subjectivities of strong female characters, their everyday lives, and their embodied experiences. Their narratives of the past are interlaced with an acute awareness of Japan’s present-day geopolitical positions. Davinder L. Bhowmik explores Japan’s aggressive colonial past in her chapter “Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa.” She shows how this past is still very much present and now accompanied by the militaristic imposition of the United States. Women under such imperialistic powers often bear the brunt of abuse. But Bhowmik’s presentation of works by Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko and, Sakiyama Tami reveals an unflinching defiance of both the colonial powers as well as masculinist assumptions of female passivity. As with the characters Shan describes in her chapter, these women are likewise strongly grounded in self-awareness. “Their writing on aging bar hostesses, vibrant mixed-race children, and intrepid tourists rails against interminable war, the loss of home, and violated bodies. Furthermore, their work stands counter to male writers’ literature of Koza [Okinawa City] in the form of indelible female characters who challenge depictions of passivity through bold action.”

Environment and disaster Empire building, industrialization, and corporate greed conspire to destroy nature, while at the same time these acts draw our attention to the beauty and significance of the very nature that is threatened. In the chapters by Rachel DiNitto and Jon L. Pitt, we consider the works of writers who describe the intimate connection between humanity and environment. The damage to the environment mirrors the wounding of the human soul; and by the same token, the wonder of nature. In “Writing Human Disaster,” DiNitto examines the works of Hayashi Kyōko, Ishimure Michiko, and Kawakami Hiromi, observing how they “have responded to disasters that span the history of Japanese industrial modernity, war, and postwar economic growth.” The dangers that these disasters produced—poisoned air and contaminated water— have largely been invisible, and the government response slow and dismissive. The victims of the catastrophes have been doubly damaged by both physical harm and social ostracism. But as DiNitto notes in her analysis of the works these writers produced in response: “Not only do [they] give voice to information that was repressed, but they use the imaginative power Introduction: When Women Write

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of human storytelling to keep the facts from being reduced to statistical insignificancies that can easily fade into obscurity.” The writers Jon L. Pitt discusses in “Teeming Up with Life: Reading the Environment,” Ishimure Michiko, Hayashi Fumiko, and Osaki Midori, describe the detrimental impact colonialization, overbuilding, and industrialization have had on the environment and its inhabitants. But Pitt also delineates the way these writers delve into the primordial, mythic, restorative properties that can arise from human engagement with nature. “Their works present a nature inseparable from culture, and a culture inseparable from nature.” And it is through this contact with the natural world both around them and in them that the characters in these stories are transformed and healed.

Crossing borders: Writing transnationally Finding a place to belong, or ibasho, has long been at the forefront of concerns shared by Japanese women writers, as David Holloway’s chapter reveals. Women seek their belonging in and outside the family, in concert with nature, and in an awareness of contemporary geopolitics. In the Japanese postcolonial nation, we have writers who represent the remnants of an earlier colonial enterprise, who struggle to speak in a language not quite their own. Simultaneously, we have writers who are no longer bound to Japan by national affiliations, writers who travel, who immigrate, who immerse themselves in other cultures but who still retain their affinity to Japan and Japanese language. In “Women and the Ethnic Body,” Christina Yi highlights the process of being “forcibly de-ethnicized through the process of assimilation” in the works of three Zainichi (lit. “residing in Japan”) authors of Korean descent: Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil. She does so through an exploration of three different creative practices: poetry, performance, and prose fiction. Yi’s choice here is to demonstrate that the collective category of Zainichi is in a way as artificial as that of “woman writer.” The categorization erases and constrains as much as it reveals. And yet, Yi shows that even with the obvious diversity, there are shared concerns (as we have seen as well with the category “woman writer.”) The writers in her chapter all wrestle with the legacy of assimilation, the difficulty of using the language of the oppressor to enunciate the trauma of discrimination. “To the various protagonists of the works explored here, that language is a curse, a trap, a lamentation, a lie. But it is also, above all, an incantation—something that enacts the very thing it describes, conjuring up possibilities of being beyond the binding spells of nation and home.” In “Transnational Narratives and Travel Writing,” Pedro Thiago Ramos Basso explores the works of three writers who complicate the sense of home and belonging by writing about travel. Yoshimoto Banana, whose works travel globally through the process of translation, sets her stories in places as far flung as Egypt and Argentina. In doing so, she produces a hybrid novel-guidebook format or narratives that travel between genres. Whereas Banana’s travel writing is informative, her sojourns in her destinations are short. Takahashi Takako, on the other hand, lived for years in France, exploring French language, literature, and Catholicism. For writer Yi Yangji, the journey is one of a lifetime. Although she travels physically to South Korea, she is searching for that which has no real location. She seeks a home that, as a Zainichi Korean, “is simultaneously doubled and erased.” The transnational

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narratives Bassoe analyzes in this chapter “incorporate diverse perspectives and identities in the exploration of a world that is increasingly interconnected in complex ways.”

English-language scholarship on Japanese women writers The year 1982 was an extraordinary one for the appreciation of modern Japanese women writers in English-language translation. Three anthologies of 20th-century Japanese women’s fiction in translation appeared almost simultaneously, representing the efforts of five women translator-editors and presenting translations of twenty-eight works of Japanese women writers. In one fell swoop, these translators pushed against the gender-defined boundaries of Japanese Studies in the English-speaking world. They made it possible for literature teachers to offer more than a smattering of works by women writers in their courses; and they inspired fledgling scholars to focus on women writers. As Sharalyn Orbaugh would recount when she first learned of the anthologies in 1982: “I was just beginning to discover Japanese women writers after a steady diet of Akutagawas and Shigas and Tanizakis and Mishimas. I looked forward to the chance to familiarize myself quickly with the work of the best women writers” (Orbaugh 1992, 281). Of course these anthologies were not spawned out of thin air. In tandem with the rise of women’s studies programs in the United States, feminists in Japan had been equally galvanized to spearhead interest in Japanese women writers. Spurred on by the UN’s “Decade of the Woman” (1975–1985), feminist literary critics such as Mizuta Noriko and Komashaku Kimi began actively publishing works that spoke directly to the situation of women writers in Japan while simultaneously treating canonical male-authored works to feminist interpretations. Komashaku’s Majo no ronri (Witch’s Theory, 1978), a collection of essays she wrote between 1971 and 1977, and Mizuta’s Hiroin kara hīrō e (From Heroine to Hero, 1982), essays written between 1970 and 1981, established the basic framework for feminist criticism in a Japanese literary world. Feminist literary scholar Kitada Sachie has called these works “the origin of Japanese feminist criticism” (Kitada 1994, 81). Inspired by this new attention to modern Japanese women writers, and influenced by burgeoning attention to women’s studies, scholarship on Japanese literature in North American universities began to shift. After decades of focus on male writers, dissertators began dedicating themselves to research on modern Japanese women writers. These dissertations, then, often found their way to publication. With English-language studies on such writers as Kurahashi Yumiko, Higuchi Ichiyō, Sata Ineko, Kōda Aya, Uno Chiyo, Yosano Akiko, Hayashi Fumiko, accompanied by more and more translations, modern Japanese women writers soon became the subject of college courses. The interest led to more translations and more studies and eventually to journals and conferences. Japanese feminists, largely under the direction of the above-mentioned Mizuta Noriko, founded the US-Japan Women’s Journal in 1988, with the goal of promoting scholarly exchange on social, cultural, political, and economic issues pertaining to gender and Japan. Some years later, North American scholars held the first conference on Japanese women’s literature at Rutgers University in 1993. This conference was followed by an anthology of essays, The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Writing (published by Stanford University Press), which made enormous strides in grounding the study of Japanese women’s writing in North American academies, while simultaneously laying the foundation for

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the creation of a woman’s literature canon. This conference was followed in 2001 by “Across Time and Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts” held at the University of Alberta, which was so popular and so inclusive, the organizers elected to run simultaneous panels and include two keynote speakers. In 2006 scholars in Australia held a series of workshops on the topic of the Japanese girl as reader, which resulted in the volume Girl Reading Girl in Japan (Routledge 2009), which explored the reading practices of Japanese girls throughout the 20th century. By 2013, the Emory University conference, “Sex, Gender, and Society: Rethinking Modern Japanese Feminisms,” gave ample evidence of the richness of scholarship now available on Japanese women’s writing, reading, and activism. The conference included second- and even thirdgeneration scholars of Japanese women’s writing who convened over a “reconsideration” of Japanese feminism from a multidisciplinary lens. The resulting publication, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), explored the dynamic intersection of gender, political action, and ethnicity in Japan. More recently scholars from both North America and Japan collaborated in 2019 on “The Woman in the Story: Female Protagonism in Japanese Narratives,” a conference at UCLA that explored the way “woman” as a transhistorical category has been represented over time in Japan. Interest in Japanese women writers is not a fad. It has not faded or abated. Instead, the second decade of the 21st century has seen an increase in monographs on and translations of these writers. In many of these the goal has been to move us beyond comfortable assumptions about what Japanese literature is or who Japanese women are and to assist English-language readers in understanding the richness and depth of modern women’s literature in Japan.

Notes 1 For example, Meiji (1868–1912) writers are well represented by Rebecca Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2000); Yukiko Tanaka, Women Writers of Meiji and Taisho Japan: Their Lives, Works and Critical Reception, 1868–1926 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000); Janine Beichman, Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Rebirth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002); and Rebecca Copeland and Melek Ortabasi, eds. Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), and others. Writers of the early 1900s and interwar years are represented by Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–1916 (Ann Arbor: U of M Center for Japanese Studies, 2007); Joan E. Ericson, Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); and Michiko Suzuki, Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); in addition to many articles and chapters in other works by a host of other scholars. 2 These anthologies are: Rabbits, Crabs, Etc.: Stories by Japanese Women. Translated and edited by Phyllis Birnbaum (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1982); Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers. Translated and edited by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden (Armonk, New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1982); and, This Kind of Woman: Ten Stories by Japanese Women Writers, 1960–1976. Edited by Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).

References Kitada, S. & Lippit, M.E.M. (1994). Contemporary Japanese Feminist Literary Criticism. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. English Supplement. 7: 72–97.

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Oguri, F., Yanagawa, S., Tokuda, S., Ikuta, C., & Mayama, S. (2006). On Women Writers. (R. Copeland, trans.). In R. Copeland (ed.). Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Orbaugh, S. (1992). Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction by Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Kyoko Iriye Selden. Monumenta Nipponica.47.2: 281–83. ———. (1995). The Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction. In P. G. Schalow & J. A. Walker (eds.). The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Setouchi, H. (2006). Requirements for Becoming a Woman Writer. (R. Copeland, trans.). In R. Copeland (ed.). Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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Part 1 Expanding Genre and the Exploration of Gendered Writing

Chapter 1 When Women Write History: Nogami Yaeko, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Nagai Michiko Susan W. Furukawa While there are many well-known Japanese women writers who write historical fiction, such as Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), Miura Ayako (1922–1999), Nagai Michiko (1925–), Sugimoto Sonoko (1925–2017), Miyao Tomiko (1926–2014), Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–1984), and Sugimoto Akiko (1953–2015) there has also been fairly consistent resistance to the idea that women should or can write it well. By looking at how Nogami Yaeko, Nagai Michiko, and Ariyoshi Sawako challenge this assessment of historical fiction writing by women and defy the limitations placed upon them, this chapter demonstrates how historical fiction written by women expands the boundaries of the genre.

Introduction Since the beginning of the modern era, women writers have been encouraged, and sometimes even forced, to limit the style and content of their writing to those that are “becoming of a lady.” They have been not only expected to keep their works set in the domestic realm but also “to confine themselves to a sentimental tone, a lyrical style, and especially a focus on the soft and subtle moments in a woman’s life” (Copeland 2006a, 21–22). Further, male critics and readers alike have attributed value to women’s writing only insofar as it differed from men’s. As Oguri Fūyō, Yanagawa Shun’yō, Tokuda Shūkō, Ikuta Chōkō, and Mayama Seika (all men) note in their essay “On Women Writers”: “Our wish for women writers is that they take henceforth as their guiding principle the preservation of that within themselves that is most womanly and that they adapt themselves to this womanliness and write accordingly. If women were to do so, their works would satisfy just those very elements that men’s works cannot” (Copeland 2006b, 34). This bias regarding how and about what women should write has existed in some form for decades, even as women have continued to write in ways that reject such expectations.

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Women who write historical fiction find themselves doubly bound by these expectations. There has been fairly consistent resistance to the idea that women can write historical fiction that is entertaining or successful. Not only are women not supposed to write in nonwomanly ways about non-womanly things, they also are not supposed to write history. In his article “Nogami Yaeko—rekishi to bungaku” (Nogami Yaeko—history and literature), Kikuta Hitoshi notes: “There are many Japanese writers who are women but very few historians who are women. In the same way, there are also very few female authors of historical fiction” (Kikuta 2008, 208), highlighting the fact that there is a considerable gap between the number of men who write historical fiction and the number of women who do. Critics like the novelist Ōoka Shōhei argue that few, if any, women can write novels worthy of the designation of rekishi shōsetu (historical fiction). In Rekishi shōsetu no mondai (The problem of historical fiction), Ōoka Shōhei contends that since women writers are only particularly skilled at writing about feelings and personal experiences, historical novels written by women naturally focus more on the domestic sphere and thus fail to satisfy readers’ interests in reading about history. Ōoka offers Ariyoshi Sawako’s The Doctor’s Wife as an example, stating that her novels (like those of many other women) are heavy on domestic topics but leave little impression on readers in terms of how they handle history (Ōoka 1974, 26). This assessment of historical fiction writing by women fails to take into account the various ways that women writers push back against the limitations placed upon them thereby creating deeply-textured and fascinating novels that ask readers to re-examine their understanding of who and what constitutes history. By looking at how three well-known historical fiction writers, Ariyoshi Sawako, Nogami Yaeko, and Nagai Michiko, engage with these expectations, this chapter will challenge the notion that women do not write good historical fiction and will demonstrate how the fiction they write expands the boundaries of the genre.

Brief overview of historical fiction in Japan Before considering how works of historical fiction by women demonstrate their ability to contend with the limiting expectations of the male-dominated literary guild, it is important to have a better understanding of the genre itself. From chanted accounts of 12th-century battles by biwa hōshi (itinerate lute players) and entertaining kōdan (oral storytelling) of historical narratives recited in public venues during the Tokugawa or Edo period (1600–1868) to Taiga dorama (serialized TV history dramas) and various samurai manga widely-consumed today, engagement with the past has been a popular pastime in Japan. One of the earliest forms of historical tales in Japan are the gunki-mono (warrior tales), a prominent genre of medieval literature. Traditionally these tales were encountered as written text (yomimono) or recited material (katarimono). They were sometimes chanted by biwa hoshi who traveled with battling troops and recited well-known tales of brave and heroic warriors. The earliest of the gunki-mono dates to the 10th century, but some of the most famous, such as the Tales of the Heike, are more recent. During the Edo period a vibrant popular literature scene developed to meet the needs of an expanding urban commoner class. Historical tales in the form of kabuki, jōruri puppet plays, and kōdan flourished as people were drawn to both their entertainment value and to the role these tales could play in providing a critical response to current events.1 Historical fiction underwent another explosion in readership in the 1910s and 1920s with the popularity

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of taishū bungaku (mass or popular literature) and a burgeoning magazine audience.2 It is during this surge in magazine serializations that we see the first historical fiction works published by women. There are three primary reasons historical fiction has been so widely-consumed in Japan. First, historical fiction is entertaining. Its entertainment value lies in the fact that it is accessible because it offers characters who are familiar to readers and recounts tales using colloquial language. Second, historical fiction’s romanticization of history at moments of change highlights glorious heroes of the past while also providing models for modern readers to emulate.3 By focusing on the moments in Japanese history that helped pave the way for Japan to become what it is today, historical fiction provides readers with a refuge in an often idealized past where characters’ actions display courage, loyalty, and heroism. And, finally, by setting stories in a distant past, writers can promote discussions of socially or politically difficult topics. This serves as a potential release valve for readers who may be seeking opportunities to address contemporary problems.4 As the rationale and readership for historical fiction began to expand, so too did the authorship. But, as women have stepped into the arena, they have used historical fiction to write against expectation. First, they add their voices to the cacophony of women writers who seek to subvert notions about how and what a woman can and should write, and second, they resist patriarchal retellings of history by amplifying voices that have often been silenced. Nogami Yaeko’s fiction offers an excellent example of this first approach. Her historical fiction novels, which are almost completely devoid of the domestic sphere, focus on the inner workings of the male mind, often highlighting the insecurities and pride found there. Ariyoshi Sawako and Nagai Michiko’s novels give us the stories of the often-forgotten women surrounding famous men. Through their protagonists’ eyes, readers get a critical view of the men in power and the ways that patriarchal constructs—and in fact, the telling of history itself—oppress women.

Nogami Yaeko Nogami Yaeko, whose writing career spanned more than six decades ending only with her death when she was nearly 100, writes about a wide range of topics, with history being just one of them. Like both Ariyoshi Sawako and Nagai Michiko, Nogami places utmost importance on historical research. Unlike them, however, the characters that take front and center in her historical novels are male. Her most famous historical fiction novel Hideyoshi to Rikyū (Hideyoshi and Rikyū) subverts common expectations of women’s writing in three primary ways. First, she convincingly recreates the inner workings of the male mind and effectively imitates the male voice. Second, while focusing on developing the internal lives of her male characters, she is not only able to highlight their insecurities but also to demonstrate how power corrupts them and how much wasted energy goes into protecting their fragile egos. And, finally, there is an almost complete absence of reference to the traditional domestic sphere. Hideyoshi and Rikyū, which was serialized from January 1962 to September 1963 and published as a book in February 1964, is considered by many critics to be one of Nogami’s best works. The book was wildly successful, selling more than 8000 copies in its initial hardcover run and reprinted two more times that month. It went on to have 49,800 copies in its 19th

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printing and 52,000 in its 31st printing. By 1969, paperback copies were also widely available (Kanō 2009, 324–25). As Kanō Michiko notes, “Most works by Yaeko are long sellers that have solid sales for even ten years. But, among these, Hideyoshi and Rikyū has sold incredibly well since publication and is her best-selling novel” (Kanō 2009, 325). Another example of the novel’s relevance comes in the form of Teshigahara Hiroshi’s 1989 film Rikyū, which is a retelling of Nogami’s work that highlights Hideyoshi’s greed, a fitting theme for an audience living through Japan’s 1980’s economic bubble.5 The film’s release twenty-five years after the publication of Nogami’s novel was met with critical acclaim in Japan and internationally and offers yet another indication of the durability of Nogami’s story. The popularity and longevity of this novel attest to its entertainment value and to its ability to effectively tell the story of these two men. In Hideyoshi and Rikyū, Nogami provides readers an inside look at the deteriorating relationship between samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) and his tea master confidante, Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591). The focus of this novel is the interactions of these two powerful men, and much of the action in the narrative centers on the ways in which pride, the quest for power, and emotional vulnerability lead to the tragic outcome of this pairing. Nogami sets this up for readers early in the novel by describing a seemingly tense yet highly interdependent relationship between them. According to Nogami, primary drivers for this tension between the two are Hideyoshi’s insecurities and the power imbalance between the two men. As Nogami describes him, Rikyū is the son of a merchant, who has “grown up in a city with a long tradition of freedom, where people did not bend easily to power” (Nogami 2018, 22). Hideyoshi, meanwhile, has risen to the position of lord of the realm but has still not overcome the embarrassment of his impoverished, peasant youth. Despite the fact that Hideyoshi is clearly of higher rank than his tea advisor, he views Rikyū as a threat. “A strong ruler cannot bear it when his subjects have knowledge, skill, courage or other noble traits greater than his own. Hidyeoshi loved Rikyū and honored him, and that affection only grew stronger with the passing of time. In spite of that, sometimes he hated Rikyū. Rikyū knew that, and Hideyoshi was aware that he knew it” (Nogami 2018, 28). At the foundation of this relationship, then, is an imbalance exacerbated by a combination of jealousy, greed, and a desire for power. As Nogami highlights, Hideyoshi and Rikyū respect each other, but they do not trust one another. This tension plays out every time the two prepare tea together. When they are in the tea room alone—Hideyoshi gaudily dressed and Rikyū in subdued black—a silent struggle for dominance unfolds. As Hideyoshi serves first, Rikyū’s “big eyes would watch each movement carefully, while a crooked smile twisted his lips. His large, distinctively wrinkled hands would sit curved on his lap. He never blinked. He never corrected Hideyoshi, or gave him any direction. The steam rising from the kettle sounded like it was coming from a faraway mountain and within that sound Rikyū would sit tranquilly, like a wooden statue” (Nogami 2018, 26). This transformation in Rikyū causes Hideyoshi to lose confidence and start to feel “like a thin, miserable shadow, overpowered by the irresistible dignity that Rikyū possessed just sitting there” (Nogami 2018, 26). The negative impact of Rikyū’s presence dissipates once Hideyoshi is finished serving tea, but Hideyoshi’s sense of inferiority lasts much longer. Aware of his power over Hideyoshi, Rikyū rarely responds to requests for feedback. For example, in this exchange: “Was it all right?” Hideyoshi would ask as if it weren’t important. 6

Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers

Rikyū would smile at Hideyoshi with his big eyes, his face much warmer than it had been when he was watching Hideyoshi make tea. But his answer was only ever one syllable: “Hmmmm.” No matter how well or poorly Hideyoshi did, the answer was always “hmmm.” Rikyū never gave more praise or criticism than that. Hideyoshi always knew what Rikyū would say, but he still wanted to ask his opinion. The other teachers, like Tsuda Sogyu and Imai Sokyu, always praised Hideyoshi’s tea-making technique. He knew that this was only flattery. Rikyū’s assessment would be genuine, so, like a vulnerable child in front of a teacher, Hideyoshi wanted to hear a bit of praise from Rikyū. (Nogami 2018, 26–27) According to Nogami’s account, Rikyū’s unwillingness to overly praise Hideyoshi exacerbates the latter’s increasing animosity toward the tea master. She writes, Hideyoshi remembered his old lessons with Rikyū, and the fact that his teacher never gave even a little bit of praise, but only ambiguous comments. The frustration and inferiority he had felt at the time had transformed into conceit and satisfaction at being able to give orders to such a skilled, famous man. The old feeling still stabbed sometimes, like a thorn that isn’t felt on a fingertip until it’s rubbed the wrong way. Thus today, as always, Hideyoshi got a small thrill from forcing Rikyū to bow deeply. (Nogami 2018, 257) With these detailed descriptions of the internal workings of both men’s minds, Nogami highlights the ongoing deep-seated struggle for power between them—one that eventually erupts to the surface. In the novel, readers are offered a series of explanations for the ultimate falling out between Hideyoshi and Rikyū. First, Nogami references the existing theories. One is that Hideyoshi was outraged by a statue of Rikyū that had been created and displayed at a temple in such a way that Hideyoshi had to pass under the statue’s sandaled feet to enter the building. Another reason is that Rikyū refused to give his daughter to Hideyoshi as a concubine. The third reason is that Hideyoshi was displeased with the way that Rikyū used his role as confidante to Hideyoshi to help him sell more tea ware. Finally, it has been speculated that the growing discontent of other daimyo regarding Rikyū’s proximity to power is what led to his downfall.6 We see all of these possibilities explored in the novel. But Nogami introduces a fifth, as well: Rikyū’s lack of support for an invasion of the Korean peninsula. While all of these explanations could have been in play, ultimately Nogami’s reader understands how Hideyoshi’s insecurity and unpredictability and Rikyū’s pride led to their final impasse. As the novel progresses, the reader sees more and more of Hideyoshi’s erratic behavior. The most significant is when he rashly cuts off the head of Yamanoue Sōji, one of Rikyū’s disciples. With this incident, Rikyū realizes that his own choices have been increasingly constricted by concerns regarding Hideyoshi’s mood. Further Rikyū realizes that Hideyoshi’s unpredictability has gotten worse as he’s aged and particularly after he welcomed his new son (Nogami 2018, 283). Although Rikyū knows he is valuable to Hideyoshi and although he has worked hard to be as diplomatic and discreet as possible, he also knows none of that

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will matter to a Hideyoshi who seems to be becoming more and more rash and increasingly aware of his physical limitations and the risks his death will cause his heir. Ultimately, Rikyū is punished by Hideyoshi due to the placement of a wooden statue of him in the newly-built gate of Daitokuji Temple. When the order comes for Rikyū to be exiled to his home in Sakai, his wife and other women try to help, and Rikyū and Hideyoshi’s unwillingness to accept this help demonstrates the fragility of the male ego that has been at play throughout the story. At this critical junction, Nogami notes that the women not only act more clear-headedly, but they also know exactly how to manipulate these men. First, Rikyū’s wife Rikki sends a letter to Yura, Hideyoshi’s wife’s maid, who “controlled the entire domestic life at Jurakudai” (Nogami 2018, 316) apologizing for not coming to formally say goodbye and asking that Yura convey her regards to Hideyoshi’s wife, Onene, and his mother (Nogami 2018, 316). Although there is no mention of the circumstances for their departure, all involved understand what has happened and the true meaning behind Rikki’s letter. In response, Yura makes it clear that she has spoken to Hideyoshi’s wife, Hideyoshi’s mother, and Hidenaga’s wife, and that all agree that if Rikyū could make a formal apology the situation would be resolved. Despite being offered this lifeline thanks to the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the women in the orbits of these two men, both men find themselves unable to break free from the cycle of power, insecurity, and pride that ultimately leads to Rikyū’s death. Rikyū’s inability to apologize despite the work the women do on his behalf ensures that he will not be forgiven by Hideyoshi. Rikyū hadn’t turned on his wife. Nor on Hideyoshi’s mother, nor on Maeda Toshiie. His scorching anger was directed at himself. He pushed down the part of himself that wanted to grovel. He knew only too well that if he followed their advice, it would be the safest, the wisest, and the most advantageous way back into Hideyoshi’s good graces. He knew it, but he didn’t want to do it. He’d had enough of flattering. Besides, if he was forgiven, Hideyoshi would still have him by the neck, and he didn’t want to be in that position anymore.” (Nogami 2018, 316) Nogami’s Rikyū demonstrates agency by refusing to apologize, and in this way, he is no longer Hideyoshi’s victim. Instead, he becomes a man who chooses dignity and freedom from Hideyoshi’s control. Had he followed the guidance of the women around him, Rikyū may have walked free but not without his pride deeply wounded. As Kikuta notes Hideyoshi and Rikyū has been called “a masculine novel” thanks to the way Nogami uses language and to the fact that there is very little to suggest the domestic sphere (Kikuta 2008, 208). The novel is unsentimental as it probes the characters’ psyches, and the action of the novel deals squarely with political power. These traits of Nogami’s novel certainly challenge any notion that women cannot or should not write about topics outside of their lived experience. On top of giving readers an effectively depicted story of the inner workings of these men’s minds and of the political maneuverings of those around them, Nogami’s novel highlights the fact that women can write novels that are, as Yoko McClain describes them, “forceful and impassive, never sentimental or emotional” (McClain 1982, 259), clearly demonstrating that women can write entertaining historical fiction despite what male critics like Ōoka Shohei or Mishima Yukio say.

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Ariyoshi Sawako Ariyoshi Sawako’s historical fiction is often situated squarely within the domestic sphere. In fact, by writing about wives, mothers, and daughters, Ariyoshi provides readers with characters who seek to challenge the ways in which women are oppressed in a society dominated by men. As a writer, Ariyoshi credits growing up in a highly educated and well-traveled family for helping her develop a strong sense of self and a voice that she wanted to share with the world. By the time she was a young adult, she had encountered the highs of being a member of the elite expatriate community in the colonies and the very lows of being a Japanese national who experienced the devastation of World War II and its aftermath. After her marriage fell apart, Ariyoshi’s hardships as a single, working mother led her to use her novels to repeatedly examine the difficult and often tenuous positions of women in Japanese society.7 Ariyoshi writes about real and imagined female characters from the past to lend a critical voice to the role of women in society, associating her premodern female protagonists with 20th-century issues. Three notable works of historical fiction—Kinogawa (1959, The River Ki,*), Hanaoka Seishū no tsuma (1967, Hanaoka Seishū’s Wife; translated as The Doctor’s Wife*) and Izumo no Okuni (1969, Okuni of Izumo; translated as Kabuki Dancer*)—describe how the female protagonists overcome the restrictions placed upon them by male-dominated social structures and demonstrate the way that historical fiction written by women facilitates a reassessment of the genre and allows for the kind of social criticism missing from male-authored works. Most of Ariyoshi’s fiction features strong women who face unbelievable social and emotional challenges caused by societal norms. Common themes in her works include the conflict between two generations of women in a family, men who manipulate these tensions between women to their advantage, and the oppressive nature of societal conventions regarding the role of women in the household. All of these themes speak to the way women are oppressed in a society bound by patriarchal structures and demonstrate the importance of historical fiction written by women. In 1959, the first of Ariyoshi’s most well-known novels, a work of period fiction called Kinogawa (The River Ki), was serialized in the women’s journal Fujin gahō (Women’s illustrated). This novel follows three generations of Matani women from the Kinogawa district of Ariyoshi’s native Wakayama. The first section follows the life of Hana, a Meiji woman who is progressive for her time, yet still very much limited by her roles within the household. Her success is measured by the successes of her husband and children. The middle section is about Hana’s daughter Fumio, who, like her mother before her, is an educated and strongwilled woman. While both Hana and Fumio were considered modern in their respective days, their relationship is marked by conflict because they grow up in such different times. Fumio, who comes of age during the Taishō period (1912–1926), marries a successful businessman and goes abroad with him. Her fiercely independent ways are tempered only when her young child dies and she begins to reconsider the traditional customs and beliefs of her home, beliefs she once rejected as backwards and irrelevant. The final section follows Fumio’s daughter Hanako who lives though the family’s rapid decline with the death of the patriarch (Hana’s husband) and the onset of World War II. As the Matani men squander what is left of the family’s fortune, it is the women who protect the family’s history and legacy. The book ends with Hanako reading at Hana’s sickbed from the history of the Matani family, Hanako

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realizing that she too is part of the flow of the history of the Matani family, constant like the River Ki itself. Though none of these women is heir to the Matani family fortunes—Hana has no Matani blood in her veins, and Fumio and Hanako (will) marry out of the family—all of them serve as the greatest guardians of its legacy. The River Ki is a vividly-imagined work of period fiction that paints a believable and easy-to-understand picture of how one family experienced the rapid changes of the modern era. Along the way, it highlights the fact that none of these women can escape the inevitable nature of the social or political change (caused by men) happening around them nor the impact of the successes or failures of their husbands and sons. In this way, The River Ki uses history as both a backdrop and an actor in this tale of the travails of women like the Matanis. While The River Ki is a period piece that seeks to address the issues faced by women using an epic, multi-generational format, the 1967 Hanaoka Seishū no tsuma (The Doctor’s Wife) focuses on a single moment in history, drawing on the true story of Hanaoka Seishū’s groundbreaking work in anesthetics and breast cancer research. In particular, Ariyoshi uses the story of Seishū’s wife, Kae, as the basis for a novel-length criticism of how the maledominated nature of Tokugawa era (1600–1868) Japan pitted women—in this case Kae and her mother-in-law Otsugi—against one another. Over the course of the novel, the two women fight to show superior degrees of support by sacrificing their bodies as guinea pigs for the work being done by the young doctor. Details of Seishū’s research provide the backdrop for the unspoken, restrained conflict that consumes the two women. Their story begins as one of seeming mutual affection. As a young girl, Kae hears of Otsugi’s unparalleled beauty and is thrilled when Otsugi chooses her as the most suitable wife for her son. During the first year of her time in the Hanaoka household, the women live and work side by side, devoting their energies to the success of the household, a household which is without Seishū, its heir and young husband who is away pursuing medical training. When Seishū returns to take over the family’s medical practice, the relationship between mother and daughter-in-law, which had been peaceful, sours, becoming fraught with conflict. The story of Kae and Otsugi illustrates how the structure of the family system with its focus on the male head inevitably disadvantages women and often forces them to fight with one another for resources and attention. This struggle is often seen in the conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, although in this novel most of the females fare poorly. Seishū’s two unmarried sisters die from cancer he is unable to treat. His daughter dies of an illness when she is still a young child. Those of Seishū’s sisters who do marry go on at length about their terrible mothers-in-law. The point is clear; the patriarchy is hard on women. On her deathbed, Seishū’s sister, Koriku, says: Don’t you think men are incredible? It seems … that an intelligent person like my brother … would have noticed the friction between you and Mother… But throughout he shrewdly pretended he didn’t see anything … which resulted in both you and Mother drinking the medicine… Well, isn’t it so? … I think this sort of tension among females … is … to the advantage … of … every male. And I doubt that any man would volunteer to mediate their struggles. (Ariyoshi 1978, 163–64)

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Statements like this lack a certain subtlety, to be sure, but they accurately reflect not only the thoughts and feelings of the women of the time Ariyoshi is portraying but also of the late 20th-century women who read her stories. The final line of The Doctor’s Wife highlights the way that writing about the women who surround famous men can serve as a searing critique of the structures that created this situation: [Kae] died in 1829 at the age of sixty-eight, her eyes and lips sealed forever… When she was laid to rest in the Hanaoka cemetery by the iris pond, her tombstone appeared one size larger than the one behind her which belonged to Otsugi—a difference due perhaps to the increased prosperity of the family. Her stone, which overshadowed Otsugi’s, was inscribed simply with her posthumous Buddhist name. Even larger than twice the size of the two women’s tombs combined is that of Seishū, who died six years after his wife. It stands on a triple pedestal six feet high, towering over all the others in the Hanaoka cemetery… If you stand directly in front of Seishū’s tomb, the two behind him, those of Kae and Otsugi, are completely obscured (Ariyoshi 1978, 173–74). In death, as in life, both Kae and Otsugi, find themselves overshadowed by their husband and son, their sacrifices largely forgotten to time. While The River Ki and The Doctor’s Wife focus on strong female figures and their struggles within the context of the family, Kabuki Dancer addresses the struggles women face in society from the perspective of Okuni, the woman who is thought to have founded kabuki. As a single, poor woman trying to make her way through the tumultuous late 16th and early 17th centuries outside of the confines of the family system, Okuni provides readers with a very different role model as she offers sharp criticism of her society and of the men in charge of it. In the novel, which follows Okuni and her dance troupe as they set out from Izumo and seek fame and fortune in the city, Okuni and her fellow travelers express confusion, concern, and even criticism at how Hideyoshi’s policies impact the marginalized members of society. Peasants are killed in construction projects, and others starve as they are forced to give the bulk of their resources away as tax payments. The members of Okuni’s dance troupe are unable to return home or join one of the set social groups because they were not counted in the recent census. By having characters of such low social standing demonstrate the impact these policies had on those not in power, Ariyoshi offers a history that asks readers to question the apotheosis of certain men.8 Kabuki Dancer also offers readers an example of how Ariyoshi uses women to challenge male-dominated narratives of the past. This is the most striking when Okuni describes seeing Hideyoshi, the so-called tenka, or leader of the realm, for the first time: “He carried a six-foot sword in a gold scabbard at his waist. It was so much longer than his scrawny body that people couldn’t help but wonder how he was able to draw it in battle. He was an upstart, a peasant gaudily decked out in gold” (Ariyoshi 1969, 1: 251–52).9 This is the only time in the text when Hideyoshi and Okuni share the same space, and Okuni and her friends clearly see him as insignificant and weak. This emasculation of Hideyoshi moves the narrative away Chapter 1: When Women Write History

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from a focus on strong men and great battles and encourages readers to see people like Hideyoshi as something other than heroic. In this novel, everything that men strive for—leadership, victory in battle, bigger castles—is depicted as being pointless. Okuni sees some of the best-known battles in Japanese history, but instead of being impressed by their significance, she experiences them as entertainment. She watches men build castles and then have them destroyed. At one point, she wonders aloud, “What good do castles do? The first thing a man in power does is build a castle, and, when he loses that power, the castle is the first thing that is destroyed.” (Ariyoshi 1969, 2: 174). To Okuni and her troupe mates the creation and destruction of castles seems like nothing more than the hobbies of men. This is perhaps most obvious in Okuni’s persistence in asking, “What is a lord of the realm anyway?” (Ariyoshi 1969, 2: 120) This is a question she asks multiple times. While she understands what the words mean, she finds it difficult to believe that great men exist or that one man could or should rule over all. With this question, she is asking, rhetorically, how any of the imperfect men who populate this novel can claim to rule the entire realm, especially when the distance between the person in power and the real lives of those she encounters on a daily basis is so great. Ultimately, just like Kae, Otsugi, and the Matani women, Okuni is not able to break free of the expectations society places upon her. While none of these women can dismantle the structures that subjugate them, all of them bear up under these intense social and emotional hardships just the same. By highlighting the stories of these women, some real and some fictional, who suffer because of the way society oppresses them but who also voice their own criticisms of and doubts about the effectiveness and fairness of that society, Ariyoshi paves the way for her readers to reevaluate their own situations. Although Ariyoshi’s work has been criticized for being simple domestic pieces that have history as a backdrop (Ōoka 1974, 26), with Kae and Okuni, Ariyoshi has written about women who did indeed defy expectations about how women should behave. Mishima Yukio argues that historical fiction is just a contemporary drama set in the past as a way of attempting to hide society’s flaws (Kikuta 2008, 206), but if that is the case, these stories by Ariyoshi demonstrate that women in Japan have been fighting some of the same battles for centuries. In that context, Ariyoshi’s protagonists’ refusal to bow to the pressures placed on them by social expectations serve as an important model for modern-day readers.

Nagai Michiko Nagai Michiko is a historical fiction writer in the truest sense of the word. Most of her career has been spent closely reading historical source materials and creating tales with the information she finds. Like Nogami, she believes adherence to historical facts is important whenever possible, and like Ariyoshi, she finds the voices of women to be the ones most in need of amplifying, so the bulk of her novels are written from the perspective of women, some powerful and some not, who managed to influence the path of history. Nagai has said that if she had not experienced the loss of World War II, she probably would not have written historical fiction or engaged deeply with women’s history (Nagai 2001, 42). In particular, she noted that the experience of seeing Japan lose the war and watching how things changed once it was finished, transformed the way she thought about history.

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“The ones who were shocked by blacking out their textbooks with ink (sumi-nuri) were in the generation ten years younger than I, while I, who was tired of being force-fed the imperial view of history, felt as if I could finally breathe freely and understood that history cannot be understood from a single perspective; I felt as if I had gained power” (Nagai 2001, 42). While Nagai acknowledges that this realization did not immediately lead her to start writing historical fiction (she got married and found a job at a publisher first), it was the impetus for how she viewed history moving forward (Nagai 2001, 43). That said, even when she began writing full-time, she did not set out to focus on female characters. In her article “Joseishi to rekishi shōsetsu—watashi no taiken kara” (Women’s history and historical fiction—from my experience),” Nagai explains, that her novel Enkan (1964, Ring of Fire) is not only significant because it earned her the Naoki prize, but it was also the work that put her on the path to writing women’s history (Nagai 2001, 44). In preparation for this novel, she researched the fall of Kajiwara Kagetoki (1140?–1200),10 Minamono Yoritomo’s closest advisor. One of her main sources for this research was the 13th-century Azuma kagami (History of the East), where she discovered the story of Awatsubone (d. 1227), a woman who is said to have alerted Yūki Tomomitsu (1168–1254), a low-ranking vassal in Yoritomo’s forces, of Kagetoki’s plans to betray their lord. By whispering the information into Tomomitu’s ear—“Kagetoki is planning to slander you, and if he does, your life will be in danger.” (Nagai 2001, 44)—Awatsubone triggered the events that pushed Kagetoki from power. The more Nagai read about the woman who whispered to Tomomitsu, the more fascinated she became with her. “When you read this story casually, you think that the gossip of this chatty woman brought down Kagetoki, but what really happened? When I reread the Azuma Kagami looking for information about her, I was reminded once again of how sloppily I tend to read history” (Nagai 2001, 44). As she re-read Azuma Kagami, Nagai realized that while Awatsubone actions had been described as mere gossip, when viewed through a different lens, Awatsubone’s significance—as Hōjō Masako’s younger sister and wife to one of Yoritomo’s close allies, and more importantly as the nursemaid to Hōjō Masako and Yoritomo’s second son—is obvious. As she made these connections, Nagai began to realize the important role that women who are often found in the background, such as nursemaids and concubines, had in the making of history. She explains, “This is the moment when I turned to writing women’s history. I realized what the existence of nursemaids meant within the structures of power, and that women were also involved in society and politics” (Nagai 2001, 45). From this realization early in her career, a desire to highlight important lost stories has served as a motivation for Nagai.11 One example of this is Nagai’s novel Ōja no tsuma: Hideyoshi no tsuma Onene (1969–1970, The Monarch’s Wife: Hideyoshi’s Wife Onene). Although Onene became arguably one of the most powerful women at the end of the 16th century, her story has often been bracketed by the fact that she was never able to bear children and spent the last twenty-five years of her life as a nun at Kōdaiji Temple. In many ways, Onene’s richer story has been lost to that single narrative. When Nagai discusses her reasoning for taking up Hideyoshi’s wife Onene as a topic, she explains that, first, she sees Onene as an excellent example of how women can use their positions in society to assert their own power. In her essay “Nihon ichi no ‘okamisan’: Kita no Mandokoro” (1969, The Best Wife in Japan: Kita no Mandokoro), Nagai moves away from any analysis of Onene as a “failure” for having not been able to produce an heir and focuses instead on her role as Hideyoshi’s wife. This enables Nagai to argue that Onene stands out Chapter 1: When Women Write History

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as one of the most ideal wives of all time: “It is common knowledge that Onene had no children. Despite the fact that this was a major strike against women of her time, she continued to assert influence as Hideyoshi’s primary wife because she had exemplary character. Furthermore, what really made Onene great was that she not only had authority over Hideyoshi’s various mistresses, but she also paid close attention to politics and skillfully offered her husband advice on such matters” (Nagai 1969, 114). In other words, Nagai reads Onene’s potential weakness as both the foundation for the strength she demonstrates throughout the novel and proof that she could overcome hardship. Second, Nagai argues that a woman’s perspective provides readers a new and possibly subversive reading of heroes of the past. For Nagai, a common woman like Onene has the potential to break free from standard narratives: telling her story can broaden our understanding of history and reveal that the heroes are not who we thought they were. Because this is a novel with Onene at its center, the events of The Monarch’s Wife begin when Onene is a young girl and end with her death in 1624. As a result, the reader sees the important historical events surrounding Hideyoshi’s rule but they also see what happens after he has gone—in other words, readers see Hideyoshi’s demise and begin to understand the important role Onene played in the succession struggles and the creation of the Tokugawa peace after her husband’s death.12 Further, Nagai believes that emphasizing Onene’s internal strength and fortitude will allow readers to understand how history has tended to privilege men, even when those men have proven unworthy of the praise they receive. When Onene appears in historical analyses of Hideyoshi, discussions tend to focus on her inability to produce an heir at a time when a woman’s primary role was to give birth to a son who could carry on the family line.13 Yet, in Nagai’s novel, Onene repeatedly uses her resources to ensure her own success regardless of the fact she had no children. She helps negotiate her marriage with Hideyoshi and manages the increasing number of concubines in his household even though his neglect of her leaves her lonely and without a child. Although Nagai’s Onene moves past her concerns about bearing a child, her ongoing conflict with Hideyoshi’s favorite concubine, Ochacha, is a central theme in the novel. Ochacha, daughter of Asai Nagamasa and Nobunaga’s sister Oichi, is the only of Hideyoshi’s women to give birth to a surviving heir. When Ochacha has the baby, Onene’s points out the ways this puts her at a disadvantage: “Young, beautiful, pregnant, and now giving birth to a boy! I lose to her in every way” (Nagai 1995, 362). Still, she subverts expectation by remaining steadfast and continuing to assert her power even after Hideyoshi dies. Following Hideyoshi’s death, Ochacha and Hideyori displace Onene from Osaka Castle, and Onene retreats to a temple where she spends her final years, but according to Nagai, even though she is physically removed from the centers of power, Onene continues to be involved in advising some of Hideyoshi’s most trusted men. In a society that often pits women against one another, neither Onene nor Ochacha can break completely free from the patriarchal structures that bind them. Nagai highlights this by linking Ochacha’s death directly to her ability to bear children and produce the Toyotomi heir. Because Ochacha was able to fulfill her destiny and give Hideyoshi a son, she died. And because she was not able to do the same, Onene survived and went on to live a life of peace and influence. By telling Hideyoshi’s story through the perspective of Onene, then, Nagai offers readers an interpretation of the past that demonstrates the ways in which women can

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succeed even if they are not wives or mothers. More importantly, though, her novel reminds readers that women need to work together instead of against one another.

Conclusion Historical fiction written by women fulfills an important role within the genre and in the larger world of Japanese literature. While much of the historical fiction written by men has focused largely on glorifying male heroes of the past, overlooking many other important players along the way, writing by women has expanded the boundaries of the genre by focusing on women and by writing about men in ways that are often more critical. Historical fiction by women refuses to lionize institutional shifts and political moments that tell but one aspect of the human endeavor. Instead, by offering readers entry to the kitchen and the boudoir, to traditionally female spaces, they restore important facets to our understanding of the past. In the process, women writers of historical fiction have sought to dismantle patriarchal structures and challenge the ways in which the telling of history has largely been by and about men.

Notes 1 During the Edo period, well-known playwrights such as Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) drew on the Japanese literary practice of adapting stories from the past to comment on current events and indirectly criticize the strict social structure enforced by the Tokugawa regime. 2 See Maeda, “The Development of Popular Fiction in the Late Taishō Era” in Text in the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. 3 Sakai (Nihon no taishū bungaku), Torrance (“Literacy and Literature in Osaka”), and Langton (“A Literature for the People”) have written at length about the popularity of historical fiction in Japan. See also Shimura, Rekishi shōsetsu to taishū bungaku. 4 Parts of this discussion about the history and reception of historical fiction in Japan can be found in Furukawa, The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 5 See, for example, Furukawa 2022, 182. 6 See Bodart, “Tea and Counsel,” for a description of these theories. 7 Background information on Ariyoshi Sawako comes from Nihon josei bungaku daijiten and Gendai josei bungaku jiten, as well as from Tahara, “Ariyoshi Sawako: The Novelist,” in Heroic with Grace. 8 A more lengthy discussion of Ariyoshi’s novel Izumo no Okuni [Kabuki Dancer] can be found in Furukawa, The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 9 In capturing the essence of Ariyoshi’s narrative, Brandon had to attenuate the Japanese slightly in his translation. I have chosen to use my own translation for excerpts from this novel in order to highlight my point about Okuni’s focus on the uselessness of war. 10 Kajiwara helped lead the forces of Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Minamoto no Yoritomo against their cousin Yoshinaka. He was also instrumental in helping them defeat the Taira. Over time, however, Kajiwara worked to sow seeds of distrust between Yoshitsune and Yoritomo and eventually caused Yoshitsune to be exiled. 11 At a public lecture given in March 2008 at the NHK Broadcast Museum, for example, Nagai stated: “I am not writing about women because I am a woman. I simply believe there is a lot to learn from seeing history through their eyes.” 12 For an extended analysis of Nagai’s novel, see Furukawa The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 13 For example, when Kuwata Tadachika discusses Onene, he emphasizes her inability to bear any children for Hideyoshi (Taikō Hideyoshi no tegami [The letters of the retired imperial regent Hideyoshi], 29). See also Kitagawa, Tomoko, “An Independent Wife during the Warring States.”

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References Ariyoshi, S. (1969). Izumo no Okuni [Kabuki Dancer]. (3 vols.). Tokyo: Chūō Kōron-sha. ———. (1980). The River Ki. [M. Tahara, trans.]. Tokyo: Kodansha International. ———. (1987). The Doctor’s Wife. (W. Hironaka & A. S. Kostant, trans.). Tokyo: Kodansha International. ———. (1994). Kabuki Dancer. [J. Brandon, trans.]. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Copeland, R. L. (2006a). Introduction to Meiji Women Writers. In R. L. Copeland & M. Ortabasi, The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (ed.). (2006b). Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ericson, J. (1996). The Origins of the Concept of ‘Women’s Literature.’ In P.G. Schalow & J.A. Walker. The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Furukawa, S.W. (2022). The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Ichiko, N., Kan, S. & Asai, K. (eds.). (2006). Nihon josei bungaku daijiten [Dictionary of women’s literature]. Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentaa. Kanō, M. (2009). Nogami Yaeko to sono jidai [Nogami Yaeko and her time]. Tokyo: Yumani Shobō. Kikuta, H. (2008). Nogami Yaeko—tekishi to bungaku [Nogami Yaeko—history and literature]. Mita Bungakkai 87(93): 197–209. Kitagawa, T. (2009). An Independent Wife during the Warring States: The Life of Kitamandokoro Nei (1548– 1624) in Letters. (3388066) [Doctoral dissertation, Princeton University]. UMI Kuwata, T. (1965). Taikō Hideyoshi no tegami [The letters of the retired imperial regent Hideyoshi]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Langton, S. (2000). A Literature for the People: A Study of Jidai Shōsetsu in Taishō and Early Shōwa Japan. [Doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University]. Dissertation Abstracts International, 61–08a. Maeda, A. (2004). The Development of Popular Fiction in the Late Taishō Era: Increasing Readership of Women’s Magazines. In J. Fujii, (ed. and trans.), Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, 163–219. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McClain, Y. (1982). Nogami Yaeko: A Writer as Steady as a Cow? The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 17(2): 153–72. Muramatsu, S. & Watanabe, S. (eds.). (1990). Gendai josei bungaku jiten [Dictionary of contemporary women writers]. Tokyo: Tōkyō-dō Shuppan. Nagai, M. (1969). Nihon no suupaa reidii monogatari [Stories of Japanese Super Ladies]. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun-sha. ———. (1995). Nagai Michiko rekishi shōsetsu zenshū. Dai 14 kan: Ōja no tsuma: Hideyoshi no tsuma Onene [The complete historical novels of Nagain Michiko. Vol. 14: The Monarch’s Wife: Hideyoshi’s Wife Onene]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron-sha. ———. (1996). Ōja no tsuma: Hideyoshi no tsuma Onene [The Monarch’s Wife: Hideyoshi’s Wife Onene]. Tokyo: PHP Bunko. ———. (2001). Josei-shi to watashi josei-shi to rekishi shōsetsu—watashi no taiken kara [Women’s History and Me, Women’s History and Historical Fiction—From my Experience]. Sōgō joseishi kenkyū 18: 42–47. ———. (2008). Rekishi no naka no josei no hatsumei [Inventing women in history]. Lecture at the NHK Broadcast Museum, Tokyo, March 22. Narita, R. (2003). Shiba Ryōtarō no bakumatsu/Meiji: Ryōma ga yuku to Saka no ue no kumo o yomu [Shiba Ryōtarō’s Bakumatsu and Meiji: Reading Ryōma Moves On and The Clouds above the Hills]. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun-sha. Nogami, Y. (1998). Oishi Yoshio/Fue [The Flute]. Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko. ———. 2018. Hideyoshi and Rikyū. (M.N. LaFleur and M. Beard, trans.). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ōoka, S. (1974). Rekishi shōsetu no mondai [The problem of historical fiction]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Orbaugh, S. (1996). The Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction. In In P.G. Schalow & J.A. Walker. The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing (pp. 119–64). Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Sakai, C. (1997). Nihon no taishū bungaku (1900–1980) [Japanese popular fiction (1900–1980)]. (Asahina K. trans.). Tokyo: Heibon-sha.

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Strecher, M. (1996). Purely Mass or Massively Pure? The Division between “Pure” and “Mass” Literature. Monumenta Nipponica 51(3) (Autumn): 357–74. Tahara, M. (1991). Ariyoshi Sawako: The Novelist. In C.I. Mulhern (ed.), Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan (pp. 297–322). New York: M. E. Sharpe. Torrance, R. (2005). Literacy and Literature in Osaka, 1890–1940. Journal of Japanese Studies 31(1) (Winter): 27–60.

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Chapter 2 Writing Within and Beyond Genre: Ōkura Teruko, Miyano Murako, Togawa Masako, Miyabe Miyuki, and Minato Kanae and Mystery Fiction Quillon Arkenstone  

Mystery fiction is an immensely popular genre in Japan, and one that women writers have been involved with from the beginning. Recognition has not been commensurate with their contributions, though, and only recently have women contributions to the genre been accorded serious critical interest. Building on this current scholarship, this chapter looks at five women writers of mystery fiction, from the interwar period to the present: Ōkura Teruko, Miyano Murako, Togawa Masako, Miyabe Miyuki, and Minato Kanae. Through a mix of short stories and novels, I examine the interaction between these writers and the mystery fiction genre, which has often involved a critique of both society and the medium itself.

Introduction Few genres in Japanese literature have enjoyed the appeal and longevity of mystery fiction. From its modern appearance in the Meiji period through Taishō and Shōwa tales of the erotic and the grotesque to current iyamisu (or gross-out mysteries), mystery fiction and its subgenres have maintained an enthusiastic readership for well over a century. And while the current state of mystery fiction is exemplified by a wide range of writers and readers, its official history is somewhat less representative, having been written as a predominantly male line of descent. Studies of the genre, for example, have long held prominent positions for figures like Edogawa Ranpo, Yokomizo Seishi, Ayukawa Tetsuya, and Matsumoto Seichō, and it is only in the last several decades that critics have begun to pay serious attention to contributions by women. The correction is a welcome one, for as might be surmised, women have been actively writing mystery fiction for as long as their male counterparts. Readers of mystery fiction will of course be familiar with its basic structure, which rests on a formula that Pierre Macherey describes as being “a product of two different movements:

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the one establish[ing] the mystery while the other dispels it” (Macherey 2006, 38). With the revelation of the concealed mystery “the work’s solution … entails its disappearance, hence the work is sustained only by the question to which it must provide an answer” (Macherey 2006, 26). This movement, the foundation of the genre, is even more circumscribed in what is probably mystery fiction’s most famous subgenre, detective fiction (honkaku tantei shōsetsu). Detective fiction manipulates the two different movements into two distinct narratives, one of the crime and the other of the investigation (Scaggs 2005, 2). While there are any number of variations on the theme (and the ingenuity of writers is often determined by their ability to maneuver within these limits) detective fiction has maintained this dual narrative structure throughout its development, which in Japan is considered to have occurred in three waves: an initial wave in the interwar period, a second wave in the early postwar and a third wave in the late 1980s and 90s (Kasai 2017b, 6). Women writers have been active in mystery and detective fiction throughout these periods, and their formal and thematic innovations have ranged widely over the discursive boundaries of both. With this understanding of mystery fiction in general and detective fiction in particular, the primary focus of this chapter will be on how women have worked within the genre during the above periods. First, two short pieces by Ōkura Teruko and Miyano Murako will illustrate the prewar period. Next, for the early postwar I will examine The Master Key by Togawa Masako. Finally, I take up the two post-bubble novels, Shadow Family by Miyabe Miyuki and Penance by Minato Kanae. The goal overall is to show how these women use mystery fiction to engage with some of the dominant ideological concerns of their specific social and historical moments. These concerns, often surfacing through the “question” alluded to by Macherey, correlate with what Louis Althusser terms the work’s problematic, its underlying theoretical or epistemic boundary, which “constitutes its absolute and definite condition of possibility” (Althusser 1997, 25). With each work below the writers explore the problematic in the encounter between form and content, an encounter that for Ōkura and Miyano led to a conservative reinforcement of the genre, for Togawa and Miyabe a push against (and pushback by) its limits, and for Minato a burst through these limits into a new genre altogether.

The interwar enchantress: Ōkura Teruko One of the most well-known, if not prolific, among women writers of mystery fiction during the interwar period was Ōkura Teruko (1886–1960). Ōkura, the daughter of prominent Meiji era nativist scholar Mozume Takami, debuted in 1934 with the short story “Yōei” (The Enchantress). The work was inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s 1884 tale “The Spasm” (Le Tic), although Ōkura recasts the focal characters into a pair of villains that speak to contemporary Japanese anxieties about women and foreigners as representative of internal and external threats to society (Yokoi 2011, 455). These threats coalesce in the figure of the eponymous Enchantress, through which Ōkura melds these modern fears with the earlier character of the female criminal, or poison woman (dokufu), whose true crime-like narratives of the late Edo and early Meiji periods served as a forerunner to modern mystery fiction in Japan (Hori 2014, 70). “The Enchantress” is an epistolary narrative that takes place aboard a ship, told by a man in possession of a secret code that he is to deliver as he takes up his new post on the

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Asian continent. While onboard he is warned to be extremely vigilant, his forced asceticism precluding visits to customary haunts like dance floors and bars. Succumbing one night to mental fatigue, and concerned his paranoia will get the better of him, he makes his way to the ship’s dining hall to indulge in conversation with the other passengers. During dessert, a Chinese couple announcing themselves as father and daughter quietly enter. They are both of obvious standing, but it is the sickly daughter who captures the man’s attention as they take their seats near him: Bowing slightly as she took her seat, she looked in my direction. The first thing that struck me was the beauty of her eyes. I got the feeling that her body had long since wasted away but her eyes alone were alive, and that sad beauty sent my heart aflutter. Until now I had never encountered eyes of such fearful beauty. One glance from her and you might say I was completely entranced. (Yokoi 2011, 5) While in their company the man notices some eccentricities on the part of the pair, as the daughter wears a white glove on only one hand and the father makes repeated gesticulations in the air before taking food. The man is disarmed by their overall mannerisms, however, which are agreed by those aboard ship to be impressively Japanese (the product of an extended period in Japan). Several chance meetings result in a familiarity that emboldens the man to probe the father about the daughter’s condition, and the three retire to the man’s room one night so that the father may tell the story. The Chinese guests produce a bottle of whiskey and some chocolates, and it is at this point that the daughter addresses the man directly for the first time, offering him the chocolates and sealing his fate as he pops one into his mouth. As they settle in, the father’s story begins, a bizarre incident in which his daughter suffered an apparent premature death. With the father sunk in gloomy despair following the burial, a trusted house servant breaks into her tomb, cutting off her finger to steal a ring, and the subsequent shock brings her back to life. She returns to the house in the dead of night and is taken for an apparition, causing the guilty servant to flee in terror and the father to try to banish what he believes to be her ghost, giving rise to his involuntary hand gestures. As he listens to the story the man begins to feel drowsy, and his stifled yawns cause the father to break off the story to inquire if they should adjourn for the night. The concern is, of course, disingenuous, for the chocolates have done their work: “I felt the [father’s] voice was something I heard far off in the distance,” the man recalls, “[after] that I don’t remember anything” (Yokoi 2011, 16). He is found unconscious the next day deep in the ship’s hold after it has docked. The code he was to deliver has been stolen, and the Chinese couple is nowhere to be found. The crime in “The Enchantress” is accomplished through a combination of deception, drugging, and theft, and is a result of the investigation by the narrator turned amateur detective into the condition of the daughter. It is this ghastly account, in which she rises from the grave to appear before her father in a blood-soaked white dress with nine fingers, that links the story to the larger cultural fascination with the erotic and grotesque. More specifically, the muted philosophical questions at the story’s end (the code goes unrecovered, the crime unpunished) are ignored in favor of what Sari Kawana has called the “ostentatious displays of flesh, bad taste, and silliness” characteristic of much of the so-called ero-guro literature of the time (Kawana 2008, 10). Moreover, the Enchantress’s combination of sexual allure and use of 20

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poison (albeit nonlethal) suggest a lineage to the earlier poison woman, who deployed both, usually with murder, in pursuit of her goals. And yet, the criminality of prior poison women was in many cases explained through a sexual lens as a product of biology (Marran 2017, 117). While sexuality no doubt factors in the crime of “The Enchantress,” its role is not ontological; on the contrary, by grounding the motive in the increasingly entangled situation on the Asian continent Ōkura poses the question of whether a crime has been committed at all. The note left behind with the man after the theft of the code explains the rationale behind the deception, justifying and explaining it, not as sexual, but political in nature: For us, burning with patriotism, the delicate performance undertaken in pursuit of an objective is a matter of life and death, and so it is no surprise that those who witnessed it were wholly deceived. Moreover, in your case we went so far as to drug you—. We do not believe it constitutes a crime. And we hope it will not be considered as such. (Yokoi 2011, 18) Issues of empire found their way into many narratives following the intensification of Japanese activity in Northeast Asia, an area that had by this time been functioning for decades as one of the main sites of mystery in the Japanese imagination (Kawana 2008, 10). The details of the extremes to which Chinese citizens will go in the name of patriotism, compounded by the failure to apprehend them, taps into national (and readerly) fears that would hit a fever pitch with the outbreak of war in 1937 (the same year the story was aptly retitled “Odoru supai,” or “The Dancing Spy”). And while the xenophobic aspect of “The Enchantress” was certainly nothing new at the time, Ōkura breaks thematic ground through the inclusion of secret codes and state-level espionage, both of which herald the later spy thriller. She also offers in the Enchantress a transitional figure between the domestic poison woman and a fundamental character in those later thrillers, the femme fatale (Yokoi 2011, 456). This refinement (for lack of a better term) of female criminality in “The Enchantress” is its most significant aspect, as Ōkura presents a set of intentions and abilities that, while available to the poison women of the past, broaden the range of motives beyond a reductive attribution to sexuality. This comes at a cost, though, and although the motives might be diverse, Ōkura is ultimately unable to break with the genre’s traditionalist view of women, as the threatening skill sets of both poison women and Enchantress share an outlet in activity broadly defined (if not acknowledged) as criminal.

The genius amateur sleuth: Miyano Murako “The Enchantress” distills interwar geopolitical ideology into the basic mystery fiction structure while offering one possible line of descent for the poison woman. It is not the only line, though, for other writers deployed these abilities differently, and for a divergence from the entrenched image of the modern, intelligent woman as malevolent one might look to Miyano Murako (1917–1990), who explores such a scenario in 1939 with her short story “Buchi no kieta inu” (The Dog with Vanishing Spots). Miyano’s sleuth, whose critical faculties are put to use solving a crime within the strict detective fiction formula, would appear to have little

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in common with Ōkura’s Enchantress, but in reality poses a similar question of how female otherness is dealt with by the genre’s conservative tropes. “The Dog with Vanishing Spots” opens with a teenager, Michiko, playing a game with a friend when a neighbor brings over a stray puppy. The dog (christened “Ururu”) is in poor shape, with a wounded foot and dark spots; these mysteriously wash out when he is given a bath, though, leaving only white fur. Several days later Michiko sees two classified advertisements in the newspaper for a lost dog: one with a wounded foot and spots, the other for a snow-white puppy with no mention of a wound. As she ponders which of the two is the true owner, a friend recognizes the surname of one of the claimants and petitions their case, casting them as consummate dog lovers. This leads to the first display of abductive reasoning on the part of Michiko, who retorts, “If [they] were really dog lovers, Ururu wouldn’t have wanted to escape to the point of biting through his rope and limping away. I’m not saying [they] stole Ururu because they wanted him, I think they had another reason for doing it” (Miyano 2009, 268). Michiko’s assumptions are validated when she returns the dog to the other claimant, learning from the owner that it was kidnapped during a break-in next door where a valuable diamond was stolen. Surveying the adjacent house and neighborhood, Michiko reasons that the thief had hidden the diamond in the puppy’s paw during his or her escape (where it looked like a shard of glass) before covering the dog with dark liquid “spots” in order to recover it later through the advertisement. After taking steps to confirm her deductions, Michiko has the dog taken to a vet to get the stone extracted while she consults with the police. The vet is soon murdered, though, and a note left behind by the killer justifies the homicide by claiming that the vet had, in a fit of avarice, surreptitiously swapped out the diamond for a piece of glass. Michiko, however, refutes the explanation in an exhibition of logical reasoning that, while seemingly obvious, represents an understanding of the genre by Miyano that was almost unmatched by her contemporaries, who often struggled to employ similar elements in their own detective fiction: Unless one is familiar with jewels, I don’t think it’s possible to see something like a bloody piece of glass, take it for glass, and then suddenly realize it is in fact a diamond. And even if he had realized that, the fact that he would have conveniently had a piece of glass of the exact same shape and size handy [with which to replace it] is absurd. (Miyano 2009, 280) With this insight Michiko identifies the murderer, thwarts a further theft of the diamond, and ensures the return of both it and puppy to their rightful owners. Along with offering a rare example of a teenage female sleuth in prewar detective fiction, “The Dog with Vanishing Spots” is notable for encapsulating almost every element of the detective story’s plot-puzzle formula as it existed in the late 1930s. Miyano’s use of an anonymous third-person narrative style, for example, removes the problematic active narrator who had by that point been discarded as an impediment to the process of “fair play.” Also, the exercise in logic by the amateur detective Michiko is played out in detail before the reader, and the evidence she uses in her deductions is disclosed in accordance with that process. Finally, the prominent role of probability, considered by Michiko in response to the classified advertisements, is emblematic of the interwar detective’s process of ratiocination (Komori 2007, 73). In fact, the most curious alteration of the detective fiction formula in “The Dog 22

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with Vanishing Spots” is the story’s treatment of its own murder victim, for the return to the status quo does not include justice for the corpse. That corpse, the veterinarian who extracted the diamond from the puppy, appears almost at the end and is hardly consequential outside of the implications it has for locating the diamond. “The Dog with Vanishing Spots” serves as an archetypal illustration of interwar detective fiction, and together with “The Enchantress,” and its expanded range of criminal motives for women, both stories show that by the late 1930s women writers were not only active in genres still generally considered outside of their purview but along with male writers were using the medium to explore some of the dominant disquiets of the day. And while the limitations of the genre are articulated in the way both female characters as menacing “others” are in effect brought under control (Ōkura’s Enchantress is dismissed as a treacherous foreigner and Michiko’s critical faculties are safely channeled into the service of the state), there is a slight pushback from both writers, as the Enchantress escapes and Miyano’s killer (a neighboring housewife) is dealt with privately by a sympathetic Michiko rather than being exposed publicly. This groundwork laid by writers like Ōkura and Miyano would be built upon in the postwar period as women writers continued to draw from the formal and thematic legacies of the genre to express the ever-shifting concerns of their eras.

Religion, aging, and a postwar Butterfly: Togawa Masako With the approach of war, the viability (commercial or otherwise) of the position of writer became increasingly precarious. As the development of mystery and detective fiction proceeded in tandem with the militarization of society in the 1930s its women practitioners in particular were exhorted to abandon their literary aspirations and embrace the patriotic (read domestic) role of “good wife, wise mother” (Tanaka 1987, xi). By the end of the decade and into the 1940s detective fiction itself entered a period of censorship that saw almost all of its dedicated publications disappear (Kawana 2008, 191). Its production further declined during the Pacific War (though it was popular enough with the soldiers fighting it), until in the postwar it received a new and important ally in the Occupation administered by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, or SCAP. Considered a Western genre, detective fiction was viewed favorably by the Occupation authorities, and the ensuing support led to its resurgence in the postwar period. One of the earliest women writers of this postwar era was Togawa Masako (1931–2016), a former English typist turned popular chanson singer, who published her first novel Ōinaru gen’ei (The Master Key*) in 1962. Winner of the prestigious Edogawa Ranpo Prize for mystery fiction, The Master Key was praised for its formal and intellectual aspects, although this reception focused on it as a nonpolitical piece of detective fiction. However, a closer look at the novel shows Togawa’s critical engagement with two specific aspects of postwar Japanese society: aging and the issue of interracial children born to Japanese women and American servicemen during the Occupation. Both are used to provide a context within which postwar crime occurs. The Master Key is presented as a series of vignettes focused on a female-only apartment building in Tokyo where most of the residents, who have been living there for decades, are well-advanced in age.1 The main narrative centers around a project to move the apartment building in its entirety to accommodate the widening of its fronting street. As the move

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approaches, the mysteries of the building surface through machinations surrounding its master key as it is continuously stolen and re-stolen, and the reader follows its current possessor as they enter the others’ rooms, exposing secrets and pretenses alike and exacting retribution for slights real and perceived. Finally, the building is moved and the vignettes are tied together. The socio-critical interest of The Master Key is made immediately apparent through the building where it takes place. Designed by a Westerner during the Meiji period fervor for “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika), the building’s strict gender code was intended to help emancipate Japanese women, although thirty years later it has resulted in a prison house for the elderly. As the narrative proceeds, the residents are shown to be engaged in the solitary pursuit of their own illusions (gen’ei, giving the book its original Japanese title, which translates to “grand illusions”), dreams that collapse when revealed to the other occupants. Thus, one who has spent decades editing her dead husband’s academic manuscripts is revealed as a fraud when the manuscripts turn out to be gibberish. Another, a snoop who lives among piles of refuse and survives by eating fishbones, has her voyeuristic proclivities cut short when a fellow resident hurls a torch through her fanlight window, incinerating her. Yet another, who passes the years brooding over a brief affair with a foreign violinist, is made victim of a trick involving his purported reappearance in Japan. In all instances the women are trapped both physically by their inability to leave the building and psychologically by the knowledge of their potential exposure through the missing key. The grand illusions of the story are not limited to the apartment residents, though, as an additional plotline centers on a mother searching for her missing son, offspring of a relationship with an Occupation soldier. The introduction of the mixed-race child, who was kidnapped shortly before the soldier divorced the mother and returned to the United States, highlights the Occupation in the political and social background of The Master Key’s crimes. These crimes are facilitated by two of its influential policies, the first being the Shintō Directive (Shintō shirei) of 1945, which dismantled state Shintō and allowed a profusion of new religions to enter the landscape. A fictional incarnation of these new religions, the Three Spirit Faith (Sanreikyō), deploys a blend of Shintō and Buddhist myths to target the residents for conversion. When the novel’s criminal is revealed, she admits to using the master key to spy on the residents so that her brother (the priest) can use the information in his “miracles;” skeptics are singled out and either provide fodder for the miraculous events or are murdered outright. She remains to the end unrepentant, and her confession to the reader, revealing in its portrayal of vulnerabilities similar to the targeted neighbors, is not so much a religious apology as it is a defense of her own refusal to go quietly into the twilight of her years: You readers who have grown up in happy homes will not be able to understand the feelings of someone like me who, after living alone for so long, suddenly encounters a chance of escape from this solitude. You will not therefore understand that in such circumstances one is prepared to give up everything rather than lose that chance. (Togawa 2017, 178) The second policy relates to a more intimate side of the Occupation. This is revealed in the epilogue in Los Angeles where a retired Major Kraft, father of the missing boy the Japanese mother has spent years searching for, sits imperiously on his porch smoking a corn-cob 24

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pipe (in an obvious likeness to MacArthur) and ruminating on his time in Japan. Settling his gaze on their son, alive and well in the background, he reveals that he had wed the Japanese woman despite already being legally married, and so to avoid charges of polygamy upon his return to the US he divorced her, but not before concocting a kidnapping story and putting his son on a flight back with his American wife. Such a predicament, which would have been immediately recognizable to contemporary readers, presents Kraft as a postwar incarnation of Madame Butterfly’s B. F. Pinkerton. Kraft’s appearance in the novel sets up a challenge to the genre’s conventional path to narrative closure, as his use of Occupation-era extraterritoriality indicates the contingency of justice under the Occupation, when the very notion of law was bound up with SCAP. His actions find an implicit echo in the cavalier manipulation of Japanese law by the earlier Pinkerton, and the situations of both men can be contrasted with their respective Butterflies, abandoned and condemned either to death or a search that can never legally transcend the boundaries of Japan. Unlike his predecessor, though, any regrets Kraft displays are minimal: “Well, I suppose worse things went on during the Occupation,” he mused. “What the hell else could I do? I mean, my wife and I had lived apart so long … and then she suddenly arrives in Japan, and we start up all over. Besides, she was rich, and I had to think about my retirement. A major doesn’t get much of a pension, and anyway I didn’t want to stay in the army forever. I needed a bit of security for a change.” (Togawa 2017, 187) The expression of such sentiments would have been impossible during the Occupation itself, when the Civil Censorship Detachment worked assiduously to keep expressions of fraternization between Americans and Japanese out of print (Rubin 1985, 92). Kraft’s reasoning, though, brings into focus the volatility of the early postwar legal framework, and the legacy of the Occupation is critical in legitimizing his actions, which are backed by the full force of Occupation law. This backing is summed up by one of the characters, who in remembering the kidnapping recalls that “It was … strange that the Military Occupation authorities were completely silent about the whole matter” (Togawa 2017, 18). While Kraft’s legal unassailability frustrates the genre’s desire for accountability Togawa’s postwar Butterfly is forever stuck in limbo, denied even the knowledge of betrayal that might induce the sort of climactic self-destruction undertaken by her precursor, whose sacrifice figured constructively in both Western and Japanese imperial imaginations (Mostow 2006, 194). By shedding light on the predatory aspects of postwar religions vis-à-vis elderly women and the complicated legal and psychological ramifications of relations between Japanese women and the Occupation, The Master Key offers a commentary on postwar Japan whose critical insight belies its apolitical reception. The depiction of solitary aging, which would become more pronounced in later years, is here given early treatment by Togawa, and despite the text’s rather ambivalent nature on interracial mixing (the foreigners in the novel are either sterile or duplicitous, and the emotional wreckage of the liaisons linger with the Japanese women for years), her depiction of the intricacies of relationships between Japanese women and foreigners poses a subtle challenge to the official nationalist narratives that were perpetuated by both the US and Japan in the postwar period (Koshiro 2003, 64). This challenge is solidified by an allusion to the Madame Butterfly narrative that highlights

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the enduring arbitrary nature of justice while exposing the dependence the detective fiction narrative has on the possibility of its achievement.

Family matters in the “lost decade”: Miyabe Miyuki The postwar flowering of detective fiction tapered off in the early 1960s and was succeeded by a third wave in the late 1980s (Kasai 2017a, 291). This third wave coincides conveniently with a profusion of women writers in the broader genre of mystery fiction, one of the first of whom was Miyabe Miyuki (1960–). Miyabe began writing in the late 1980s and achieved notoriety with Kasha (1992, Fire Cart; translated as All She Was Worth*), a work that explores the deleterious side effects of the rampant consumerism of the asset bubble period. While much of Miyabe’s subsequent oeuvre falls within the detective fiction genre, she has worked in a variety of styles, and has been known to weave together several genres at once. What links them all, though, is a critical acumen, and despite Miyabe’s assertion to the contrary, social consciousness is an important facet of her work (Seaman 2004, 26). This cognizance is evident in R.P.G. (2001, translated as Shadow Family*), a work that examines relations within the Japanese family, particularly between fathers and daughters, at the end of the “lost decade” following the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s. Shadow Family focuses on the murder of a salaryman, Tokoroda Ryōsuke, and one of his lovers, and as the circumstances of his death are investigated by the police it comes to light that he had created a surrogate family on the internet that, although existing initially to provide support and advice about life matters online, eventually met in person. The surviving members are brought into police headquarters to be questioned, and most of the novel takes place in the investigation room in front of Tokoroda’s daughter Kazumi, who watches the proceedings through a one-way mirror. Before long the case is revealed to be one of patricide, and the investigation itself is exposed as a multi-layered role-playing game. Shadow Family reads in large part like a stage drama, a formal setup Miyabe has affirmed was intentional (Miyabe 2001, 303). As such, much of the novel conforms to dramatic elements: movement is limited to a single floor in a police station, and most of the psychological drama is produced through clever stage acting. Furthermore, there is a melodramatic undertone throughout, with the internet family symbolic of the ideal chased by families in a changing society. The ethical implications of constructing a substitute, virtual existence to compensate for familial absence is explored in detail, as are the personal and social deficiencies that serve as the impetus for such activity. These concerns, part of the search for moral certitude at the center of melodrama itself, are here traced to the decay of what Merry White has called the core of the Japanese family, the parent-child relationship (White 2002, 88). With the fracture of Japanese family life in the decade after the bubble recognized as causing the sense of unfulfillment in Shadow Family, the internet family’s behavior is seen as an attempt to fill the void by restoring what they see as the customary function of their role. The result is an idealized manifestation of a role whose fulfilment would be impossible in actuality. Thus, for example, the father can connect candidly with his daughter and give advice, the mother is able to view a dream house together with a loving husband, the siblings are able to get along. These roles are credited by some of the members with providing more fulfilment than anything reality could offer:

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“We’re all lonely. We can’t get people in real life to understand who we really are, and we ourselves lose sight of who we really are, and we feel alone. We want to make a connection. That’s why you came to ‘Dad,’ looking for what your real-life dad couldn’t give you.” (Miyabe 2005, 105) The solving of the murder in Shadow Family is linked to the psychological puzzle presented by the online family’s behavior, which is venomously explained by Tokoroda’s real-life daughter as an extension of her father’s chronic infidelity. This introduces the importance of the father-daughter relationship, and it is on an understanding (or rather a misunderstanding) of this relationship that the novel’s crime and solution hinge. Miyabe explores the connection from both sides: first, she has several detectives attempt to explain Tokoroda’s motives through their own personal anecdotes, a classic tactic of detective fiction that positions the police as the repository of collective opinion, or doxa (Žižek 1991, 57). Given in solidarity as a justification for his behavior, this doxa presents a false solution predicated upon a social understanding of the fading role of the father figure: “My daughter’s treated me like a pain in the neck ever since she was ten. When she was still in grade school, I’d come home sometimes and she’d say, ‘Daddy, are you going to spend the night here?’ You’d have thought she wanted me to pay up my bill.” Chikako and Tokunaga laughed. Tokunaga said, “Captain Shimojima was saying the same thing about his kid.” (Miyabe 2005, 40) The ideology of the beleaguered father here acts as a rebus, and the detectives’ inability to transcend a dogmatic understanding of their own patriarchal positions prevents them from interpreting the murder effectively. It is only when Miyabe has them invert the rebus to consider it from the point of view of the daughter, rereading the lighthearted complaints from the father to explain how the relationship could be not only a source of misery for him but for the daughter as well, that the extinction of the parent-child bond as a catalyst for murder is posited: Kazumi could never have confronted her father with her anger. If she did, he’d only think she was caving in. That’s what he was after, all along. “See there? You’re Daddy’s girl after all, aren’t you? You don’t like me spending time with any other little girl, do you? You’re mine and you’ll do as I say, won’t you? There, now, that’s a good girl. As long as you see how it is.” That’s the whole reason he did it, just so he could say those words to Kazumi someday. […] Only Kazumi—his own child—had had the nerve to reject that pattern and push him away. As any other perfectly normal adolescent child would do. But Ryōsuke Tokoroda wasn’t having any of that. He decided to tame his daughter, the same way he’d tamed his wife. And he picked the meanest way possible to put her in her place. (Miyabe 2005, 176)

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While Shadow Family for the most part concentrates on the state of family life in Japan, it also renders judgment on consumerism, a familiar foe treated earlier in All She Was Worth. Here the two are related, as Tokoroda’s materialism is directly tied to his death: his liberal spending on himself, in conjunction with both online family and extramarital affairs, is mirrored by his miserly inclinations toward his real family. Both are experienced by his daughter, whose evolution from paragon of virtue to murderer is tied to his profligacy. With melodrama as Miyabe’s critical lens there is no middle ground in Shadow Family, either in morality or essentialism: Tokoroda’s self-centered materialism ensures his slide from success to failure, much as victimhood swings his daughter from bystander to murderer. Through Shadow Family Miyabe fashions detective fiction and melodrama into a frame to view Japanese family life in distress. As she surveys a society adrift in a post-bubble world, she focuses on the characters’ attempts to recapture a vanished moral system, the increasing violence of which echoes literary developments more than a century earlier with the initial appearance of melodrama in Meiji Japan. Tokoroda’s elaborate creation of a replacement family to restore his conventional authority as father shows the difficulty in recapturing such a system, although it maintains a persistent ideological allure (White 2002, 12). It is the questioning of this ideology that the text briefly brings to the surface, although the inquiry is shelved when the police restore the status quo by bringing the wayward daughter to justice.

Minato Kanae and “Iyamisu” Shadow Family’s integration of melodrama into its narrative framework illustrates the malleability of the detective fiction form but also its limits, as Miyabe’s interrogation of issues of consumerism and a weakening paternal authority conflict with the traditional understanding of crime and resolution the genre relies on. In fact, an existential look into the same criminality and the deepening family crisis devoid of the customary sanguine conclusions would necessitate the creation of a new genre. And so it has: iyamisu (a portmanteau of “iya” disagreeable or unpleasant and “misuteri-” or mystery) are described as leaving a range of negative emotions with the reader after they have finished. At its forefront is Minato Kanae (1973–), who following her debut in 2008 with Kokuhaku (Confessions*) has been credited with simultaneously establishing and reigning over the category.2 Iyamisu share the basic structure of mystery fiction (the double movement of the text), and much of their novelty lies in a reinterpretation of themes considered characteristic of 20th-century women’s writing such as education and the relationship between mothers and daughters. Minato has found particularly fertile ground in both issues, and they figure heavily in Shokuzai (2009, Atonement; translated as Penance*), Minato’s third novel, although she also manages to incorporate a mélange of problems confronting 21st-century Japan that includes the division between city and country, class consciousness, a declining birth rate, and the pursuit of normalcy and success (Yamazaki 2018). The plot of Penance revolves around four small-town girls and a transfer student from Tokyo, Emiri (an approximation of “Emily”). Emiri comes to the town because her father is prominent in a company that built a factory there, and during the annual Obon festival she is raped and murdered. The murderer’s face is seen by the four girls, none of whom are able (or willing) to help identify him, and before returning to Tokyo the slain girl’s mother Asako

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blames them for the death, casting an injunction on them that will linger long after she has gone: “I will never forgive you, unless you find the murderer before the statute of limitations is up. If you can’t do that, then atone for what you’ve done, in a way I’ll accept. If you don’t do either one, I’m telling you here and now—I will have revenge on each and every one of you.” (Minato 2017, 71) The bulk of the novel takes place fifteen years later where, with the statute set to expire, the girls report to the mother on their progress. The mother’s malediction, which positions her as a twisted maternal surrogate, dominates the lives of the girls for fifteen years by branding them as killers, and their adoption of this mantle causes them to become so through a process described by Slavoj Žižek as the “transference of guilt” (Žižek 1991, 73). The first girl to report, Sae, becomes convinced that Emiri was murdered because she was the most developed among them, and so to avoid a similar fate, endeavors to remain a child forever: “When I learned that periods can start, and stop, because of psychological reasons, it made sense. If I become an adult I’ll get killed, I thought. If my periods start, I’ll get murdered” (Minato 2017, 24; italics in original). Pressured by her company to marry she relents, revealing herself as a “defective doll” to her newlywed husband. Against her expectations he is elated, however, and produces a doll he had stolen from her as a child, complete with matching wardrobe. The shock triggers her first menstruation, causing her to see him as the murderer and kill him. The second girl, Maki, becomes an elementary school teacher to save children, getting her chance when a fanatic enters her school one day and attacks the students. She manages to kick him into a pool where he drowns, an action that puts her in the crosshairs of the media, who depict her as a cold-blooded killer. Akiko, the third to report, believes that the murder was the result of her reaching beyond her station to befriend the urban Emiri. She views this as a violation of a warning from her grandfather, a rusticism of status consciousness that undergirds much of the girls’ experience in the novel: “You shouldn’t think that everyone’s equal. Because some people are given different things from the time they’re born. The poor shouldn’t try to act like the rich. A stupid person shouldn’t try to act like he’s a scholar. A poor person should find happiness in frugality, and a stupid person do his best with what he’s capable of. Seek something above your station and it will only lead to sorrow.” (Minato 2017, 99) Raised in a multigenerational rural household, she is considered useless in the system of primogeniture and perennially second to her brother whom she worships; that is, until catching him sexually molesting his daughter-in-law triggers an image of the murdered girl, and she strangles him. Finally, there is the farm girl Yuka, the recipient of her mother’s continuous lamentations for not having produced a son, who is ignored in favor of her asthmatic sister. After a miscarriage, though, the sister is unable to bear children, and Yuka has an affair with her brother-in-law resulting in a pregnancy. While her mother is shocked, her father is relieved to learn it is a boy: “But this means we have an heir now,” he says, after which Yuka relates that her mother “started to be more upbeat about the situation, taking a pregnancy Chapter 2: Writing Within and Beyond Genre

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belly band, and me, to the local shrine to be blessed, and accompanying me to my doctor’s appointments…” (Minato 2017, 164). Unfortunately, the brother-in-law tries to hush her up, and in a physical scuffle she pushes him down a stairwell to his death. In a series of expiations these accounts are related to the dead girl’s mother whose malice is revealed to stem from her own efforts to court normality and present a picture of successful family life. She relates her experience as common: she left Tokyo for her husband’s career, withdrawing her daughter from the promising escalator system (of which she herself is a product) for what she assumed would be a temporary assignment in a rural town. Her pressured decision to follow the husband is echoed by most of the relocated wives, whose own upward mobility is tied to their husband’s success: And then came the transfer to that rural town. My parents urged me to stay with Emiri back in Tokyo. My husband wasn’t opposed to the idea, but I decided we should go with him. This was a critical period in my husband’s career … and I wanted to do what I could to support him. (Minato 2017, 245) Her ideal of a dutiful wife entails more than just following her husband, however, and leads eventually to the death of her daughter. Emiri is not her husband’s child, but knowing her husband’s sterility would prevent him from becoming company president, she arranges to raise her daughter (the result of a prior relationship) as his; the ruse is so successful that the daughter is killed by the biological father in vengeance for a decade-old grievance (and in ignorance of their true relationship). With the girls as with the mother, success in Penance is defined through marriage, and the fact that the men prove collectively to be fanatics, pedophiles, perverts, sterile, and murderers is key in Minato’s efforts to highlight the contradictions of this dependence on male-centered culture. Regardless of efficacy, such an attempt aligns Penance with much postwar women’s writing (Lippit 1991, xxiv). As the ideology of a successful life becomes more pervasive in inverse proportion to its attainability, the breakdown of the nuclear family at its most basic level is replicated in the larger network of social relations. Self-created epistemological boundaries prevent the formation of any common ground between subjects, most notably the four girls and the mother, as all cycle from criminal to victim and back. This broken connection begins with the murdered girl, who is considered by the survivors almost as a plague bacillus, her appearance in the town a catalyst for the beginning of their misery. In fact, it is only after fifteen years have elapsed that the girls finally begin to process the violent origin of their social breakdowns: “Let’s pray for Emiri. Why didn’t we realize that back then? The one thing we should have done the most?” (Minato 2017, 227). Paralleling this path in the background of the text is the filicidal father, who rationalizes his crime through his own subjective lens of victimhood. This final extirpation of human bonds, along with the collapse of the criminal-victim distinction and the distorted psychology of crime, is integral to Minato’s use of the iyamisu form. At the core of Penance (that is, the penance) is this blurring of the very understanding of crime which reveals the essential framework for iyamisu. The legal system as arbitrator is replaced by an unstable network of interpersonal relations, and in the characters’ attempts to satisfy the ultimatum legality is the least of their concerns. The extralegal nature of the resolution and the emphasis on the contradictory importance of intersubjectivity in social success is a result of Minato’s look into the characters’ psychology that, not coincidentally, mirrors a larger trend in mystery fiction globally, where Jessica Mann has noted that “in an 30

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age of do-it-yourself psychology, the dissection of deviant motive has become more and more popular” (Mann 1981, 234). Simply put, the scope of Minato’s investigation and the magnitude of the breakdown of the social façade is rooted in the realities of the 21st century, realities for which Minato has employed a new form, similarly rooted, to investigate. As for the results, they are as inconclusive as the genre’s namesake would imply, for after learning of the carnage resulting from her imprecation Asako can only ask rhetorically: “I wonder if you have it in your hearts to forgive me. And whether you are freed now from the curse that’s held you in its spell for so many years” (Minato 2017, 221).

Conclusion Penance’s relationship to contemporary social conditions is mirrored by each of the other works discussed above. All are a result of the author’s critical gaze directed toward Japanese culture at a specific moment in time, whether concerning prewar attitudes over women and foreign nationals, postwar aging and unresolved sentiment from the Occupation, the breakdown of the family in the decade of the 1990s or its seeming collapse in the 21st century. These inquiries elucidate (however briefly) the underlying problematic of each text as a product of modern Japan, uncovering its ideological limits while either reinforcing or rejecting the genre’s traditionalist nature. As outcomes of the writer’s negotiation with the genre the works have much in common, of course, and women writers have made extremely productive use of the basic structure of the mystery fiction genre for their socio-critical inquiries (Seaman 2004, 145). There remains much research to be done before taking the questions posed by each text and venturing into generalities, but the historical and continuing ways in which women writers have made use of mystery fiction is a testament not only to the enduring utility of the form, but to those women who use it.

Notes 1

The building is based on the Otsuka Women’s Apartments in Tokyo, where Togawa herself had lived. While Minato has been called the queen of iyamisu the crown is in fact revolving, and she shares court with fellow writers Mari Yukiko and Akiyoshi Rikako (Yamazaki 2018). 2

References Althusser, L. & Balibar, É. (1997). Reading Capital. London: Verso. Hori, K. (2014). Nihon misuterī shōsetsushi: Kuroiwa Ruikō kara Matsumoto Seichō e [A history of Japanese mystery fiction: From Kuroiwa Ruikō to Matsumoto Seichō]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. Kasai, K. (2017a). Tantei shōsetsuron I: Hanran no keishiki [Theory of detective fiction I: The form of the flood]. Tokyo: Sōgensha. ———. (2017b). Tantei shōsetsuron II: Kokū no rasen [Theory of detective fiction II: The empty spiral]. Tokyo: Sōgensha. Kawana, S. (2008). Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Komori, K. (2007). Tantei shōsetsu no ronrigaku: Rasseru ronrigaku to Kuīn, Kasai Kiyoshi, Nishio Isshin no tantei shōsetsu [The logic of detective fiction: Russellian logic and the detective fiction of Queen, Kasai Kiyoshi, and Nishio Isshin]. Tokyo: Nan’undō.

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Koshiro, Y. (2003). Race as International Identity? “Miscegenation” in the U.S. Occupation of Japan and Beyond. American Studies 48(1): 61–77. Lippit, N.M. & Selden, K.I. (eds.). (1991). Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Macherey, P. (2006). A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge. Mann, J. (1981). Deadlier than the Male: Why are Respectable English Women so Good at Murder? New York, NY: Macmillan. Marran, C.L. (2007). Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Minato, K. (2012). Shokuzai [Penance]. Tokyo: Futabasha. ———. (2017). Penance. (P. Gabriel, trans.). New York, NY: Mulholland Books. Miyabe, M. (2001). R.P.G. Tokyo: Shūeisha. ———. (2005). Shadow Family. (J.W. Carpenter, trans.). Tokyo: Kōdansha. Miyano, M. (2009). Miyano Murako tantei shōsetsusen I [Selected Detective Fiction of Miyano Murako I]. Tokyo: Ronsōsha. Mostow, J. (2006). Iron Butterfly: Cio-Cio-San and Japanese Imperialism. In J. Wisenthal et al. (eds.), A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rubin, J. (1985). From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation. Journal of Japanese Studies 11(1): 71–103. Scaggs, J. (2005). Crime Fiction. New York, NY: Routledge. Seaman, A. C. (2004). Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Tanaka, Y. (1987). To Live and To Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers 1913–1938. Seattle: The Seal Press. Togawa, M. (1998). Ōinaru gen’ei [Grand Illusions]. Nihon Suiri Sakka Kyōkai (ed.). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2017). The Master Key. (S. Grove, trans.). London: Pushkin Vertigo. White, M.I. (2002). Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yamazaki, S. (2018). Jūshūnen, hajime no “kanzume” mo: Minato Kanaesan shūtaisei no shōsetsu [Minato Kanae’s culminating novel results in first writerly confinement of ten-year Career]. Asahi Shimbun, July 9, https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASL754H12L75PTFC00B.html. Yokoi, T. (ed.). (2011). Ōkura Teruko tantei shōsetsusen [Selected detective fiction of Ōkura Teruko]. Tokyo: Ronsōsha. Žižek, S. (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Chapter 3 Feminist “Failed” Reproductive Futures in Speculative Fiction: Ōhara Mariko, Murata Sayaka, and Ueda Sayuri Kazue Harada  

The chapter concerns the way reproductive futures are imagined in speculative fiction by three Japanese female authors: Ōhara Mariko, Murata Sayaka, and Ueda Sayuri. Their imaginings counter ideologies of reproductive futurism, yet the narrative techniques they use—a circularity of the past, endless repetitions of the present moment, or the absence of a future for humanity—can point to the “failure” of the past and the present moment—failure as a denial of a linear progression of time with a singular goal-oriented success. This failure, however, is constructive in generating a meaningful understanding of the past and ongoing issues of reproduction. Ironically, the failure may provide alternative ways to engage in the future when trauma, loss, and demise are reconnected to human, especially women’s, struggles and the environment. Therefore, understanding the failure in their stories provides an alternative way to understanding feminist futurity.

Introduction The science fiction, or SF (esu-efu), that emerged in Japan in the early postwar era was predominantly influenced by Anglo-American and European works. While Japanese authors were drawn to Western aspects of the literary genre of science fiction and sought to integrate its narrative techniques into their works, there were many debates about and attempts to move away from imported models in an effort to develop a distinctively Japanese SF genre. Thus, SF has evolved in Japan as a discursive genre of imaginative fiction that pushes the boundaries of other genres. The discursiveness of the SF genre, in general, in which inclusive and constantly changing multifold definitions and media mix, allowed women writers and artists to question the boundaries of the genre and expand it to suit their own creative speculative styles and agendas. The genre opened the door to greater experimentation in women’s writing, which in turn encouraged women to push their way into science fiction and speculative fiction, both in their prose fiction and shōjo manga (girls’ comics). Whereas

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this experimentation has led to many exciting innovations, such as questioning of the physical limitations of the body and of gender determination, in this chapter I will consider the way women writers of SF have challenged narratives of futures by looking at three different kinds of “failure”: repetitive time, circularity, and a future without humans. I will also discuss the idea of queer futurity in Ueda’s novels, how her works contest the notion of reproductive futurism that reinforces Japan’s pro-natal policy. Many recent feminist and queer scholars have contested narratives of futures that are linear progressions of time with a singular goal-oriented outcome of success. Instead, they champion narratives that provide various descriptions of time, particularly of the disruption of a linear continuity of present and past. The speculative fiction of Ōhara Mariko, Murata Sayaka, and Ueda Sayuri are great examples of how the genre can allow readers to rethink the narratives of futures in relation to present and past. These three authors not only explore the possibilities of the futures, they imagine futures as circularities of the past, endless repetitions of the present moment, or as having no future for humanity. The imagined futures in these authors’ texts offer insights into social realities of the past and the historical moment concerning issues of reproduction in contemporary Japan. Their narrative texts work against notions of linearity, progress, and conventional understandings of reproductive time. As literary critic Sam McBean (2014) argues in her analysis of Marge Piercy’s (1976) Woman on the Edge of Time, “a feminist futurity might require considering how the incomplete, the unfinished or even the ‘failures’ of the past do not threaten the future, but open up unforeseen possibilities” (46). Failure can generate productive discussions of the present and past and new ways to think about the future.1 Thus, these three authors’ imagined reproductive futures, when reconnecting to trauma, loss, and failure of the present and past, open their narratives to new possibilities. I choose the term “speculative fiction” for these female authors’ texts because it counters dominant narratives of futures to decolonize the genre of science fiction, as recent feminist and queer scholars invoke.2 This chapter also focuses on imagining reproductive futures that counter ideologies of reproductive futurism (the belief that having children will ensure the future),3 offer the possibility of alternative reproductive futures, and point to the limitations of reproductive measures that are prescribed in state intervention and neoliberal policies. Thus, I will illustrate how their stories offer resistance to the future-oriented, heteronormative, reproductive family systems central to the Japanese government policies intended to raise current birth rates to ensure the continuity of the nation. I explore in particular the ways these three Japanese speculative fiction writers provide alternative reproductive futurities by disrupting the simple continuity of the present. Ōhara’s novel Hybrid Child not only challenges traditional reproductive methods and time but also revisits trauma caused by familial roles through the repetitive cycles of mother-daughter dyads. The circularity of Murata’s Dwindling World provides insights on coerced and non-affective reproductive systems. Ueda’s The Ocean Chronicle series illustrates a futurity without humans that has been caused by impending natural disasters.

Ōhara Mariko: Endless repetitions and trauma and violence Ōhara Mariko (1959–) is considered one of the forerunners in Japan of cyberpunk fiction (a subgenre of science fiction that is often set in a dystopic future and involves human hybridity

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and high technology).4 She established her position among science fiction writers and readers when she won several important awards during the 1980s and 1990s, most notably the award for the Best Science Fiction in 1994, bestowed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan (SFWJ).5 Ōhara’s novel Haiburido chairudo (1990, Hybrid Child*) also won the Seiun Award in 1991, an award voted on by the fans of the Nihon SF taikai (Japan Science Fiction Convention).6 Hybrid Child and her other works bear the trace of Ōhara’s interest in psychoanalysis, specifically in challenging established psychoanalytic schools of thought. She rereads psychoanalysis by attempting, through her own feminist approach, to defamiliarize, decolonize, and play with phallogocentric versions. The repetitive performance of gendered familial roles, mother and daughter, though cyborgs in Hybrid Child challenges the normative discourse of reproductive futurities. Paradoxically, the contested (nurturing and destructive) feminized versions of cyborg bodies are employed to illustrate the perpetual trauma of violence played out in the social system and in everyday life. The cycles of the mother-daughter symbiosis are particularly manifested as violence and constantly illustrate the negative existence of the daughter by the mother because of an asymmetrical power relationship imposed by the male imaginary. Lucy Irigaray’s notion of the “female” imaginary is a critique of the “male” imaginary used by Sigmund Freud and his followers in their theory of a child’s psychic development that uses the son (male) as a prototype based on the heterosexual matrix (Withford 1991, 71–78).7 Irigaray argues that Freud’s and Jacque Lacan’s theories provide no clear identification of the female subject. Ōhara’s novel highlights the repetition of the mother-daughter symbiotic relationship, that both a mother and a daughter lack individual subjectivity (the self and the other) and become indistinguishable. In the novel, the mother-daughter symbiosis is a satirical version of the male imaginary played out by hyperbolic gender performance. The exaggerated nature of this performance also accords to Judith Butler’s notion of the constructedness of gender (1993, 181). Butler argues that the repetition of gendered signs through performance “can reveal the hyperbolic status of the norm itself, [and] indeed, can become the cultural sign by which that cultural imperative might become legible.” 8 Ōhara’s works mock the mother-daughter symbiosis in the male imaginary, as well as the maternal icon, and interrupt the linearity of time. In doing so, her use of interruptions and repetitions amplifies what Julia Kristeva describes in “Women’s Time” (1981) that a woman as a symbol interrupts the linearity of time in two ways—“repetition” by reproductive cycles and “eternity” by religious icons. In Ōhara’s Hybrid Child, several different versions of mother-daughter conflicts are played out repetitively. Some seem to conform to the psychoanalytic theory of a symbiotic motherdaughter identity, whereas in others the excessive performance of maternity play with the mother-daughter relationship. The repetition of excessive performance is partly mocking an ahistorical aspect of the mother-daughter symbiosis. None of the mother-daughter pairings are created by reproduction in the heterosexual family. They are copies or imitations of the family enhanced by technology, such as genetic engineering. Thus, these dyads mock the generational continuity of reproduction. Translator Jodie Beck (2015) explains her notion of “maternal fascism” as a key theme of Hybrid Child by emphasizing that the mother’s control and care play out together, especially “giving birth to autonomous life forms” while “maternal care and military operations come to work together, gradually becoming inextricably entangled” (7). Ōhara (1995) stated, “I believe that ‘maternity’ has a mythical aspect of both nurturing all and controlling them Chapter 3: Feminist “Failed” Reproductive Futures in Speculative Fiction

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destructively” (189). Beck (2015) stresses Ōhara’s point in arguing that maternal fascism illustrates the paradox that maternal control and care of the daughter creates a “victim and agent of terror” as well as “container and contained” (7, 9–12). This paradox is played out by the mother-daughter symbiosis, as reflecting Luce Irigaray’s notion mentioned above. The paradox presented by the mother-daughter symbiosis, in fact, highlights the trauma of being categorized as a woman who is unable to move away from a mother figure. As feminist historian Ayako Kano (2010) notes “the basis of social policy in modern Japan is the assumption that all women are potential wives and mothers (and that all men are potential breadwinners and heads of household)” (8). In other words, the assumption that all women—mothers—are reproductive has been pervasive in social policy. The endless cycles of the mother-daughter symbiosis are an ironic version of the socially imposed female images. Hybrid Child is a sprawling narrative that dips backward and forward in time, telling the story of Jonah, a girl who, after being killed by her mother, becomes a haunting spirit attached to an AI-controlled house. Jonah’s form reappears when a renegade cyborg once known as Sample B #3, who has sought shelter in the house, consumes her corpse. We can consider three major phases of the character Jonah’s simulacra in the mother-daughter relationship in Hybrid Child. The three cycles exemplify perpetual trauma caused by being categorized as a woman/mother, and trauma manifests as violence toward the oppressed family role and the self. First, there is the seven-year-old, human girl, Jonah. In this phase, the daughter exists as a clone of the mother and is killed by the mother. Second, there is Consciousness Jonah (dead Jonah), who assumes the historical memory of Jonah from the first phase. This voice is in dialogue with the shape-shifting cyborg weapon Sample B #3 who looks like Jonah. Consciousness Jonah’s ambivalent feelings toward Sample B #3’s Jonah come from the motherdaughter symbiosis that Consciousness Jonah inherited and her traumatic memory that was carried over to Consciousness Jonah. Third is Hybrid Jonah. In this phase, we have a hybrid of Sample B #3 and Jonah that is created when Sample B #3 ingests the corpse of Jonah and Consciousness Jonah in the second phase. This Hybrid Jonah creates a giant dragon cosmos mother into which Jonah’s brain cells and memory are implanted. Three different phases of mother-daughter relationships are simulated through excessive maternal signs and performance. For example, in the first phase, the seven-year-old girl Jonah and her mother simulate their roles as a daughter and a mother. In an interview, Ōhara noted that we see in this performance two hyperbolic aspects of maternity: either extreme nurturing or extreme authority that manifests in destructiveness (1995, 188–90). Through Jonah’s flashback, Jonah’s mother attempts to “play” the maternal role, going through the motions of “feeding” her daughter Jonah. The act of “feeding” is normally a nurturing aspect of the maternal role, while “being fed” (or eating) is part of the daughter’s role. The mother is so fixated on the act of “feeding” or “eating” that she harms her daughter, and she herself has an extreme eating disorder that fluctuates between bulimic and anorexic periods. During the bulimic period, the mother forces Jonah to eat a great deal of food. When Jonah does not eat, the mother punishes her by asking her to stand in front of the mirror, where the mother pulls savagely at the girl’s face. She sees in Jonah her own mirror image and is jealous of a youth and beauty that she no longer has (Ōhara 1990, 26, 28–30). The mother has difficulty in completely separating herself from Jonah, as she sees her younger self reflected in her daughter. According to Jean Baudrillard (1994), “the mirror stage is abolished in cloning, or rather it is parodied therein in a monstrous fashion” (97). The image of the mother becomes a prison for the daughter, as the mother-daughter symbiosis is an imperative concept in the 36

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male imaginary. Nonetheless, in this cycle, the mother-daughter symbiosis is modified by cloning and the mother’s contradictory performance: excessive nurturing and simultaneous destructiveness mock their symbiosis. In the third phase, the relationship between Jonah and her mother is revived through role reversal performances. Hybrid Jonah then gives birth to a giant dragonfly creature called dragon cosmos that contains the mother’s memory—in other words, Hybrid Jonah’s dragon cosmos offspring is an imitation of the mother (Ōhara 2018, 85, 161).9 Hybrid Jonah performs the role of nurturing mother and feeds the giant dragon cosmos. The dragon cosmos assumes the role of daughter and grows into a grotesque form with a voracious appetite. Hybrid Jonah eventually tires of feeding the dragon cosmos, kills her, and slowly consumes pieces of her flesh (Ōhara 2018, 163–67). Hybrid Jonah’s violent act may stop the perpetual cycles of traumatic experience caused by the mother. The role reversal initially confuses the identities of the mother and the daughter (Kamikawa 1995, 103).10 However, as both cyborg mother and cyborg daughter perform the roles of “feeding” and “being fed” repeatedly, the repetition of their performance can expose the artificiality of their familial roles and of the symbiotic identity, insofar as they all return to the mother. Thus, the performance shows the entrapment of women’s cycles and the repetitions of self-destruction. Since the sign “feeding” or “eating” is repeatedly used for the playing of the motherdaughter roles here, the action of “eating the dragon cosmos mother (reconstituted in the role of the daughter)” creates an alternative form of the mother-daughter symbiosis in the feminized family space (without the father figure). “Eating the mother’s flesh” (cannibalism) in the text connotes two paradoxical meanings. First, it displaces an authoritative figure—the phallic mother. Japanese literary scholar Tomoko Aoyama posits that “texts that have cannibalism as a theme involve … a notion of ‘displacement’” (Aoyama 2008, 95). The daughter (Hybrid Jonah) gains power and becomes independent as an autonomous subject.11 Second, cannibalism can emphasize the daughter’s affection for the mother and the mother-daughter affinity. The slow process of eating her flesh is an act of homage; the complete absorption of the mother is also the act of her acceptance of the mother. After consuming the mother’s flesh, Hybrid Jonah can no longer maintain the body of a seven-year-old girl; she begins to grow (Ōhara 2018, 171). The daughter will become the mother no matter what, and hence, the mother-daughter symbiosis will never end. Nonetheless, by ingesting the mother, Hybrid Jonah can finally end the conflict with her and the perpetual trauma and violence, and their reconciliation establishes her subjectivity while allowing her to embrace the mother’s qualities. Hybrid Jonah might return to the mother; the mother-daughter symbiosis is like the food chain cycle, which never ends. The cycles of this mother-daughter symbiosis satirize the male imaginary that is a violence preserved in the form of an ahistorical image of woman. The perpetual violence is acted out by the mother on the daughter who is traumatized over and over. The repetitions of the mother-daughter dyads expose a heterosexual family space confined to the mother and the daughter. The never-ending cycles seem to emphasize the entrapment of woman and “fail” to show the progression of time, yet the mocking process of reproducing the violent mother-daughter continuum depict the trauma that women perpetually carry as a result of that entrapment.

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Murata Sayaka: Circularity and return to original sins Murata Sayaka (1979–), winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, has consistently written about alternative reproductive futures. Her short story “Satsujin shussan” (2014, Birth Murder) received the 2014 Special Award for a Counter Measure to the Low Birth Rate by The Japanese Association for Gender Science Fiction and Fantasy.12 The story depicts the childbirth system in a near-future world where, to solve the problem of low birth rate, umibito (child-bearers) must give birth to ten children and then are allowed to kill one person. In this world, both men and women are able to become child-bearers. Similarly, Murata’s novel Shōmetsu sekai (2015, Dwindling World) presents worlds that are sexually sanitized yet propagative through the use of reproductive technology.13 In Dwindling World, artificial insemination, IVF, and artificial womb technology are commonplace and are used to create another kind of reproductive futurism. Eden, located in Chiba Prefecture, is portrayed as the ideal reproductive city, where everyone participates in reproductive efforts for the future of children—the kodomo-chan. Although the shared parenting system in which all adults raise all children is not necessarily new in human society, it is different in that all adults can equally become “mothers” who raise all children (the kodomo-chan). Biological relations and family lineage between mothers and kodomo-chan in Eden are insignificant, since conception is conducted by random selections of sperms and eggs and performed by artificial insemination or IVF technology. All kodomo-chan are raised together from birth at a collective childcare center. This reproductive system creates a new form of family between all adults and kodomo-chan that provides a solution to low birth rates and creates a seemingly egalitarian society that erases not only the heterosexual family system but also individual differences among adults and children (Murata 2015, 234). However, the protagonist, Amane, struggles throughout the story with the homogenized and systematic nature of the reproductive system. In the end, Amane subverts the Eden method by having sexual intercourse with a male kodomo-chan. The ending suggests the “failure” of this reproductive family structure and a possible return to a heterosexual reproductive system. The hinted return of heterosexuality can be read as a critique of the persistence of the past and a potential opening up of “unforeseen possibilities” as a feminist futurity. This section will examine how the novel presents the Eden philosophy, satirizes coercive family ideologies through the changes in the protagonist, Amane, and highlights Eden as a nonaffective, homogenized, reproductive society. The Eden family philosophy illustrates a reproductive family system (conception, pregnancy, childbirth) that is strictly controlled by computer. The novel’s presentation of Eden’s ideology invokes evolutionary thought: it offers the fittest reproductive system for a human species. The quotation below from the first-day orientation seminar for those arriving in Eden illustrates its familial philosophy: Many research papers prove that “the kazoku [family] system” is not a suitable breeding [hanshoku suru] system for highly intelligent animals. In “Eden,” we all are not only a child of the “human” species [hito] but also a “mother” of the species. It’s like a love-filled world before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. The center will provide food [esa] and shelter [su] for raising “human” children.

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[…] There are two duties for an adult in “Eden.” Once an individual receives their postcard, their first duty is to physically contribute to fertilization and procreation regardless of age and sex. The second duty is to give emotional support for childrearing. To be precise, all adults must become the ones who give “a shower of affection.” (Murata 2015, 184) The language suggests the focus of the ideology is “breeding” (hanshoku suru)—reproduction of the human species. The novel plays with the idea of innocence (ignorance) in Eden by using IVF technology as a method of maintaining sexual innocence and giving a miraculous birth that is possible prior to original sin. The description of the Eden philosophy above is not emotive, although the philosophy promotes emotional support and affection to kodomochan. The first duty functions as a conscription system of child-bearers. Anyone who receives a postcard must participate in the process of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. Eden’s kinship system also denies the individual child’s biological identity and biological relations between parents and children. The seemingly equal and loving communal society is based on dogma that erases individual identity and familial differences—leaving only the motherchild dyad. The equal opportunity for conception and love ironically cultivate homogeneity and minimize diversification despite mixing biogenetic pools among the people in Eden. The seemingly equal reproductive system produces similarly-minded people and behaviors and, thus, removes individualized needs and beliefs because the system discourages emotional attachment to an individual. The irony of an egalitarian society that promotes the erasure of difference creates a sense of uncanniness in the world of Eden. Eden is an emotionally sanitized place because an emotional attachment to a particular individual, especially a child, is not encouraged, as we can see from the depictions of Amane’s struggle to adapt to Eden’s homogenous family system, with its production of likeminded people. The emotional responses of Eden’s people seem identical. For example, after her miscarriage, Amane does not get the emotional support that she needs when she wants to take a moment to process the loss of her baby. Instead, Amane feels that the doctors and nurses have nonchalant attitudes toward her miscarriage. A doctor tells Amane: “Miscarriage happens quite often during the first trimester. We manage all the data by the computer, including miscarriage. So please don’t worry about it. Take care.” The doctor talked as if s/he knew this would be a part of calculations, and thus, I could forget about it. I wanted to scream, I have lost my child, not a child of the human species. But I held in my emotion. My surgical procedure [dilation and curettage, D&C] ended quickly. The doctors’ and the nurses’ attitudes toward miscarriage left me extremely bitter. As if they wanted to say, “it will be alright because others will bear a child,” instead of thinking about losing a child. The nurse said, “Thank you for your hard work. I wish you the best for the next fertilization.”

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I tried to contain my anger—I wanted to fiercely grab the nurse who gave a bright smile when I tried to leave the ward. (Murata 2015, 198; emphasis added) The doctor does not explain the cause of her miscarriage. Nor is Amane allowed any room for mourning her loss. The computer manages all of the data for reproduction, and thus, a miscarriage is a calculated error. Later, Amane’s husband, Saku, gives birth to a child, who was immediately sent to the collective center. Eventually Amane adapts to the Eden system and remains resigned to it until, just as the story ends, she violates Eden’s principals by having sexual intercourse directly with one of the male kodomo-chan. Amane’s final actions suggest a return to original sin and heterosexual relations. Her sexual intercourse implies the breakdown of Eden’s family equilibrium, although it is unclear whether or not their act is incest or child abuse. The depiction of Amane and the male kodomo-chan satirizes the Garden of Eden and sexual innocence. Amane, as Eve, seduces the innocent male kodomo-chan, as Adam. She asks him while touching his small penis: “What would you do if I asked you to put this into the ‘okāsan’s’ [mother’s] body?” … The ‘kodomo-chan’ gets a puzzled look, but soon after he beams with an innocent smile that shows his teeth. “Sure, I get it. Yeah, we all were originally in the ‘okāsan’s’ body, weren’t we?” The naked, smiling ‘kodomo-chan’ looks like the very existence of Eden’s Adam whom I’ve read about in an illustrated book… We both are naked and are not embarrassed by our nakedness at all. On top of the white sheet, I tried to create sexual intercourse. Creation is the only way. It is because I’ve forgotten the previous way of coitus, which has disappeared from the inside of my body. (Murata 2015, 249–50; emphasis in original) While the male kodomo-chan’s innocence is stressed here, also striking is that Amane has forgotten how to have sex. Amane explains that her coitus with the kodomo-chan is not for sexual pleasure but for “a sense of relief ” (andokan) (Murata 2015, 251). Since the passages describe Amane’s action as “sekkusu o tsukutteita” or “she was making/creating sex,” her action suggests multiple meanings: Amane tries to create a human baby or to create a new myth (genesis) or to create sexual intercourse in a new way. Amane says, “I am trying to create inside of my body something that human beings have never done” (Murata 2015, 251). This statement might indicate that she will create a baby in her womb, as those in Eden, including Amane, never have had sex for reproductive purposes. Ending the story with the union of Adam and Eve can be read as Amane’s resistance to the homogeneity of Eden’s family system because her act itself will destroy sexual innocence and its equilibrium. Amane’s sinful act of “natural” conception, rather than the use of reproductive technology, also suggests anxiety over the compulsory reproductive ideology and practice in Eden, which allows only one method and one choice. Amane’s sexual intercourse with the kodomo-chan evokes the connection between a mother and a child. As sex is described above as “put[ting] it into the ‘okāsan’s [mother’s] body,” it is a liaison between a mother and a baby or a fetus (though it can be read as incest or child abuse). Amane describes their sexual intercourse: “an umbilical cord stretching

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out from a vagina is connecting me and the ‘kodomo-chan.’ I stretched out my arms to my ‘kodomo-chan.’ Our wet fingers tangled. The ‘kodomo-chan’ laughed like the first cry of a newborn baby” (Murata 2015, 251). This depiction implies the birth of a baby and the relationship between mother and child. The new birth or genesis possibly indicates the new beginning of family or the ironic return to a heteronormative family system with “natural” conception. Perhaps, the ending is Amane’s way of coping with the loss of her babies (her miscarriage and her baby to whom Saku gave birth). The circularity of the story in Murata’s Dwindling World also depicts Amane’s recovery of her own desire, emotion, and identity. The “failure” of the so-called future-oriented reproductive family is also the success of her recovery and resistance to the compulsory reproductive ideology.

Ueda Sayuri: The end of humanity Despite the feminist import of their works, the women writers discussed above rarely overtly claim to be feminist. Ueda Sayuri (1964–) is similar. She decided to turn to writing after she lost family in the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. Her SF and speculative fiction works have been notable for how they question humanity by seeing humans as one species in a contiguous environmental system, where human bodies are modified to adapt to drastic environmental changes and are placed in new relations with nonhuman beings. Ueda (2011) explains that SF can express the world of nonhumans, which occupy a large part of the Earth and live outside of human values and morals. Ueda highlights sex, gender, and sexualities that are not bound to a binary, heteronormative system, but rather challenge the human sex and gender system. Ueda’s series, The Ocean Chronicles, which utilizes elaborate genetic engineering for human survival in a drastic environment, can be read as a critique of reproductive futurism and the reinforcement of pro-natal policies that were meant as countermeasures to the low birth rate in contemporary Japan. The Ocean Chronicles comprises two main novels—Karyū no miya, (2010, The Palace of Flower Dragons) and Shinku no hibun (2013, Deep Crimson Epitaphs), along with three short stories. In this chapter, I will focus on the two novels. The Ocean Chronicles world—a world near its end—provides a counter view of this reproductive futurism. Childbirth is an inappropriate choice for the population of a dying world, because adding more people at this critical time taxes the scarce resources and gives life to young people only to force them to face impending disaster. A variety of entangled companionships between humans and nonhumans, including queer families—non-reproductive and nonheteronormative relationships—become common choices and eventually obligatory choices. Ueda’s series offers the potential to depart from our human reproductive discourse and to rethink our existing normative worldview. This bleak view of humanity and nonhumanity illustrates the irreversible demographic and environmental changes in our future. Ueda’s series is a critique of the prevalence of reproductive futurism in contemporary Japan’s pro-natal policies. Since 1995, the Japanese government has instituted countermeasures to combat the low birth rate by promoting childbirth. The Basic Act for Measures to Cope with a Society of Declining Birth Rate (Shōshika shakai taisaku kihon hō 2003) was reinforced by programs such as the Three Children and Childrearing Related Acts (Kodomo/ kosodate bijon 2010, enacted in 2012). This program operates under the concept of reproductive futurism: “A child is a hope for the society and a power force for the future. Children

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filled with smiles make a society that embraces hopes and dreams” (Cabinet Office 2010).14 The main goals of The Three Children and Childrearing Related Acts are “to support the environment for childrearing as an entire society” (“the Dynamic Engagement of All Citizens”) and “to achieve everyone’s dream.” This program, thus, aims at establishing societal, regional, and community support systems for childrearing for the betterment of everyone’s life as well as the improvement of the lives of youths. During the Covid-19 pandemic, several policies were implemented to support children’s welfare, childrearing, childbirth, pregnancy, fertility treatments, and marriage.15 The government, recognizing that having children is ultimately a personal choice and that single parents are also in need of support, has implemented a number of pro-natal policies (e.g., konkatsu or “spouse hunting,” rankatsu or egg freezing, sankyū papa project or paternal leave initiatives, and kurumin certificates for businesses that support employee’s childcare and fertility treatments). Ultimately these initiatives endorse heterosexual marriage and the assumption that having children will solve the problems of the low birth rate and secure the future of Japan (Cabinet Office 2017).16 Despite a brief uptick in the average fertility rate from 1.26 (number of children) in 2005 to 1.44 in 2016, the government’s policies do not seem to have encouraged people to have children (Cabinet Office 2019, 6–7). According to the Japanese National Fertility Survey of 2015, many men (29.5 percent) and women (23.9 percent) aged twenty-five to thirty-four did not feel the necessity of getting married, while 56.3 percent of heterosexual married couples claimed that raising and educating children was too expensive17 (Cabinet Office 2019, 18–19, 25). In addition, 39.8 percent of married women commented that they would “hate to bear children at an older age” (Cabinet Office 2019, 25). Allison (2013) points out, “[T]he assumption that children represent the life-force most valued—in need of protection along with resources—is not universally shared” (164). One of the women that Allison interviewed cited global overpopulation as the reason for her lack of concern over low birth rates, and she noted that “not everyone should have children, which includes a lot of young Japanese” (164). The aggressive governmental policies on low birth rate have not been reflected in the views of people in Japan, contradicting the idea of reproductive futurism. More people than ever live outside of marriage without having children. Ueda’s series builds on societal counter-tendencies to governmental pro-natal policies. She adapts ideologies from non-conformist reproductive futurism, showing that it is acceptable to have fewer children and that humans are not necessarily the dominant biological lifeform. Her series describes queer families and demonstrates “queer futurity,” defined by José Esteban Muñoz (2004). Ueda tends to focus on the marginalized people of society in her many works. People who remain unmarried and have forgone having children in Japan, for example, are a group whose members do not conform to societal expectations and thus correspond to the marginalized people in Ueda’s series as she shows various family forms existing outside of societal expectations. A queer futurity, such as that created by Ueda in this work, where humans no longer exist means an alternate Earth history. In the posthuman world of The Ocean Chronicles, there are various life forms—land-folk and sea-folk, icthynavis and feranavis, assistant autosapients, and dolphin-like human hybrids called lucis—that are often either in conflict or in negotiations with each other. In preparation for the imminent Winter of the Plume, scientific researchers accelerate the development of alternative life forms. They build a floating city, they transform the sea-folk bodies into lucis, and they dispatch humanity’s records into outer 42

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space. These advancements lead to further conflicts between species and also to new directions in inter-species companionship. Ueda depicts human anxiety over extinction as a means to comment on the need for reproduction in order to present a counter example to queer futurity. In Deep Crimson Epitaphs, Hoshikawa Yui asks her father why he and her mother decided to have her despite the imminent disaster. He answers: Life forms are entities that cannot help looking toward the future. … The act of living always opens up to a future. All life forms eat, exercise, sleep if tired, and procreate. They feel anxious because they know there is a future. … In particular, humans whose brains are developed will feel more fear. … Although most people cognitively understand the potential end of humanity, they have not come to terms with it emotionally. The essence of life is always to look toward the future no matter how harsh the environment. The concept of having children is along this line of thought. (Ueda 2013, 2: 132–33) Yui’s father’s statement reveals two contrasting thoughts about the future: He reiterates the idea that life forms feel fear because they can think about the future and survival even while knowing that the end is approaching. He also conveys the assumption that procreation is instinctual (Ueda 2013, 2: 132–33). In Ueda’s series, humans cannot escape death; yet, the human desire for preservation and reproductive continuity persists. Yui’s father, however, acknowledges the conflict intrinsic to the idea of reproductive continuity for a population facing extinction when adding more people taxes scarce resources during a time of impending disaster (Ueda 2013, 2: 133–34). Yui chooses to promote futurity without procreation by joining the space program and is tasked with sending genetic data into space to memorialize human civilization. Thus, Ueda shows that reproductive continuity is not necessary and contradicts Yui’s father’s concept of instinctual procreation. Ueda presents reproductive futurism as one choice and queer futurity as another. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muñoz’s (2009) “queer futurity” responds to Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism by focusing on “here and now” without relationality and historicity (10). Muñoz (2009) provides another view of queer potentiality and possibility, with queerness as existence of awareness (1) and regards queerness as performative and “a doing for and toward the future” about something that is not existent and that is “not-yet-conscious”—that is, queer futurity (1–3). However, Muñoz’s idea of queer futurity—“not-yet-conscious”—should constantly reflect on the past since the idea of “notyet-conscious” will keep changing. After all the characters in The Ocean Chronicles realize the potential impossibilities of the survival of human beings, living at the present moment and looking toward the future are done out of despair and something that they live for. Anticipating no humanity for the future can reflect on the present reality of the Earth environment and the past human actions that have caused the harmful environment that we are currently facing. In The Ocean Chronicles, queer futurity is manifested in the launch of human genetic data into space by nonhumans. Ueda’s series ends with an alternative futurity to human preservation beyond or without human beings. Two plans will be carried out. First, the spaceships, Akili, will carry the genetic database of humans and nonhumans (e.g., Tsukisome—the feranavis-mutant hominid) to other planets. Autosapients will operate the spaceships and Chapter 3: Feminist “Failed” Reproductive Futures in Speculative Fiction

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serve as representatives of humanity (Ueda 2010, 570–76). Second, lucis will be genetically engineered to modify human bodies to adapt for another ice age. When the temperature of the Earth rises, ice will begin to melt, and the sunlight will reach the ocean where lucis live. The name lucis means “light” for a symbolic revival of quasi-human beings (Ueda 2010, 271). At the end of The Palace of Flower Dragons, Aozumi’s superior, Ambassador Katsura, explains the reason that nonhumans—quasi-humans (whom he calls giji ningen)—are chosen to be sent to outer space: The adaptability of quasi-humans to the environment is much higher than human beings. When you saw Tsukisome, you understood that. … Of course, we will not send living bodies of quasi-humans to outer space. We will send their genetic information and the methods for creating living beings from artificial protein and store necessary chemical materials for their creation. If the spaceships reach an environment in which to revive these quasi-humans, they will be created as living beings. Well, this is unlikely to happen, but, in case it does, Maki and the other autosapients can inspect their neuro functions and intelligence. (Ueda 2010, 571–72) Since human beings are more vulnerable than nonhumans, nonhumans become the hope for continued human existence. Tsukisome’s genetic data is the best example of environmental adaptability because she is originally a feranavis, which transforms into a hominid form to survive inland. It is Maki, Aozumi’s cognitive assistant, who will monitor Tsukisome’s data. Thus, quasi-human data is monitored by nonhumans. The continuity of humanity seems to simulate heteronormativity because Maki appears to be gendered male and Tsukisome female. However, the gendering of the two characters is meaningless in a heterosexual reproductive sense; they represent only the possibility of the replication of quasi-human genetic data. Another example of queer futurity is the creation of lucis, which have two brains: one of a deep-sea creature and the other of a human. In Deep Crimson Epitaphs, when Aozumi and the religious leader Anise meet lucis, they sense their beauty, but Anise feels ambivalent. A researcher responds to Anise: It will depend on each person’s perspective whether people can call lucis “humans” or not. … We cannot decide the value of creatures based on their appearance now that we are able to modify every life form. The value of all life is equal, but social circumstances determine the priority of life forms. … Although humans have created lucis, it does not mean that lucis are inferior beings. After human extinction, they can dominate the Earth as a new humanity—they can even further evolve depending on the situation and environment. To a scientist, this seems another wonderful future. (Ueda 2013, 1: 32) This comment exemplifies the notion of the queer futurity of human beings as a different kind of humanity. What we see is based on our human assumptions. After human extinction, humans will no longer have control over the future of other creatures, even though lucis are related to human beings. Humans do not know how lucis will evolve or how the environment

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will change. Humans may not be the center of the world, but their data sent to outer space will remain.

Conclusion: Failure as a feminist futurity Ōhara, Murata, and Ueda imagine reproductive futures that are neither bright nor hopeful and that may be seen as the “failure” of progress. In the process, these future narratives depict the perpetual violence of imposed gender and reproductive ideologies that are prescribed in contemporary society. In Hybrid Child, Ōhara’s endless repetitions of the mother-daughter symbiosis appear as the “failure” of women to escape bonds imposed by patriarchal societies and reflect the male imaginary of psychoanalytic theory. Although the use of cyborg subjectivities provides the mother-daughter symbiotic identity with a means to modify concepts of gender in the male imaginary, the perpetual trauma that the daughter carries shows the continued violence of an asymmetrical power relationship. The mother and daughter are both destroyed, and the endless cycles depict the struggle and pain caused by their imposed relationships. In Murata’s Dwindling World, Eden’s state-controlled, compulsory system produces a homogenized kinship that erases difference, diversity, and individualized emotions. This kinship system resonates with the anxiety in contemporary Japan over compulsory reproductive choice and technological control of reproduction other than as options for individual reproductive choice and diverse family values. The ending signals the “failure” of the reproductive system but hints at Amane’s coping with her life and her own desire as well as her resistance to the perpetual reproductive system of Eden. Ueda’s series reflects on those who live varied lifestyles and those who do not conform to the concept of reproductive futurism in contemporary Japan. In challenging our anthropocentric worldview, The Ocean Chronicles critiques the prevailing idea of reproductive futurism in Japanese government policies to encourage population growth. Although the post-apocalyptic scenario does not present a hopeful vision for the human future, it offers an alternative way to preserve humanity via nonhuman beings. The departure of the spaceship with nonhumans into outer space gives a sense of queer futurity, as all human beings attempt to cope with their end in the environment. The series conveys the belief that continuity without physical human beings is acceptable. The “failure” of human continuity contests reproductive futurism and provides an alternative way to engage in the future. Failure can generate meaningful understanding of the past and ongoing issues and of how to engage in the future. Therefore, the failure in these three authors’ speculative fiction is an engagement in feminist futurity.

Notes 1

See also Judith Halberstam’s (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. See Aimee Bahng’s (2018) Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Alexis Lothian’s (2018) Old Futures Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, and Sami Schalk’s (2018) Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. 3 See Lee Edelman (2003), No Future: Queer Theories and the Death Drive. 2

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4 Larry McCaffery (1997) has described cyberpunk works as a radically new form of hybridity, synthesis, and integration “between high art and trash, beauty and ugliness, avant-garde and pop, delicacy and violence, the utterly programmed and the spontaneous, and, perhaps their most original synthesis, technology and humanism” (306). 5 Ōhara served as the president of the SFWJ from 1999 to 2000. Her works go beyond prose fiction and embrace a variety of media. Ōhara’s (2014) profile is provided on the homepage of her website. http://park6. wakwak.com/~ohara.mariko/welcome.htm. 6 I use Jodie Beck’s (2018) translation as the source of quotations throughout this essay unless otherwise noted. The Seiun Award [Seiun shō] was named after the Nebula Awards of Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America by the Japanese SF convention and fandom. 7 The “imaginary” order coined by Jacques Lacan is the developmental stage where a child recognizes its self-image. 8 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 181. 9 Ōhara describes the mother as a mysterious creature called Doragon kosumosu (the dragon cosmos), which resembles a giant dragonfly (“a glass dragonfly” or “the shape of a primitive insect, slowly undulating its four newly grown wings”) in space. The mother no longer has a human form and becomes an insect. 10 Kamikawa Aya discusses the exchangeability of the mother and the daughter: “attributes of mother and daughter are exchangeable at a deeper level; the daughter also connotes twofold maternal meanings: nurturing and destructive” (103). 11 The images of the mother’s flesh pierced through by a lightning rod and the church covered with blood are iconoclastic and can be associated with distorted images of Christianity (perhaps, the flesh and blood of Christ). Ōhara frequently plays upon Christian symbolism, challenging organized religious institutions. 12 Shōshika taisaku tokubetsu shō. 13 While “Dwindling” for shōmetsu is common in English translations of the title, “Vanishing” might be more accurate because the word expresses a strong sense that sexual relations and family are completely disappearing. 14 In terms of the “three” related acts, the Cabinet Office stresses three essential moral attitudes: 1. “Embrace human lives and growth;” 2. “Help those who are in need;” 3. “Support everyday lives.” 15 The Cabinet Office provided support for municipalities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each municipality could allocate funds for childcare, pregnancy, or countermeasures for low birth rates. For example, Hitachiōta City, Ibaraki used the funds for online konkatsu while Kyoto City offered PCR tests for pregnant women, and Matsudo City, Chiba provided temporary childcare for remote working parents. For details see: https:// www8.cao.go.jp/shoushi/shinseido/pdf/shoushika/211227-b2.pdf. 16 One kurumin certificate project promotes corporations and business enterprises to support those who go through fertility treatments. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_14408.html. 17 Eighty percent of the married couples aged from thirty to thirty-four stated that it was too expensive.

References Allison, A. (2013). Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aoyama, T. (2008). Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Bahng, A. (2018). Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994, 2010). Simulacra and Simulation. (S.F. Glaser, trans.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Originally published as Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981). Beck, J. (2015). Consumption, Control, and Maternal Fascism: A Critical Introduction to Mariko Ōhara’s Hybrid Child. rf55zb517 [Doctoral dissertation, McGill University]. eScholarship@McGill Butler, J. (1990, 1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. (2010). Kodomo/ kosodate bijon [Future visions for children/childrearing, 2010] Accessed February 21, 2021. https://www8.cao.go.jp/shoushi/shoushika/family/vision​ /pdf/honbun.pdf. ———. (2021). “Shingata korona uirusu taiō ni kakawaru kosodate shien ni tsuite [Child support responding to novel coronavirus].” Accessed September 24, 2022. https://www8.cao.go.jp/shoushi/shinseido/ taiou_coronavirus.html.

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———. (2017). Sankyū papa junbi book [Preparation handbook for paternal leave]. Accessed February 21, 2021. https://www8.cao.go.jp/shoushi/shoushika/etc/project/pdf/book_h29/print_all.pdf. ———. (2019). “Chapter 1. Current Status of Countermeasures against Declining Birthrate (Summary).” In A 2018 Declining Birthrate White Paper (Summary). (June): 1–33. Accessed February 21, 2021. https://www8. cao.go.jp/shoushi/shoushika/whitepaper/measures/english/w-2018/pdf/part1-1.pdf. Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theories and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kamikawa, A. (1995). Chikara no opera—Ōhara Mariko no miraishi shōsetsu to “chitsujo” josetsu [The power of opera—The introduction to Ōhara Mariko’s futuristic novels and social “order”]. Joseigaku nenpō 16 (October): 95–108. Kano, A. (2016). Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kristeva, J. (1981). Women’s Time. (A. Jardine & H. Blake, trans.). Signs 7(1): 13–35. Lothian, A. (2018). Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. New York: New York University Press. McBean, S. (2014). Feminism and futurity: Revisiting Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Feminist Review 107: 37–56. McCaffery, L. (ed.). (1997). Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muñoz, J.E. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Murata S. (2014). Satsujin shussan [Birth Legitimates Murder]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2015). Shōmetsu sekai [Dwindling World]. Tokyo: Kawadeshobō. Ōhara M. (1995). Moshimo to iu jikkenba de: Josei SF sakka ni totte no haha: 2777-nen no jōoh” [Experimenting “What if…”: What “Mother” Means for Women SF Writers: The Queen of the Year 2777]. In Kanō M., (ed.), Bosei fashizumu: Haha naru shizen no yūwaku [Maternal Fascism: Temptation to Maternal Nature]. 188–190. Vol. 6 of Nyū feminizumu rebyū [New Feminism Review]. Tokyo: Gakuyōshobō. ———. (1990, 2018). Hybrid Child (J. Beck, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. “Mariko Ohara Profile.” (2014). In the Aqua Planet. Last modified October 18, 2014. Accessed March 20, 2021. http://park6.wakwak.com/~ohara.mariko/welcome.htm. Piercy, M. (1976). Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: The Random House Publishing Group. Kindle. Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ueda. S. (2010). Karyū no miya [The Palace of Flower Dragon]. Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō. ———. (2011). Ueda Sayuri Karyū no miya intabyū [Ueda Sayuri The Palace of Flower Dragons Interview], interview by Takatsuki Maki, April, http://prologuewave.com/archives/853. ———. (2013). Shinku no hibun [Deep Crimson Epitaphs]. (2 vols.). Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō. Wiegman, R. (2010). The intimacy of critique: Ruminations on feminism as a living thing. Feminist Theory 11(1):79–84. Whitford, M. (1991). Luce Irigaray: The Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge.

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Part 2 Owning the Classics

Chapter 4 Tales of Ise Grows Up: Higuchi Ichiyō, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Kawakami Mieko Emily Levine  

This chapter explores three works by modern Japanese women writers that function as threads in the intertextual web originated by the twenty-third episode of Tales of Ise (10th century). It seeks to demonstrate how ties to this premodern text—connections based in plot, imagery, language, and even direct quotation—have enriched these narratives, and how, ultimately, this classic has been creatively repurposed and made to resonate with the concerns of Japanese women from the various periods in which these authors wrote and lived.

Introduction Why allude to the classics? What is gained by repurposing or reimagining what has already been written? This chapter will seek answers to these questions through an exploration of the works of three modern authors who drew upon past works to infuse their writing with resonances dating back to the 10th century. Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), writing in the Meiji period, was well-known for mobilizing scenes and motifs from classical texts in her work, as well as for writing in an archaic style that was quickly losing popularity as Japan embraced “genbun itchi,” an initiative calling for the unification of the spoken and written word. Her 1894 novella, “Takekurabe” (Child’s Play*) famously references the twenty-third episode of the 10th-century Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise*) in its title and content, presenting a grim view of what it means to “grow up” in an era on the cusp of modernity. Although Ichiyō’s premodern idiom had long ago yielded to the colloquial by the time Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005) turned her attention to the classics nearly one hundred years later, this author’s later work demonstrated that the content of the ancient poems and stories could still bear evocative fruit. Kurahashi’s 1989 short story, “Tonsei” (Seclusion) plays with the ideas of Ise 23 and the medieval Noh play it inspired to create a fantasy that celebrates compassion and sexual pleasure from a female perspective. In a third section, this chapter will examine the allusions to Ichiyō’s “Child’s Play,” now a modern “classic” in its own right, in contemporary writer Kawakami Mieko’s (1976–) 2019 novel Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs*), tracing the influence of Ise 23 right up to the present day. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to demonstrate

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how the story of Tales of Ise’s twenty-third episode has been transformed into three vastly different, and distinctly modern, accounts of the trials and tribulations of coming of age, and of love lost and found.

The seed: Tales of Ise 23 Tales of Ise has been considered a pillar of the Japanese literary tradition for a thousand years. As early as the 11th century, it was cited in Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji*) as a work that demanded the reader’s respect, and from this, historians have surmised that it was well-known—and well-regarded—by the courtiers of the time (McCullough 1968, 58). Among the traditional literary genres, Tales is classified as a series of uta monogatari (poem tales). It is composed of one hundred twenty-five short episodes, each containing one or more waka (the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable verse of elite Heian society). In each case, the prose portions of the episodes offer a natural context in which the poem could have been written or spoken (MacMillan 2016, xiii). The hero of Tales of Ise is the nobleman poet Ariwara no Narihira, although the truth of the link to the historical Narihira varies from episode to episode. Indeed, the context provided to some of the episodes, including 23, contradicts what we know of his life. As Peter MacMillan explains, the notion that Narihira both wrote and acted in all of the episodes was “a deliberate fiction perpetrated by a succession of compilers and editors in a tongue-incheek manner for the amusement and entertainment of their audience” (MacMillan 2016, xxv). In other words, even the first readers of Tales knew full well that its protagonist was not necessarily a single man, much less Narihira himself. The demonstrable rift between the historical Narihira and the “man” of episode 23 has not diminished the episode’s popularity, however. Despite the inconsistencies, it remains one of only three episodes that have come to metonymically stand for The Tales of Ise as a whole and is represented extensively in other genres and art forms, including the Noh play Izutsu (The Well Cradle*) (Macmillan 2016, 207). The episode begins as follows: Long ago, the children of some people living in the countryside used to play with one another in front of their well. But as they grew up, a young man and woman among them became bashful with each other. The young man wanted to take the woman as his wife, and she was equally determined to marry him, to the point that she refused when her parents tried to betroth her to someone else. Her suitor, who lived nearby, sent her a poem.

Since I saw you last, I have grown well beyond the rim of our measuring well where we compared our height, but have you noticed yet?

Tsutsuitsu no izutsu no kakeshi maro ga take suginikerashi na imo mizaru ma ni

The girl replied:

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My hair that I compared with yours as a child now falls below my shoulders If not to wed you, for whom shall I put it up?

Kurabekoshi furiwakegami mo kata suginu kimi narazu shite tare ka agubeki

The couple exchanged many such poems and, eventually, true to their wishes, became husband and wife. (Macmillan 2016, 37) The girl’s poem refers to the coming-of-age custom of ceremonially putting up a young woman’s hair (kami-age), which often occurred at the same time as a betrothal. Prior to the ritual, her hair would be styled in a furiwakegami (a child’s style which both boys and girls wore) (Macmillan 2016, 208). This point is generally thought to demarcate the first part of episode 23, which goes on to discuss how the couple falls upon hard times financially, forcing the husband to take a second, wealthier wife in Takayasu (Macmillan 2016, 207). In the next part of the episode, the man observes his first wife’s apparent lack of concern over his new wife in Takayasu and grows suspicious that she too is seeing someone else. One night, pretending to leave, he spies on her to see if this is the case: Filled with melancholy, his wife applied her make-up with the greatest care and recited a poem.

As the wild winds blow and the white waves rise, I think of you crossing Mount Tatsuta all alone by night.

Kaze fukeba oki tsu shiranami Tatsuta-yama yowa ni ya kimi ga hitori koyuran

Hearing her, the man felt his heart fill with love, and he desisted from going to Takayasu. (Macmillan 2016, 39). The first wife’s poem signifying her devotion quells her husband’s doubts and reignites his affection for her. This act of kaimami (watching in secret) is a common trope in classical Japanese texts—since noblewomen were supposed to avoid the gaze of men, catching a glimpse in this way heightened the eroticism of scenes such as this one (Macmillan 2016, 303). The second wife in Takayasu ultimately disappoints the man with her unseemly behavior, and the third part of episode 23 describes her lonely plight as the man ceases to visit her (MacMillan 2016, 39). Although the second wife’s story plays a significant part in episode twenty-three, it is the above accounts of coming of age and enduring love in parts one and two that will be the focus of this discussion, as it is these that have inspired the modern writers featured in this chapter.

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Higuchi Ichiyō’s “Child’s Play”: Ise 23 in the Meiji era Higuchi Ichiyō may have lived for only twenty-four years, but her reputation among women writers of the Meiji period remains unrivaled (Copeland 2000, 1). Born Higuchi Natsu in 1872, she was the fifth child and second daughter of Higuchi Noriyoshi, a municipal bureaucrat who had come to Tokyo (then Edo) in the years before the Meiji Restoration (Danly 1981, 11). On her doting father’s whim, Ichiyō was withdrawn from public school at the age of five and placed in a succession of private schools which offered greater flexibility in curriculum than those operating under the government’s new mandates (Danly 1981, 13). However, this atypical education was put on hold in 1883, when family fortunes declined sharply and it made little sense to keep the middle daughter—who was a girl, after all—enrolled (Danly 1981, 14). Ever eager to further his daughter’s education, in 1886 Noriyoshi enrolled Ichiyō in the Haginoya, a poetry conservatory for women. The school was run by Nakajima Utako, one of the leading women poets of the time, and it was here that Ichiyō received her training in the Japanese classics: lectures covered the imperial poetry anthologies, The Tale of Genji, and of course, its elite predecessor, Tales of Ise (Danly 1981, 15). This period of devotion to study and composition was not long-lived, however. In 1889, Noriyoshi succumbed to tuberculosis. Without her father, Ichiyō was responsible for supporting her mother and younger sister. Thus began a series of efforts to bring in a living for the three of them: Ichiyō worked at the Haginoya school as an apprentice, which amounted largely to serving as Nakajima’s housekeeper, and the family earned what they could by taking in laundry and sewing. Ichiyō’s interest in writing literature commercially was stirred by the acclaim—and sizable manuscript fee—garnered by Haginoya peer Tanabe Tatsuko for her short story “Yabu no uguisu” (Warbler in the Grove*), published in 1888. Like Tanabe, Ichiyō sought out a male mentor who was entrenched in literary circles, and in 1892 her work began to appear in magazines and newspapers (Ōmori 2006, 130). However, the money Ichiyō earned from her writing was still insufficient; three people simply could not subsist on her modest income. Acutely aware of this, in 1893 Ichiyō opened a small toy and sweets shop in the Ryūsenji neighborhood, situated alongside the Yoshiwara licensed quarter. She hoped that the profits from the storefront would give her the financial leeway to hone her literary craft. Although it was from the sights and sounds of Ryūsenji that Ichiyō drew much of the inspiration for her later works, she ultimately closed the shop (Ōmori 2006, 132). By 1894, “Child’s Play” was being serialized, and Ichiyō’s manuscript fees could pay the bills—she was a full-time, professional writer at last. (Ōmori 2006, 130). Nevertheless, as if testifying to the brevity of all great things with her life, Ichiyō passed away from tuberculosis just two years later (Ōmori 2006, 131). “Child’s Play” is a novella that transmutes Ichiyō’s passion for the poetry and prose of the Japanese classics into a distinctly modern narrative. It is unquestionably her most famous work. The narrative depicts the relationships between a group of adolescents on the verge of assuming their adult responsibilities, and the ways in which familial expectations and economic necessity press them into these roles (Ōmori 2006, 128). By rendering their internal monologues and psychic turmoil, the story reveals its focus on two characters: Midori, of the Daikokuya, and Nobu, of Ryūgeji. These two attend the same school and move in the same social circles—among the children in a lower-class neighborhood adjacent to the Yoshiwara

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licensed quarters. The story details how their budding romance is forestalled by the realities of coming of age in a time and place where children were expected to stay the course set out by their families. The beautiful Midori is destined to become a courtesan like her older sister, while Nobu is heir to his father’s position as priest of a Buddhist temple. Numerous classical references appear in “Child’s Play,” and, as scholars have long recognized, its title is a crucial one. Ichiyō selected one word from each of the first two waka in Ise 23 and created the neologism, “Takekurabe”—literally, “comparing heights.” In this way, she immediately prompts the reader versed in the classics to recall the story of the measuring well and the two adolescents whose youthful friendship bloomed into romance with an exchange of poems. From there, it is not very much of leap to link the boy and girl of Ise 23 with Nobu and Midori, who similarly begin to see each other as more than casual playmates (Van Compernolle 2006, 155). By alluding to Ise 23’s first two waka, Ichiyō was invoking a trope that was actually quite popular at the time, particularly in the writing of women (Van Compernolle 2006, 155). Although this motif of osanajimi (childhood sweethearts) has its origins in Ise 23, in the Meiji period it was employed as a metaphor for the notion of ren’ai (modern romantic love). As a concept, romantic love stressed the spiritual and psychological side of relations between the sexes and played down the carnal and sexual. Thus, affection between children proved to be an ideal vehicle, and the measuring well trope grew prominent. Just as the boy and girl of Ise 23 marry out of love against the girl’s parents’ original wishes, the idea of osanajimi was often linked to jiyu kekkon, or free marriage (Van Compernolle 2006, 133). Such a marriage, based on love rather than familial obligation, was the modern ideal in which a man and a woman chose each other without undue meddling from family members or other interested parties (Van Compernolle 2006, 134). Although there are no marital vows taken in “Child’s Play,” we can nevertheless see this framing of freedom versus coercion at work. A future courtesan and priest, Midori and Nobu lack the power to choose their own fate in love, rendering the notion of osanajimi particularly fraught. Midori’s affection for Nobu cools somewhat after a fight breaks out between the Main Street Gang and the Back Street Gang in their neighborhood. Chōkichi, the leader of the latter group, throws a muddy sandal at Midori, calling her a “whore” and thus identifying her with the disrepute of the licensed quarter (Danly 1981, 264). Mistakenly believing that Nobu helped orchestrate the altercation and stung by Chōkichi’s words, Midori encounters the novice priest struggling to repair his sandal strap one rainy morning. In this poignant scene, we can once again observe Ichiyō’s masterful evocation of Ise 23: Then she saw who it was. The blood rushed to Midori’s head. Her heart pounded as if she had encountered a dreaded fate. She turned to see, was anyone watching? Trembling, she inched her way toward the gate. At that instant Nobu, too, looked around. He was speechless, he felt cold sweat begin to bead. He wanted to kick off the other sandal and run away. (Ichiyō 1981, 280) Here the classical kaimami trope so central to the second part of Ise 23 is inverted and reimagined. Ise 23 depicted the young man gazing at his first wife, unbeknownst to her, as she applied her makeup; her devotion and concern for his well-being reignite his love. Ichiyō’s reworking of kaimami has several key differences. First, the female figure, Midori, is the one silently watching through the gate—a crucial component of classical kaimami was a Chapter 4: Tales of Ise Grows Up

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barrier—and her gaze falls upon the male figure, Nobu. Secondly, Nobu is very much aware of Midori’s attention, but finds himself immobilized, unable to respond (Van Compernolle 2006, 172). Most important, however, is the fact that rather than resulting in a reciprocation or rekindling of their feelings for each other, the scene concludes with Midori wordlessly tossing a scrap of red cloth out to Nobu and retreating inside: He heard her walk away; his eyes wandered after her. The scarlet scrap of Yūzen silk lay in the rain, its pattern of red maple leaves near enough to touch. Odd, how her one gesture moved him, and yet he could not bring himself to reach out and take the cloth. He stared at it vacantly, and as he looked at it he felt his heart break. (Ichiyō 1981, 281) Along with the shift in the gender of the gazing party, this scene reverses the result of the kaimami from Ise 23. Their similarities are significant enough that we can understand that longing—young love—is being suggested through the tropes of kaimami and the measuring well, but ultimately nothing comes of Midori and Nobu’s interaction (Van Compernolle 2006, 172). Here, Ichiyō skillfully renders the quandary the adolescents face: what power can their affection for each other hold when their fate is already determined by obligation and economic necessity? Midori will soon follow her sister as a courtesan and before long Nobu will be attending a Buddhist seminary. Any reader with a knowledge of the classical tradition will perceive the gesture towards desire in this scene of kaimami, while also recognizing the way Ichiyō has expanded upon and modernized Ise 23 with a reversal that still confronts the theme of love freely chosen, unfettered by familial and financial concerns. The final scenes of “Child’s Play” only strengthen its relationship to Ise 23. As we have seen, the second waka of the episode draws our attention to the girl’s hair as a signifier of her availability for marriage. In “Child’s Play,” too, hair is an important indicator of status. When we first encounter Midori, we are told that, “Undone, her hair would reach her feet” (Ichiyō 1981, 259). Although she wears a shaguma (girl’s style) then, by the end of the novella her hair has been done up in a shimada (a fashionable coiffure reserved for adult women and courtesans). As critics have observed, Midori’s shimada is “a clear sign that she is no longer considered to be a child” and the awareness of this fact weighs heavily on Midori herself (Danly 1981, 330). When questioned about it by her friend and playmate Shōta on a festival day, she responds with self-consciousness tinged with shame: “You look nice, Midori.” Shōta tugged at her sleeve. “When did you get that new hairdo? This morning? Why didn’t you come and show it to me?” He pretended to be angry. Midori had difficulty speaking. “I had it done this morning at my sister’s. I hate it.” Her spirits drooped. She kept her head down; she couldn’t bear it when a passerby would gawk. (Ichiyō 1981, 283–84) Like the young woman of Ise 23, Midori’s new hairstyle signifies her coming of age. However, rather than her hair being “put up” by her betrothed as a gesture of commitment, Midori’s shimada is meant to inform potential buyers that her body is now for sale—that she has fulfilled the destiny set forth by her family and become a courtesan. Again, Ichiyō’s

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careful allusion to Ise 23 adds new depth to the story, bringing Midori’s grim fate into focus as it refers back to the archetypal romance and its happy ending. There will be no such freedom of choice in love for Midori, and her reaction to Shōta demonstrates that she is painfully cognizant of this reality. Whereas some critics assert that “Child’s Play” lacks any connection to Ise 23 beyond its title, others find the romanticism of the episode reverberates throughout the novella. Ichiyō takes these classical allusions to a thoroughly modern place. As her translator Robert Danly has noted, “Part of the hold that Ichiyō still exerts over Japanese readers comes from her lyrical expression of a certain kind of longing. At first glance, it may seem little different from Heian melancholy, but a second look at ‘Child’s Play’ reveals an atmosphere altogether characteristic of Meiji and modern man: a yearning for freedom from the constraints of conformity, a sad, slowly crystalizing sense that one’s dreams—whether of independence or of true rapport with another human being—are all beyond consummation” (Danly 1981, 133). Indeed, “Child’s Play” imbues Ise 23’s tropes and themes—osanajimi, kaimami, and coming of age—with the modern concerns of freedom in love and life and bears witness to the distance that the bonds of social obligation create between us all.

Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Seclusion”: Ise 23 in the Shōwa era Kurahashi Yumiko’s long and prolific writing career was forged in the fires of controversy. She was born in 1935 in Kōchi prefecture to a dentist and his wife (Sakaki 1992, 1). Growing up in a relatively privileged family in the countryside, her childhood was almost idyllic compared to the suffering others experienced during the last years of World War II. Although her parents encouraged her to become a doctor, she tried and failed the entrance exams twice, eventually moving to Tokyo to study for a dental hygienist’s certificate in 1956 (Bullock 2010, 48). While working towards this goal, Kurahashi secretly decided to apply to study French literature at Meiji University. She was accepted and graduated from the four-year program, making her among the first generation of Japanese women to benefit from higher education at an elite university (Bullock 2010, 48). Shortly after her graduation, her first short stories, “Parutai” (1960, The Party, translated as Partei*) and “Natsu no owari” (1960, The End of Summer*) were both shortlisted for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize (Sakaki 1992, 3). Kurahashi’s promising start soon shifted to a scene of intense debate, however, in a series of high-profile disputes about the realism, morality, and originality of her work. While she had her supporters in the male-dominated literary circles, she was roundly criticized for what her detractors perceived as her contrived plots, unrefined subject matter, and even plagiarism (Sakaki 1992, 4). Kurahashi was always quick to respond in her own defense, countering that for her, fiction represents a form of what she called “the antiworld”: the typical self-reflective concerns of other Japanese writers were simply not a part of her methodology (Sakaki 1992, 9). As for the criticisms about originality, it was Kurahashi’s belief that “The pride of a writer lies in cleverly stealing, the honor of a writer, in being stolen from” (Sakaki 1992, 7). She called this technique “pastiche” (Sakaki 1992, 8). As publishers’ demands accumulated and the controversies continued, Kurahashi became exhausted and decided to take a Fulbright scholarship in the United States (Bullock 2010, 49). Some critics have noted a rift between her pre-and post-Fulbright writings, the

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latter being “less daring in their experimentalism and more realistic in subject matter and tone” (Vernon 1988, 107). Although she began to turn her attention to the Japanese classics for pastiche, her work is still very much engaged in satirizing “traditional” values (Bullock 2010, 49). “Seclusion” is an example of one of Kurahashi’s post-Fulbright works. It opens with protagonist Keiko receiving some unexpected news from the human resources director of the publishing company she owns and manages. Apparently, one of her employees has decided to leave his position in the editing department: “I hear that when he learned his old childhood friend, a young lady, died suddenly, all he could feel was the transience of this life,” the director of human resources said. Do young men today grow weary of society and renounce the world? Keiko wondered in mute amazement as she heard the reason for Mr. Fujiwara’s abrupt resignation. “He must have really loved her. If only it could’ve gone like Zeami’s Well Cradle for them.” “The Noh play?” “It’s the story of Narihira and Ki no Aritsune’s daughter, from Tales of Ise. The two childhood friends became husband and wife after an exchange of poems.” (Kurahashi 1993, 94).1 Keiko proceeds to quote the first two poems of Ise 23, adding that “It really would’ve been wonderful if Mr. Fujiwara and his lady could’ve been together, but in the play, doesn’t the lady of the well die before her husband?” (Kurahashi 1993, 94). This passage exemplifies Kurahashi’s signature technique of pastiche and sets the stage for her reimagining of the story of childhood friends who grow to be something more. But this is a multifaceted pastiche that relies not just on Ise 23 but also on the Noh play that it inspired in the medieval period, The Well Cradle. The Well Cradle, considered one of the great Noh playwright Zeami’s masterpieces, tells the story of the return of the spirit of Ki no Aritsune’s daughter to the earthly realm to reminisce about her mortal existence together with Narihira. We have already encountered the fact that the hero of Tales of Ise was often said to be Narihira even when the content of an individual episode did not correspond to what we know of his life, as is the case with episode 23. Similarly, despite the age difference making it improbable that the two would have been childhood companions, medieval commentators posited that Narihira’s wife, known as Ki no Aritsune’s daughter, was the woman in the first part of the episode. Aligning himself with this tradition, Zeami also identified her as Ki no Aritsune’s daughter (Brazell 1998, 143). In the first scene of “Seclusion,” then, Kurahashi explicitly establishes the narrative’s relationship to Ise 23 as a story of youthful friendship turned to romance, while also linking it to its medieval Noh “sequel” and that play’s account of the spirit of Ki no Aritsune’s daughter’s longing for—and eventual merging with—Narihira. The resigning editor Mr. Fujiwara is at

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once paralleled with Narihira, who survived his beloved wife, and with the spirit of Ki no Aritsune’s daughter, who was deeply moved by her recollection of her past love. Feeling sorry for Mr. Fujiwara, Keiko offers to “treat him to a little something” in place of the severance payment she cannot offer given the circumstances (Kurahashi 1993, 95). She turns to Saigyō—a monk poet from the 12th century, now a time-traveling spirit who can take corporeal form—for help in securing this “treat.” After listening to Keiko’s account, Saigyō recalls a historical couple whose situation was similar, Fujiwara no Tomonobu and Princess Teishi. Saigyō describes their circumstances: “When her beautiful Eminence died suddenly at the age of twenty-one, Tomonobu became aware of the transient nature of the world and cut his queue to become a monk… He was the son of her wet nurse, and they were raised as if they were twin brother and sister from the time when they were little. That being said, he served her as a warrior to the last.” (Kurahashi 1993, 96–97) Here, the pastiche thickens, as another layer is added. Tomonobu and Teishi’s story clearly reproduces the osanajimi trope originated by Ise 23, and Teishi’s untimely death and Tomonobu’s subsequent grief betray a hint of Ki no Aritsune’s daughter’s yearning in The Well Cradle. At the same time, it reflects the reality of Keiko’s employee’s situation—like Tomonobu, Mr. Fujiwara is devastated by the loss of a dear female friend from his youth. The matching surnames of Fujiwara no Tomonobu and the heartbroken editor, of course, are difficult to overlook. Up to this point, it may seem as if the story of “Seclusion” is simply a retelling of Tomonobu and Princess Teishi’s relationship thinly veiled by a contemporary setting and enriched by allusions to Ise 23 and The Well Cradle. However, Saigyō’s plan to relieve Mr. Fujiwara’s heartache supplies a thoroughly modern twist. Saigyō asks Keiko to bring Mr. Fujiwara to a local Buddhist temple, on the pretense that he might find the solitude he seeks there. Upon their arrival, Saigyō appears and answers Mr. Fujiwara’s questions about the monastic life. Once their conversation concludes, a beautiful young kimono-clad woman appears, whom Saigyō identifies as Princess Teishi. He then makes his exit, and Keiko moves to do the same: Keiko intended to follow him, but before she knew it, she was in a room as if she had been there all along. It should have been Princess Teishi facing Mr. Fujiwara, but somehow the one inside the shining kimono was Keiko herself. Though the body and consciousness were those of Princess Teishi, inside them was a tiny kernel of Keiko. On the other hand, Mr. Fujiwara was moved to the very limits of awe. In this beautiful woman, he saw the image of his dearly departed lover of long ago. Keiko, who had become the Princess, embraced Mr. Fujiwara. Then she became a whirl of disorder as violent as a storm of falling blossoms. At first, Keiko felt frustrated with manipulating the Princess’ body from within, but eventually the pleasure became her own. She realized that this was Mr. Fujiwara’s first experience with this kind of intimacy between a man and a woman. For Keiko, too, the experience was extraordinary. This last, this only feast continued until the break

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of day as Keiko fulfilled her earlier promise to treat Mr. Fujiwara. (Kurahashi 1993, 99–100) This passage, decidedly erotic, marks the conclusion of Kurahashi’s adaptation of the content of Ise 23, The Well Cradle, and the story of Tomonobu and Princess Teishi. From Ise she has drawn the story of osanajimi and a passion that is difficult to quell—in this case even by the boundary between life and death. From The Well Cradle comes the deep sense of longing and the spiritual union of male and female elements. Finally, the historical account of Tomonobu and Teishi caps the pastiche by focusing our attention on Mr. Fujiwara’s monastic aspirations and this, his “last,” “only” sexual experience. Although we are meant to understand the gravity of this event for Mr. Fujiwara, the description is in fact from the female point of view. In this sense, it recalls the intimacy with which we encounter Midori’s thoughts in “Child’s Play.” We learn that Keiko initially feels confused and displaced in Princess Teishi’s body but comes to enjoy the pleasure as “her own,” resulting in a tryst that is long and satisfying, even “extraordinary.” It is this femalecentered account of sexual satisfaction that differentiates “Seclusion” from the classical accounts, and indeed, showcases its modernity. In “Seclusion,” Kurahashi depicts Keiko as a woman who enacts her own sexuality compassionately, while simultaneously refusing to be sidelined. Despite its significantly later publication, we can look to the Japanese “women’s writing boom” of the 1960s and 70s for insight into this story. In the words of Sharalyn Orbaugh, the “boom” was “a significant cultural moment in which [women writers] could explore through fiction the various discourses and power relationships of postwar Japan.” (Orbaugh 1996, 127). Although “Seclusion” is aligned more closely with “Child’s Play” in its avoidance of explicit sexual scenes, the private glimpse it offers into Keiko’s experience of pleasure confronts a contemporary feminist concern: it imagines a scenario where both men and women find intercourse deeply satisfying. Like Ichiyō, Kurahashi enriched her stories with allusions to gems like Ise 23, and in much the same way, she used the familiar mirror of the classics to reflect the concerns of the women of her time.

Kawakami Mieko’s Breasts and Eggs: Ise 23 in the Heisei era Born in 1976 in Osaka prefecture, Kawakami Mieko was raised working-class, and she recalls the necessity of taking on odd jobs to support her family: as a factory worker, convenience store cashier, dishwasher, dental assistant, bookstore clerk, and even as a bar hostess to raise money for her elder brother’s collegiate aspirations. Now a wildly popular novelist, she reflects that, “In most cases the rich stay rich and the poor remain poor. Even with effort you cannot always change your life, and I had this severe lesson as a child” (Rich 2020). This sentiment may explain Kawakami’s abiding interest in Higuchi Ichiyō’s work and “Child’s Play” in particular. The link between Kawakami’s recently translated novel Breasts and Eggs and Ise 23 may seem weak at first glance; the process of coming of age is highlighted, but in a largely different manner. Nevertheless, the osanajimi trope makes a modernized appearance and we are given several clues to understand that they are linked through an intertextual network anchored by Ichiyō’s “Child’s Play.”

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Perhaps the most apparent connection between Breasts and Eggs and “Child’s Play” is the names of the characters themselves. The protagonist of Book I is named Midoriko and her mother is named Makiko, easily recalling heroine Midori and her courtesan elder sister Ōmaki from “Child’s Play.” Moreover, the narrator of Breasts and Eggs, Makiko’s sister, is named Natsuko—Higuchi Ichiyō was born Natsu. The same kanji, ko (child), has been affixed to each character’s name. Historically, the practice of ending female names with ko came to prevalence in the 1910s and remained dominant until the 1980s—previously, the suffix had been reserved for nobility (Mori-Kolbe 2020, 12). In this way, we can think of the inclusion of ko as signaling the characters’ modernity as well as marking them as “descendants” of their forebears in “Child’s Play.” Bar hostess Makiko parallels courtesan Ōmaki in her profession, which also requires her to make her body available to men. Fourteen-year-olds Midori and Midoriko share not only their age but also their apprehension about growing up. Natsuko, the professional writer who recounts the story of her sister and niece, can be understood as the Ichiyō of the text. Thus, the meaning of the ko ending operates on multiple levels: alluding to the novel’s themes of sexuality and reproduction, while also pointing to Breasts and Eggs’ “literary mother-daughter relationship” with “Child’s Play” (Alzate 2020, 519). Indeed, when Midoriko agrees to return to Osaka with Makiko, she receives a 5,000-yen note gift—bearing Higuchi Ichiyō’s image—from Natsuko (Auestad 2016, 542). Midori’s transition to adulthood in “Child’s Play,” marked by her new courtesan’s shimada hairstyle, quashes her formerly free spirit and leaves her all but silent with shame. In Breasts and Eggs, Midori’s counterpart Midoriko is similarly troubled by her coming of age, and specifically the way her body is changing. Kawakami is careful to make Midori and Midoriko’s relationship clear in the not just similar, but identical language they use to describe their distaste for growing up. Although Ichiyō is not explicit, many scholars have attributed Midori’s melancholy and subsequent arrival “on the market” to her first menstruation (Alzate 2020, 517). In a scene from the end of “Child’s Play,” the narrator reports the sulky Midori’s thoughts: “If only she could go on playing house forever—with her dolls for companions, then she’d be happy again. Oh she hated, hated, hated this growing up! Why did things have to change?” (Ichiyō, tr. Danly, 1981, 285). Breasts and Eggs’ Midoriko mirrors this kind of sentiment in a journal entry where she writes the following about her developing breasts: I never used to have them, but they’re growing in, getting bigger, whether I like it or not. Why? Where do they come from? Why can’t I stay like I am? Some girls show theirs to each other. They jump and shake them, seeing whose is bigger. The boys definitely notice, too. What’s everyone so excited about, though? Am I that weird? I hate it. I hate that this is happening, I hate it so bad, I hate it to death. (Kawakami 2020, 112–13) The kanji Midoriko selects to express her “hate” is the same, now unusual character used in Midori’s internal monologue in “Child’s Play.” Midoriko states that this choice better captures her feelings: the more common writing of iya (dislike) simply does not feel strong enough. By describing Midoriko’s preference for Ichiyō’s old-fashioned orthography, Kawakami further links her to Midori, creating what Reiko Abe Auestad identifies as a “‘leak’ in time” (Auestad 2016, 534). Indeed, this connection brings clarity to what Midori, over a century earlier, alluded to with talk of “playing house”: the irreversible changes to her body and the

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transformation—both biological and social—from girl to woman that they indicate are a truly hateful reality of growing up. Midoriko’s journal entries in Breasts and Eggs resonate deeply with Midori’s unspoken concerns in “Child’s Play.” In particular, her writing speaks to the lack of control the young women have over the maturation of their bodies and the social significance of this powerlessness. In a later reflection, Midoriko considers a biological phenomenon that she believes is her unavoidable fate, menstruation: Once I start getting my period, every month, until it stops, blood is going to come out of my body. It’s terrifying. I can’t do anything to stop it from happening, though. I don’t have pads at home, either. Just thinking about it is upsetting…. It feels like I’m trapped inside my body. It decides when I get hungry, and when I’ll get my period. From birth to death, you have to keep eating and making money just to stay alive. (Kawakami 2020, 43–44) In Breasts and Eggs, Kawakami refers directly to the physical facts of menstruation, “blood coming out of [the] body,” and hygiene products in a manner that was closed to Ichiyō as she depicted the brooding Midori in the Meiji period (Alzate 2020, 521–22). Nevertheless, we can once again observe the parallel drawn between Midoriko and Midori: they cannot control the changes in their bodies, nor the transition in social roles these changes signal, much less the economic systems in which they are enmeshed—as Midoriko says, her body decides, and she is at its mercy from her first moment until her last. The English translation of Breasts and Eggs is based on Kawakami’s Natsu monogatari, an extended and adjusted version of her novella Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs). In this longer version, we learn about Natsuko’s past and her aspirations for independently having a child through artificial donor insemination. Whereas Book I touches Ise 23 only indirectly through connections with “Child’s Play” and its coming-of-age story, Book II offers an account of osanajimi that resonates both with the original Ise 23 in its depiction of youthful friendship turned to romance and with “Child’s Play” in the ultimate failure of the affair, albeit for completely different reasons. Natsuko’s reminiscence begins when she hears about Midoriko’s happy relationship with her boyfriend, stirring her to superimpose her own experience: Over that image, I came to see myself at their age, at nineteen, twenty-one, or twenty-three—but with Naruse, who was always there to lend an ear and walk with me. No one knew about us, but the intimacy and conviction of the time we spent together made us both sure there was nothing more important in our lives. We met in high school, when we were just kids, and from seventeen until the end of my third year in Tokyo, we were lovers. I knew that if I was going to get married, it would be him. But even if we never got married, I was certain then, without the tiniest misgiving, that the two of us would always be together. I couldn’t even tell you how many letters we wrote each other. We talked about the things we loved and confessed the things that scared us. … Every time he showed me something he had written, I got goosebumps, and felt positive that a person who could write like that was made to be a writer. We never ran out of things to talk about. It didn’t matter where we were 62

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or what we did. I was convinced that it would be that way forever. (Kawakami 2020, 173–74). Here, we can understand Natsuko and Naruse as representing the osanajimi trope as it appears in Ise 23—friends as children who become lovers upon coming of age. It is not clear if Kawakami intended this passage to be read in this way, but there are several similarities with Ise 23 to be found beyond the basic osanajimi story. First, there is the degree of passion and intimacy in Natsuko and Naruse’s relationship—utterly convinced of its significance and staying power, they proved inseparable, even as childhood companionship turned to something more. Additionally, there is the element of correspondence and writing, recalling the courtship practices of the Heian courtiers, and specifically, the poems exchanged in Ise 23. Natsuko and Naruse wrote countless letters to each other, and it was his writing that charmed her, giving her goosebumps. Finally, we learn later that Natsuko was preoccupied with Naruse’s height. While sitting beside another man and wondering if she has ever been so close to someone this tall before, Natsuko recalls: “Naruse was 5’4”, barely any taller than me” (Kawakami 2020, 231). These elements combine to evoke the Ise boy and girl’s childish game of comparing heights at the measuring well, as well as their subsequent exchange of poems and ardent love affair. However, as was the case in with Midori and Nobu, Natsuko and Naruse’s relationship does not stand the test of time. Recalling how it ultimately fell apart because she could not share her feelings about intercourse with him, Natsuko explains: I wanted us to build a life together. But sex with him was not something I needed—not something I wanted… I could never bring myself to tell him. We could talk about anything else, and if I had something to say, I knew that he would listen. He was basically my best friend, but something stopped me short of being honest about sex with him. I wasn’t scared that he would hate me. It wasn’t like that. I just assumed I had to go along with him—because it was on me, as a woman, to fulfill his sexual desires. This wasn’t something anyone had said to me, or that I thought was right. But at some point, I picked up the idea that when you’re in that situation with a man—your man—it’s your job as the woman to go along. (Kawakami 2020, 174–75) Here, the development of Natsuko and Naruse’s osanajimi relationship is thwarted by her inability to convey how she truly feels to him. In “Child’s Play,” Midori and Nobu’s budding romance is forbidden by their predestined social roles and the awkwardness that their awakening to this knowledge engenders. Breasts and Eggs tells a different story, but nevertheless demonstrates how the “common wisdom” of what a woman should do with her sexuality can create a rift between two people who might otherwise live out their lives together. As was the case with Midoriko’s journal, Kawakami here calls attention to how women’s bodies are ensnared in a net of physical and social realities and expectations. Although no one has ever said it to her, and she herself does not necessarily believe it is “right,” Natsuko finds herself assuming that women should yield to their man’s wishes during sex, even if it is not enjoyable for them. And it is this assumption and her compulsion not to speak of her discomfort that

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ends her relationship with Naruse, and, ultimately, her sexual life altogether. In a similar way to “Child’s Play,” Breasts and Eggs points back to Ise 23’s ideal account of osanajimi and shows how modern, patriarchal ways of thinking about women’s sexuality—whether it is bought or silenced—have foreclosed possibilities for meaningful relationships.

Conclusion If women are the inheritors of the classical tradition, then they have proven the elasticity of that lineage. They have not remained trapped behind screens of elegance; rather, they have used the allusive power of the classics to tell new and modern stories. Higuchi Ichiyō’s masterpiece “Child’s Play” adopts Ise 23’s osanajimi trope to explore the social unease of a Japan seeking to catch up with the “enlightened” West. Although the nation state proclaimed the value of “pure” love and independence, were these things truly possible for those lingering in a world where sons and daughters still dutifully followed in their parents’ footsteps? In “Seclusion,” Kurahashi Yumiko channeled Ise 23 and its Noh “sequel” The Well Cradle to create a female-focused space in which sexual intercourse could be both compassionate and highly satisfying for both participants. Her fantasy spoke to Japanese women writers’ increasing interest in exploring the gendered power dynamics of contemporary Japan; in her world of spirits, women could have it all. By the 2000s, Kawakami Mieko recaptured Ichiyō’s disillusionment with Japanese society. Midoriko and Natsuko’s stories express the reality that women are still “trapped” by their bodies, social roles, and economic needs. The relative tolerance of the 21st century allowed Kawakami to include the raw, physical details of menstruation—those that Ichiyō could only allude to—and still win Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize. Indeed, Kawakami’s work and the 2020 English translation Breasts and Eggs prove that the remarkable intertextual web beginning with Tales of Ise is very much alive and well today, its threads reinforced by women writers across the span we call “modernity.”

Notes 1 I would like to thank my colleague Laurel Taylor for her help refining and editing my translations of quotations from Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Seclusion.”

References Alzate, J.B. (2020). Embodiment and Its Violence in Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran: Menstruation, Beauty Ideals, and Mothering. Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese 54(2): 515–49. Auestad, R.A. (2016). Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyō, playful words and ludic gestures.” Japan Forum 28(4): 530–48. Brazell, K. (1998). “Izutsu.” In K. Brazell, (ed.), Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays (pp. 143–144). New York: Columbia University Press. Bullock, J.C. (2010). The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Copeland, R.L. (2000). Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Danly, R.L. (1981). In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyō, A Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Higuchi, I. (1981). Child’s Play. (R.L. Danley, trans.). In R.L. Danley (ed.), In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyō, A Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan (pp. 254–287). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1894) Kawakami, M. (2020). Breasts and Eggs. (S. Bett & D. Boyd, trans.). New York: Europa Editions. (Original work published 2019) Kurahashi, Y. (1993). Tonsei [Seclusion]. In Yume no kayoiji [The Passage of Dreams] (pp. 93–102.) Tokyo: Kōdansha Bunko. MacMillan, P. (trans.) (2016). The Tales of Ise. London: Penguin Random House. McCullough, H.C. (trans.). (1968). Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan, (pp. 3–68). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mori-Kolbe, N. (2020). Child Naming Practice and Changing Trends in Modern Japan. The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal: 11(1): 1–21. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi​ /viewcontent​.cgi?article=1142&context=thecoastalreview. Accessed: February 2, 2021. Ōmori, K. (2006). Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896). In R. Copeland & M. Ortabasi (eds.), The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, (pp. 127–35). New York: Columbia University Press. Orbaugh, S. (1996). The Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction. In P.G. Schalow and J.A. Walker (eds.), The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, (pp. 119–64). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rich, M. (2020). A Novelist Breaks the Code of Being a Woman in Japan. The New York Times, 9 May. Accessed: February 2, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/world/asia/mieko-kawakami-breasts​ -and-eggs.html. Sakaki, A. (1992). The Intertextual Novel and the Interrelational Self: Kurahashi Yumiko, a Japanese Postmodernist.” 10.14288/1.0086633 [Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia]. https://open​ .library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0086633. Van Compernolle, T.J. (2006). The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Vernon, V.V. (1988). Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will, and Social Constraint in Fiction by Modern Japanese Women. Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California.

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Chapter 5 Japanese Women Writers and Folktales: “Urashima Tarō” in the Literary Production of Ōba Minako and Kurahashi Yumiko Luciana Cardi  

Ōba Minako and Kurahashi Yumiko engage with the Japanese tale “Urashima Tarō” in different ways. In Urashimasō (Urashima Grass), Ōba reflects on the notions of time, memory, and human curiosity embedded in “Urashima Tarō” and links them to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the interstitial identity of Japanese immigrants, and the problematic reality of modern Japan in a way that prefigures contemporary ecocritical and transnational perspectives. In her works Otona no tame no zankoku dōwa (Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults) and Yomotsu hirasaka ōkan (Back and Forth to Yomotsuhira Slope), Kurahashi reshapes Urashima Tarō’s adventures into a metaphor for literature as a cross-cultural, intoxicating trip to another world and emphasizes the subversive, “poisonous power” of storytelling.

Introduction Among the Japanese women writers who established their literary reputation in the Shōwa era (1926–1989), Ōba Minako (1930–2007) and Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005) stand out for their profound and long-lasting interest in folktales. Ōba and Kurahashi have diverse approaches to literature but share similar life trajectories which have informed their perspectives. They both belong to a generation of writers who experienced the harsh reality of the Pacific War and the social tensions of the changing postwar Japanese society. They both studied foreign literature (Ōba studied English literature at Tsuda Women’s College, in Tokyo, whereas Kurahashi enrolled in the Department of French Literature at Meiji University) and, in a period when few women travelled outside Japan, they both lived abroad (Ōba in the US, and Kurahashi in the US and in Portugal). These experiences enabled them to approach the narrative repertoire of Japanese folklore from a larger, transcultural perspective at different stages of their literary careers. Considering the increasing popularity of fairy-tale

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and folklore studies in recent decades, in relation to postmodernism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and political and identity issues, Ōba’s and Kurahashi’s approaches to folktales acquire a special relevance today. In light of these considerations, this chapter will analyze how these writers adapted the Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō, offering new interpretations of the traditional narrative. First, I will explore the motifs embedded in the traditional tale, the changes that it has undergone over the centuries, and the meanings associated with the fantastic undersea realm visited by the protagonist. Next, I will analyze Ōba’s adaptation in her novel Urashimasō (1977, Urashima Grass; translated as Urashimaso*), which deals with the themes of migration, time, memory, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Finally, my study will move on to examine Kurahashi’s retelling of “Urashima Tarō” in “Shin Urashima” (1984, The New Urashima and Yomotsu hirasaka ōkan (2005, Back and Forth to Yomotsuhira Slope which parody the traditional tale, combine it with motifs from Greek mythology and Japanese folklore, and explore the subversive role of storytelling.

“Urashima Tarō”: A tale shaped through multiple retellings The tale of Urashima Tarō enjoys widespread popularity in Japan. In its most common version, popularized by Iwaya Sazanami’s series of Japanese fairy tales (1894–1896), included in government-authorized textbooks during the Shōwa period (1926–1989), and used in contemporary children’s books, a fisherman called Urashima Tarō saves a turtle, who rewards the man by taking him to the Dragon Palace (Ryūgū-jō) beneath the sea. In this palace, the fisherman is welcomed by Princess Otohime, the beautiful daughter of the Sea Dragon King, and is treated to a sumptuous banquet. He spends some days in her company but, as time passes, he misses his mother and his village, so he bids farewell to the princess. Saddened by his departure, Otohime gives him a jeweled box (tamatebako) as a present, but she makes him promise not to open it. Upon returning to his village, Urashima Tarō discovers that a few days in the Dragon Palace correspond to hundreds of years in the human world, so everyone he knew is dead. In great distress, he opens the forbidden box, unleashing a plume of smoke which envelops him and transforms him into a very old man, as if all the time he had spent in the Dragon Palace had suddenly caught up with him. As Japanese folklorists have demonstrated (Mifune 2009; Mori 2001; Miura 1989; Sakaguchi 1955), this tale has undergone several changes in the course of time, from a so-called “human-animal marriage narrative” (irui kon’intan) to its current shape. In one of its oldest versions, in the Nihon shoki (720, Chronicles of Japan), a fisherman marries a woman who has taken the shape of a turtle. She does not lead him to the Dragon Palace, but to a place whose name is written with the Chinese ideograms corresponding to Mount Hōrai—a legendary Chinese mountain inhabited by a group of immortals who possess the secret recipe for the elixir of eternal life.1 However, the phonetic signs that accompanied the text indicate that readers should pronounce these ideograms as tokoyo no kuni, a faraway land recurring in Japanese mythology and literature. The ancient imaginary related to this otherworldly land is shaped by different notions, which sometimes overlap: in some cases, tokoyo no kuni represents the utopia of immortality and eternal youth in a faraway, prosperous land; alternatively, it can also be depicted as a dimly lit place that evokes the underworld, is inhabited by the ancestors’ immortal spirits, and is located at the end of a tunnel connecting the coast to the sea bottom (Origuchi Shinobu in Anzu and Umeda 1968, 430).

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In the version collected in Tango no kuni fudōki (c.a. 713, The records of Tango Province), when the fisherman Urashima no ko, having spent three years with a beautiful woman named Kamehime (turtle princess), decides to return to his home village to visit his family, his wife, in tears, gives him a jeweled comb box (tamakushige) and warns him never to open it if he wants to come back again. Of course, Urashima no ko opens the box. In that instant, he sees a scented body (the spirit of his wife)2 fluttering out and fly into the clouds, and he realizes he will never see his beloved again. The tale of Urashima Tarō, configured as a narrative of two lovers separated in different worlds, thus evokes the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi, as well as the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the two partners cannot live together because the male god/the man breaks a promise (Miura 1989, 89). Like Orpheus, Izanagi tries to bring back his wife from the world of the dead, which she is barred from leaving, having eaten the food of the underworld (an element that also evokes the myth of Persephone), but he fails because he breaks the promise not to look at his spouse. In this perspective, Izanagi’s descent to the underworld (yomi no kuni) follows the same narrative pattern of “Urashima Tarō,” because the god moves between two worlds, is punished for doing something forbidden, and must leave his loved one behind. In other versions of the tale the focus shifts from the representation of the parted lovers to the notion of immortality and, by the Muromachi period (1336–1573), the Buddhist theme of the animal repayment of human kindness replaces the Taoist motif of Mount Hōrai. Urashima Tarō continued to move through different variants over the ages until, in the Edo period (1603–1867), the tale becomes the object of several parodies. For instance, in Shūgen Urashima dai (1831, Urashima’s wedding ceremony), Otohime, prefers the wealthy Ebisu (the Japanese god of luck) to the poor Urashima Tarō, who ends up marrying Otohime’s lady-inwaiting, a pufferfish (fugu). In another variant, Furute tsuma shina tamatebako (1795, The old wife and the jeweled box), Urashima Tarō returns to his village, marries, and his new human wife opens the forbidden box. Using another gift from Princess Otohime, Urashima Tarō reverses the curse eventually becoming a boy of five with a wife of eleven, thus inverting the traditional ending of the tale. In the passage from the Edo period to modernity, the tale of Urashima Tarō became a classic of children’s literature and was included in the renowned series authored by Iwaya Sazanami (1870–1933), Nihon mukashi banashi (1894–1896, Japanese fairy tales,), where the influence of Buddhism progressively attenuates, as the princess and the turtle become two separate characters. Several writers were subsequently inspired by the tale, including Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), and Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), whose works have been extensively analyzed by a range of scholars. However, women writers’ adaptations have hitherto been neglected; Ōba’s and Kurahashi’s retellings are not even mentioned in existing Japanese studies of the literary history of “Urashima Tarō.”

Ōba’s re-envisioning of “Urashima Tarō” Ōba began her career as a writer at a relatively mature age. Born in Tokyo, she relocated several times during her childhood, because her father served as a military doctor in the Japanese navy. She lived in Hiroshima Prefecture during the Pacific War and, in the aftermath of the atomic bombing, was sent to assist the survivors, an experience that made a profound

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impact on the teenage schoolgirl. Ōba began writing in Alaska, where her husband was stationed for 11 years, from 1959 to 1970. She enrolled in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin and started writing short stories including “Sanbiki no kani” (1968, Three Crabs*), which was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Having settled back in Japan, she produced a wide range of works of both prose and poetry, including Sabita kotoba (1971, Tarnished Words*), Urashimasō, and Mukashi onna ga ita (1994, Once There Was a Woman). She was also inspired by Japanese literary classics and folktales in works such as Ōba Minako no Taketori monogatari, Ise Monogatari (1968, Ōba Minako’s Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Tales of Ise), Yamauba no bisho (1976, The Smile of a Mountain Witch*) and Ōba Minako no Ugetsu monogatari (1987, Ōba Minako’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain). Ōba was familiar with the literary tradition of “Urashima Tarō,” as she delineates it in her travelogue Shima no kuni no shima (1982, The Islands of the Island-country), in the section entitled “Miyakojima: Ryūgū o kou hitobito” (Miyakojima: The People who Love the Dragon Palace). She draws upon this tale in her novel Urashimaso, which is set in 1976 and revolves around the story of Yukie, a young woman returning to Japan after eleven years in the U.S. The title of Ōba’s novel refers to the Urashima grass that grows near the house of Morito, Yukie’s stepbrother: a plant with purple-black flowers similar to flickering flames. Because of the long tendril emerging from its tubular spathe, this plant is said to resemble Urashima Tarō holding his fishing cane and, when it withers, it conveys the image of the fisherman “all bent and crooked with age” (58)3 after opening the jeweled box. Moving from the imagery linked to this plant, the tale of Urashima Tarō resonates in Ōba’s novel on several levels. Like a “female Urashima Tarō” (Orbaugh 2001), Yukie has been away in the US for 11 years (the exact amount of the years that Ōba spent in Alaska) and, upon returning to her homeland, she feels “like a visitor to a foreign country” (25), unable to access “a closed world into which an outsider could find no entrance” (195). As Mizuta Noriko points out in the introduction to the English translation of this novel, Urashimaso is a narrative of coming home; however, the protagonist realizes that the home she was longing for does not exist anymore, just like the village of Urashima Tarō. Instead, she finds that present-day Japan resembles the U.S. more than she had imagined; Japanese people seem to her profit-driven and selfish (119). The tale of the Japanese fisherman returning from the Dragon Palace becomes thus a narrative of cultural displacement (Hill 2005) and conveys the notion of the interstitial identity of Japanese immigrants between far-away Dragon Palaces, imagined homelands, and reality. Significantly, in “Urashima Tarō wa Nihon bungaku ka?” (Does “Urashima Tarō” belong to Japanese Literature?), Nishi Masahiko (1998) emphasizes the role of “Urashima Tarō” as a metaphor for modern Japanese people’s search for an identity beyond national boundaries and associates the figure of the legendary fisherman with the war-displaced Japanese in China and with the Japanese immigrants in Latin America in the first decades of the 20th century. The notion of immigrants bringing with them the memories of distant times emerges when Yukio meets Morito and his partner Ryoko, and assures them that she has not forgotten the Japanese language and culture. Instead, she remarks that Japanese immigrants in the U.S. tend to preserve the old, anachronistic customs that have disappeared in their homeland, as if—I would add—time passed at a slower pace in the “American” Dragon Palace. By returning to her home country, like Urashima Tarō, Yukie metaphorically opens the jeweled box, because she loses her innocence: she has irremediably left the idyllic haven of the Dragon King, and now she feels alienated from both the United States and Japan, as she perceives them in a very different light. When she considers “Urashima Tarō” from the Chapter 5: Japanese Women Writers and Folktales

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standpoint of her own experience, she sees it as the tale of a man who seeks “the world of dreams” (282)—an expression that echoes the American dream in the emigrants’ imaginary– and is paradigmatic of migrants who strive under the rules of their society and move to other places with different values. Initially, as Yukie notes, they associate their new location with a sense of freedom, but soon they understand that even a utopic world “has bonds of its own” (282), so they yearn for the old order. However, if they do go home, they realize that it is impossible to return to their pre-departure mindset and equally impossible to return to their idyllic faraway world, which has vanished like the entrance of the legendary Peach Blossom Spring. Here the motif of “Urashima Tarō” merges with “The Peach Blossom Spring” (Tōgenkyō, in Ōba 1977, 439), a Chinese tale in which a fisherman finds an idyllic world hidden under a water spring. Like many modern-day immigrants, its inhabitants are the descendants of a group of people who left their homeland to escape a period of civil unrest. After departing, the man tries to return to the Peach Blossom Spring, but he never succeeds in finding the entrance again. Having acknowledged the impossibility of returning to the state of innocence prior to opening the jeweled box, Yukie moves beyond a binary divide between the Dragon Palace and the nostalgic home village. She decides to stay in Japan to shape a third space (daisan no sekai, literally “a third world”), an interstitial place between American and Japanese cultures reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s theories on hybrid postcolonial identity. Here, in this country [Japan], she might find a third world for herself in addition to the two she already had. She was no longer thinking of Japan as a homeland that would welcome her with open arms, but as a place where the frail old roots inside her might grow new shoots, and then the funny stem that had grown out in the foreign land of America might suddenly bring forth an entirely new type of blossom. (298) This change implies that, like Urashima Tarō opening the jeweled box, she will move out of her youth into old age, as a result of her journey of self-discovery. As Ryū (Ryoko’s husband) ironically says, Yukie could age before her time and become a sen’nyo (Ōba 1977, 262), an immortal female sage with supernatural powers living in the mountains. She would outlive her family members and it would be her duty to observe the world, remember, and pass down her memories to the younger generations (169). As the image of the immortal storyteller implies, Ōba’s retelling of “Urashima Tarō” is intertwined with the notions of time, narration, and memory, which are also linked to the theme of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This theme, together with the atrocities of WWII, appears in correlation with Yukie’s visit to Hiroshima, in the narrative present, and with the past stories of her family members. Ryoko recounts how, after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, she went to the city in search of her mother-in-law and describes post-bombing Hiroshima as a surreal, distorted version of the undersea Dragon King Palace, when she compares the corpses to “fish netted from the ocean and thrown into a pile, then drizzled with petroleum and half cooked” (40) and notes that people handled them as “one may grab a fish by its tail” (91). The deadly smoke that envelops the city recalls the smoke coming out of Urashima Tarō’s box and the view of floating corpses in “every water tank, in every pool and river” evokes the Buddhist image of the Sanzu River (a river that must be crossed by the souls of the deceased to reach the afterworld) that appears in relation to the 70

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tale of Urashima Tarō in a dialogue between Yukie and Ryoko. In this dialogue, Ryoko compares the Urashima grass, with its long tendril, to the figure of Urashima Tarō fishing dreams. Upon hearing her comment, Yukie, who is experiencing a sense of loss and displacement, confesses that she feels as if she had been fishing for dreams in the Sanzu River, like a female Urashima Tarō—a statement that evokes the ancient imaginary of tokoyo no kuni as the land of the dead.4 Yukie’s words combine the tale of Urashima Tarō and the themes of loss and death, which converge in the image of the Hiroshima bombing. Far from being only a past event, the atomic bomb also affects the narrative present of Ōba’s novel on several levels. For instance, when Yukie returns to her home village, Kambara, she is shocked to find a newly built nuclear plant in the place where once stood the ruined house haunted by the ghost of Morito’s late wife, who died committing suicide. Like her, the ghost of the atomic bomb, symbolized by the nuclear plant, haunts Ōba’s representation of Japanese modernity. Significantly, in an interview (1977) with Ōba, the writer Noma Hiroshi (1915–1991) correlates the curiosity that drives Urashima Tarō to open the jeweled box to the desire for knowledge that leads scientific experimentations threatening humankind. Ōba thematizes this desire in relation to tragedies of the past (the atomic bombing) as well as to the problems of the present. In a discourse that prefigures contemporary ecocritical trends in literature and foreshadows the works of contemporary writers such as Kawakami Hiromi, she links the human desires leading to the creation of the atomic bomb in the 1940s to the thirst for both knowledge and money behind experiments on genetic mutations, new forms of bacteria, and nuclear power in the 1970s. More than 40 years later, the themes of Ōba’s novel are still very much relevant in a historical time when Japan is still coping with the after effects of the Fukushima triple meltdown and is facing the threat of mutant viruses in a global pandemic. Significantly, Yukie’s American boyfriend, Marek, draws parallels between the past experiments to create the atomic bomb and more recent threats to humanity. Biologists are experimenting with genes and scheming to create fantastic new forms of life. Physicists are experimenting with new forms of energy … all of which they insist have no side effects, and even if they do, what the hell, they can always bury the danger deep under the sea. Do you know that they’re using huge amounts of money to sink atomic waste somewhere under the ocean? They’re probing every conceivable form of energy, because as long as we have energy, there’s no limit to the food or whatever else we can produce, so who cares if the temperatures go up or down a degree or two, or if the ozone layer is damaged? (188) However, as Ōba points out in her interview with Noma, even though people know that it would bring about terrible consequences, they cannot help opening Urashima Tarō’s jeweled box, because desires and curiosity are part of the human nature. This consideration resonates in the final chapter of Urashimaso, entitled “Smoke,” where Yukie realizes what Urashima Tarō’s legendary box contained. What was the magic casket that Urashima Taro carried back with him from Ryugu? What was the smoke that was shut up inside? Suddenly, Yukie thought she had the answer. … It’s life itself in all its mystery and absurdity. It’s what man, Chapter 5: Japanese Women Writers and Folktales

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in so far as he is alive, celebrates as proof of his living. That transparent, radiant, burning, flickering, moaning thing called life. The driving force of becoming that includes everything from dreams and hope to curiosity, from passions of all kinds to the desires of the instinct… Urashima Taro could not resist the desire to look into that mysterious casket. (282) Urashima Tarō’s desire to look inside the jeweled casket exemplifies humankind’s desire for knowledge and power, and is correlated with the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans, as well as with the war atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese soldiers. From this perspective, the journey of the legendary fisherman to the Dragon Palace symbolizes that of a generation of Japanese soldiers drafted into the horrors of WWII. Like Urashima Tarō, these men could barely recognize the home villages to which they returned, struggled to adapt to the changes of post-war reality, and had to deal with the memories of the past. In Ōba’s novel, their trauma is exemplified by the experience of Ryoko’s ex-husband, Ryū, whose name evokes the tale of Urashima Tarō because it is written with the ideogram of “dragon.” Ryū is dispatched to China, where he rapes a village girl and, when he returns home after the war, on a day when the Urashima grass blossoms, he realizes that everything has changed; he discovers that his wife is expecting Morito’s child, and he ends up embarking on a triangular relationship.5 The parallel between Urashima Tarō and Japanese soldiers appears again when Morito and Ryoko travel to Hiroshima thirty years after the atomic bombing and meet a war veteran described as “the Second World War warrior who said he had once been a fisherman” (185). Tellingly, Ōba hints at the war veterans’ accounts in the interview with Noma, where she explains that she has listened to the stories of many Japanese drafted into the war and notes that, despite the differences, their accounts have a characteristic in common: they all have a part that remains untold. In light of these considerations, the notions of remembering and telling become crucial in her adaptation of “Urashima Tarō.” Significantly, in the scene where they visit modern-day Hiroshima, Ryoko and Morito have the impression that the old Hiroshima has vanished like the ancient civilization of Atlantis, and has been replaced by a gorgeous city whose inhabitants are gradually forgetting the past. In contrast, Ōba’s narrative aims at preventing people from forgetting and unfolds the uncomfortable, untold stories sealed inside the jeweled box of the Japanese past. Like Yukie, who will age into a sen’nyo to remember and pass down her memories to the younger generations, the writer revisits the tale of “Urashima Tarō” to address the Japanese traumatic past memories and their present legacy.

The motif of “Urashima Tarō” in Kurahashi’s fiction Like Ōba, Kurahashi Yumiko often drew inspiration from traditional tales, after starting her career as a writer of experimental and Kafkaesque fiction. Born on the island of Shikoku, Kurahashi made her literary debut with the story “Parutai” (1960, The Party; translated as Partei*), which satirized Japanese students’ involvement in the left-wing movements of the 1960s. However, contrary to the expectations of literary critics, Kurahashi did not openly engage with political and social issues in her ensuing literary career. Instead, she dealt with these issues indirectly, in works whose primary aim was often to dismantle the traditional notion of the novel. In 1966, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa for one

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year, with a Fulbright scholarship. Upon her return to Japan, she experimented by blending different genres, bringing together novel, Nō theatre, and Greek tragedy in literary works such as Hanhigeki (1971, Anti-tragedies) and Yume no ukihashi (1971, A Floating Bridge of Dreams). In the latter part of her career, she drew upon fairy and folktales in several works including Otona no tame no zankoku dōwa (1984, Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults),6 Rōjin no tame no zankoku dōwa (2003, Cruel Fairy Tales for Old Folks), and Yomotsu hirasaka ōkan (2005, Back and Forth to Yomotsuhira Slope). Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults is a collection that combines retellings of Japanese traditional tales, Western fairy tales7 and myths, and literary classics. The rationale behind the choice of collecting “cruel” fairy tales for adult readers is explained in the afterword, where Kurahashi criticizes contemporary children’s literature, often written by adults who pretend to be children and employ an infantilized language in the name of realism. As she also argues in the essays “Zankokuna dōwa” (1985, Cruel Fairy Tales) and “Otona no dōwa” (1982, Fairy Tales for Adults), most contemporary fairy stories are sanitized versions of the older tales, which portrayed a “cruel” world where fools suffer, the virtuous and the generous are rewarded, and the wicked receive terrible punishments (Kurahashi mentions the wicked stepmother being forced to dance to her death in the earlier versions of “Snow White”). In this regard, she contends that the contemporary tendency to cleanse classical tales of their “cruelty” is equivalent to removing the alcohol from a liquor in order to produce a harmless, aseptic drink (Kurahashi 1986b, 182). In contrast, Kurahashi believes that, far from being innocuous, good literature contains a “poison” that intoxicates readers and stimulates their imagination (she often uses the word doku or dokuyaku, conveying the image of a poison or a medical drug). Nonetheless, the “poison” of her fairy-tale retellings is too strong for children and is therefore aimed at adult readers, as she maintains in the afterword of Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults. This collection includes a retelling of “Urashima Tarō” entitled “Shin Urashima” (The New Urashima), where Kurahashi reenvisages the protagonist’s passage across different worlds and times, and twists the representation of the Dragon Palace, evoking the ambivalent notion of tokoyo no kuni. The title of Kurahashi’s story recalls Mori Ōgai’s “Shin Urashima” (The New Urashima),8 a translation of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819). In Irving’s story, set in the United States before the American Revolution, a Dutch-American villager falls asleep for many years after drinking the liquor that some strangely-dressed men offer him. When he wakes up and returns to his village, he discovers that the United States is no longer a British colony.9 Kurahashi’s Urashima Tarō is a forty-year-old fisherman living with his elderly mother who complains that her son, still a bachelor at forty, is too poor to get a wife. One day, he is out at sea but cannot catch anything except a large turtle, which gets tangled in his fishing net twice; he sets it free, irritated by the fact that the animal is scaring away the fish. Discouraged, he starts pondering the idea of eating turtle meat. (Here Kurahashi parodies the Buddhist trope of human kindness being rewarded by an animal.) However, the turtle appears again and offers to take him to the Dragon Palace. Urashima hesitates because he does not want to leave his mother alone but, eventually, he enters the shell of the turtle through a crevice and travels to the dim sea abyss in a “vessel of red flesh” similar to a coffin (Kurahashi 1984, 108). When he arrives at the Dragon Palace, he has the impression that he has seen it before and that Princess Otohime resembles his mother. The princess treats Urashima Tarō to a sumptuous banquet and entertains him so well that he forgets the passing of time. After a while, she suggests that he should return home, but the fisherman cannot resolve to leave. He keeps Chapter 5: Japanese Women Writers and Folktales

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repeating to the increasingly annoyed Otohime that he is returning to his village, but he ends up staying in the Dragon Palace for three years. Finally, the princess gives him a jeweled box as a souvenir for his mother, so he has no further excuses to postpone his departure, enters the shell of the turtle once again, and reaches his village. However, he soon realizes that everything has changed and that no one recognizes him. Suddenly he remembers that Princess Otohime told him to open the jeweled box if he were ever in trouble. As soon as he opens the lid, he is enveloped in a cloud of white smoke and becomes a newborn baby. Alerted by his wailings, a widow finds him and raises him as her own son. She gives him the name Urashima Tarō. The story ends with the sarcastic moral “Bachelors wish to return to their mother’s womb” (Kurahashi 1984, 110). Kurahashi’s story subverts and parodies various elements of “Urashima Tarō.” In many versions of this tale—from Tango no kuni fudōki to Mori Ōgai’s play Tamakushige futari Urashima (1902, The jeweled comb box and the two Urashima Taros)—Otohime tearfully tries to dissuade the fisherman from returning to the human world, but in Kurahashi’s story, she waits impatiently for him to leave and devises the stratagem of the jeweled box to hasten his departure. Kurahashi also inverts Urashima Tarō’s aging process, with a narrative twist reminiscent of the Edo period parodies (“The old wife and the jeweled box,” where the fisherman becomes a five-year-old boy). Moreover, she focuses on the relationship between the fisherman and his mother, which, according to Hayao Kawai, constitutes one of the main themes in the traditional tale. Drawing upon the Jungian psychoanalytic criticism, Kawai argues that the mother-son relationship in “Urashima Tarō” resembles that “between the Great Mother and a small, subordinate male God” (Kawai 1996, 96), and that Urashima Tarō represents the archetype of the eternal youth who wishes to return to the Great Mother’s womb—and sometimes dies in pursuit of his wish. In Kawai’s opinion, this archetype recurs in ancient texts such as Mizukagami (c.a. 1195, The water mirror) and Kojidan (c.a. 1212, Talks about ancient matters), which emphasize the youthful, almost child-like appearance of Urashima Tarō upon his return to the village. In Kurahashi’s story, the protagonist’s regression to the female womb is symbolized by his journey inside the turtle’s shell (described as a vessel of red flesh) and by Otohime’s resemblance to his mother. Whereas Kawai describes Urashima Tarō’s experience in the realm of the Dragon King in terms of a journey into the unconscious, Kurahashi links it to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Drawing upon the ambivalent notion of tokoyo no kuni, from the time before the undersea Dragon Palace became an established narrative topos, Kurahashi describes the fisherman’s visit to the Dragon Palace as a symbolic journey to the land of the dead. When he enters the crevice in the turtle’s shell, he feels as if he is stepping inside a coffin and, during his trip to the sea abyss, he falls into a profound sleep similar to death (Kurahashi 1984, 109). However, his symbolic death does not imply a journey forward in time, as in the classical representation of Urashima Tarō growing old. On the contrary, the protagonist moves backward through time, from adult life to the prenatal stage inside the womb, into a netherworld to which he keeps returning after each cycle of life. Significantly, on his arrival at the Dragon Palace, he has the impression that he has already been there before, and he will likely return to it, as the open ending of the tale implies: the final scene, when he becomes a newborn baby and is renamed Urashima Tarō, suggests that his story is going to take place again as it happened many times before. As her Urashima Tarō moves back and forth in time, constantly crossing the borders of different worlds, Kurahashi employs the motifs of the traditional tale to explore the boundaries between life and death. At the same time, she turns Urashima 74

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Tarō’s journey to the Dragon King’s palace into a metaphor for literature as an intoxicating trip to another world, which affects irremediably both writers and readers. This interpretation emerges in Back and Forth to Yomotsuhira Slope, where the tale of Urashima Tarō, together with other motifs of Japanese folklore and Greek mythology, sparks once again Kurahashi’s imagination. The title refers to the slope that divides the realm of the dead from the world of the living, and that appears in the myth of Izanagi and Izanami. The protagonist, a young man called Kei, reaches this slope by drinking the intoxicating cocktails served by a bartender named Kuki (a name that combines the ideograms of “nine” and “devil”), in a strange club. In each episode, these drinks trigger Kei’s mind trips to uncanny worlds beyond the boundaries of reality, where his adventures intersect with different folkloric and mythological narratives, including those of Urashima Tarō, the Snow Woman, Princess Kaguya, and Persephone. (Incidentally, Kuki’s cocktails evoke the strange liquor drunk by the protagonist of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.”) The motif of “Urashima Tarō” appears in two episodes, entitled “Ryokuin Suisei Mu” (Intoxicating Dream in the Tree Shadow) and “Setsudō Tōgen” (The Peach Spring in the Snow Cave). The former ironically re-envisions the conjugal life of Urashima Tarō and Otohime and, at the same time, sets “Urashima Tarō” against “Kantan no makura” (The Pillow of Kantan; Noh play version translated “Kantan”), a traditional Chinese narrative that also features a trip to another world where time flows differently. In this episode, Kei, his grandparents, and a woman called Miss Tabo drink one of Kuki’s cocktails and find themselves on a hill evoking the Yomotsuhira Slope. From there, they descend into a world shaped like an island—a detail reminiscent of the land of the immortals in the early versions of “Urashima Tarō.” Like Kamehime, who escorted Urashima Tarō to tokoyo no kuni, Miss Tabo leads Kei and his relatives to this supernatural island and treats them to a sumptuous banquet. The parallel with the tale of Urashima Tarō emerges when the feast is over and the protagonist wonders about the possibility of living with Miss Tabo. Kei had a sinister premonition about what would happen after that extraordinary banquet was over, but Miss Tabo turned her unmade-up face toward him and said that they would simply continue to live their current life. “I am not going to send you back with a jeweled box as a souvenir.” [Kei] “Then, I could live in the Dragon Palace forever.” “If you wish,” said Miss Tabo smiling, her narrow eyes sparkling with light. (Kurahashi 2005, 86). For hundreds of years, Kei enjoys an obliviously happy life with Miss Tabo, who cooks a large amount of food and organizes three banquets a day—a parody of both the famous banquet with which the Otohime welcomes Urashima Tarō and the housewives’ threemeals-a-day cooking in traditional, patriarchal societies. The couple spends their free time visiting the nearby village but, whenever they eat out, Kei feels that the food prepared in that “underworld” (gekai) does not suit his body and brings a sense of discomfort. The idyllic island of the immortals thus assumes the dark overtones of an underworld whose food makes humans unable to return to the world of the living—a representation that evokes both the myth of Persephone and that of Izanami and Izanagi. Moreover, as time passes, Kei notices

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a disturbing change in Miss Tabo: despite the fact that they live in the land of the immortals, she is growing old under the burden of married life, while he is not aging at all. Kei is upset by this discovery, as he believed his wife to be a yōkai, a supernatural creature beyond the constraints of time. However, when he confronts her, Miss Tabo explains that “even a yōkai ages when it becomes the wife of a human” (Kurahashi 2005, 91). Her words unveil the parodic overtones of Kurahashi’s adaptation, because they strip the relationship between Urashima Tarō and Otohime of its idyllic aura and turn it into a paradigm of married life in a traditional society with rigidly defined gender roles. In the last one hundred or two hundred years, Miss Tabo had cooked and served him countless amounts of food. She was going to bed later than him and was waking up earlier than him. … He had consumed her little by little. Kei realized that this was married life. (Kurahashi 2005, 91) Confronting himself with the true nature of his marriage, Kei feels that he is doomed to outlive his weakening wife and lead an eternal life of loneliness and insanity, so he wishes to end their relationship. At that very moment, he wakes up, his head on a strange pillow. He is in Kuki’s bar and not even a day has passed since he set on his fantastic journey, despite having spent hundreds of years on the island of the immortals. In Kurahashi’s adaptation of “Urashima Tarō,” the gap between the flow of time in the human world and in the other world is inverted (in the traditional narrative, one day in the Dragon Palace often corresponds to one hundred years in the human world) and evokes another folkloric intertext, “The Pillow of Kantan,” a tale where a young man borrows a pillow from a monk (Ryoō), falls asleep and envisions his future only to wake up and realize that only a few moments have passed.10 The motif of the visit to the Dragon Palace appears again in the course of Kei’s strange journeys, in the episode “The Peach Spring in the Snow Cave,” which combines the tale of Urashima Tarō and the narrative themes of “The Peach Blossom Spring,” like Ōba’s Urashima Grass. In this episode, Kei and Kuki go to another world by passing through a strange tunnel made of snow, reminiscent of the early notions of tokoyo no kuni. The inside of the tunnel is warm and similar to human flesh, so Kei has the impression of moving backward through the birth channel, to the world where he belonged before being born. His metaphorical journey inside the female womb retraces the path of Urashima Tarō’s travel in Kurahashi’s story “The New Urashima” and, in a similar way, ends up in a supernatural realm configured as the underworld. Here, Kei meets Persephone instead of Otohime (Kurahashi aptly captures the analogies between Urashima Tarō and both Japanese and Greek myths), is treated to a sumptuous banquet, and engages in sexual relations which are described in terms of food consumption.11 However, in order to return to the world of the living, he must expel the food eaten in the underworld, so he vomits a strange form that recalls a rotting corpse. Finally, on his way home, he draws a parallel between his fantastic trip to the underworld and the adventures of Urashima Tarō, when he asks Kuki: “Be it the Palace in the Snow Cave or The Peach Blossom Spring, when I return from such places, do I become a new Urashima Tarō?” (182). Urashima Tarō’s journey to the Dragon Palace becomes thus paradigmatic of Kei’s trips to the world of myth and folklore, where, at the end of the novel, he wishes to stay permanently.

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Conclusion Both Ōba and Kurahashi re-envision the traditional tale of Urashima Tarō from new perspectives. Ōba turns it into a narrative of cultural displacement that addresses the disastrous consequences of war, atomic waste, and human damage to the environment, in a way that prefigures contemporary ecocritical sensibilities. Drawing from the same tale, Kurahashi explores the porous boundaries between life and death and, with her characteristic irony, turns the idyllic marriage of Urashima Tarō and Otohime into a parody of traditional gender roles. Moreover, both Ōba’s and Kurahashi’s adaptations thematize the notion of storytelling and reflect on the role of literature from different viewpoints. In Urashimaso, Ōba elaborates on the motifs of time, memory, and human curiosity embedded in “Urashima Tarō” and links them to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the problematic reality of modern Japan. In this context, the content of Urashima Tarō’s jeweled box becomes emblematic of the thirst for knowledge and the human desires that have triggered the invention of the atomic bomb and can threaten the future of humanity. Nonetheless, as Marek argues in a conversation with Yukie’s Japanese relatives, the curiosity that compels Urashima Tarō to open the magic casket is the same that drives contemporary people to reflect on the “content” of the box and tell the younger generations about it. It’s man as he is that has succeeded in surviving up to now, and it would be conservative and even dangerous to demand that we “kill curiosity.” It easily becomes a threat that means: “Keep your nose out of anything that stinks”— especially when something needs hiding. Supposing we can denounce all these atrocities we’ve been committing—and lots of people want them to be called “atrocities,” I know—supposing we can denounce them—wouldn’t that also be an act of curiosity? Which means that curiosity may save us in the end! (191) Far from averting their eyes from the “atrocities” sealed inside the jeweled box, modernday Urashima Tarōs bear moral responsibility as observers and storytellers—the same sense of responsibility that informs Ōba’s novel. In contrast, in Kurahashi’s fiction, Urashima Tarō’s fantastic journey to the Dragon Palace becomes the metaphor for Kurahashi’s journey in the world of myth and folklore, to which she gains access through the “poisonous power” of literature. In the essay “Dokuyaku to shite no bungaku” (1966, Literature as a Poison), Kurahashi discusses several literary trends of her time and expresses her interest in literature as something that “negates the world”: like fairy tales, literature cannot be reduced to innocuous descriptions of the world, but must contain a “poisonous” element to stimulate readers. In her opinion, good literature is toxic: by injecting poison into the world, literature infects it with madness, peels its superficial skin, and overturns it. For this reason, in “Tenkyo no oshirase” (1966, Notification of an Address Change), Kurahashi argues that her role as a writer is not to describe the customs of her time in realistic novels but rather to throw a poisonous “foreign body” (ibutsu) made of words at her readers. She maintains that those who eat it will be intoxicated and will experience a different world where Eastern and Western demons, from both ancient and modern times, coexist. Kurahashi herself ironically admits that—exactly like Kei—she is continuously

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wandering between this world and the other world, in which she has decided to establish her residence. Virginia Woolf said that a woman needs a yearly income of 500 pounds and a room with a key to write novels but, before long, she ended up committing suicide. If I were to continue living in the mundane, chaotic world, I would like a yearly income of several billion yen and a study room like a temple or a castle. However, once you experience living in the underworld, you can easily find the conditions necessary to write a novel. You don’t even need to commit suicide. You just have to find a way to move freely back and forth from here to there. For this reason, I changed my residence to the underworld a long time ago. Though a little late, I would like to inform you. Please refrain from condolence visits. (Kurahashi 1966, 20) The role of her writing is thus similar to that of Kuki’s intoxicating drinks, which bring Kei/ Urashima Tarō—along with Kurahashi’s readers—into a surreal, cross-cultural world populated by the characters of East Asian and European folklore.

Notes 1

The reference to Mount Hōrai (in Chinese, Mont Penglai), together with the existence of Chinese folktales where turtles repay human kindness, hints at the Chinese origins of “Urashima Tarō” (Mifune 2009). 2 Ōba supports this interpretation in her travelogue Shima no kuni no shima (The Islands of the Islandcountry, 1982). 3 In this section, page numbers refer to Yu Ōba’s English translation of Urashima Grass. However, when page numbers are preceded by the author’s name and the publication date, they refer to the original Japanese text. 4 Yukie’s reflections also evoke Yume wo tsuru (Fishing Dreams, 1983), where Ōba describes her fascination for fairy tales and explains that her work as a writer consists in “fishing dreams.” 5 Ryū’s departure to war evokes both Urashima Tarō’s undersea trip and Izanagi’s visit to the underworld and, similarly, compromises the couple’s relationship. Incidentally, Yukie remembers “a Japanese myth in which a man went to the nether world to see a woman of his who had died” (267) when her relationship with Marek is about to end. 6 Marc Sebastian-Jones and Tateya Koichi have translated two tales from this collection, “Ningyo no namida” (A Mermaid’s Tears), based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” and “Issun Bōshi no koi” (The Love Affair of Issun Bōshi), a retelling of the Japanese tale “Issun Bōshi.” The translated tales are published in the journal Marvels & Tales (vol. 22, n.1, 2008, Wayne State UP). 7 For references on Kurahashi’s retelling of Western fairy tales, see: Luciana Cardi (2013) and Lucy Fraser (2017). 8 The first edition of Ōgai’s translation was entitled “Shin Sekai no Urashima” (Urashima of the New World). 9 Kurahashi’s Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults also includes “Kokyō” (Hometown), a story that adapts Ōgai’s “Chichi to Imoto” (1912, Father and Sister), which evokes the narrative patterns of “Urashima Tarō.” Ōgai’s story, in turn, is a translation of Wilhelm Scäfer’s “Der Amerikawillm” (1897). The protagonist of Scäfer’s tale, like Urashima Tarō in Ōba’s adaptation, leaves his hometown and his family to go to America, then returns many years later to find them changed beyond recognition. In addition to Ōgai’s translation, the title of Kurahashi’s tale also recalls Kōda Rohan’s parodic retelling Shin Urashima (1895, The New Urashima). For further references, see: Shindō Masahiro (2004), Ōtsuka Tatsui (2006), and Koda Aki (2016). 10 Tellingly, in this episode, Kei asks Kuki if his true identity is that of Ryoō, but Kuki replies that he is just a bartender. 11 For references on food and cannibalism in Kurahashi’s fiction, see Tomoko Aoyama’s Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (2008).

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References Anzu, M. & Umeda, Y. (1968). Shintō Jiten [Dictionary of Shintoism]. Osaka: Hori Shoten. Aoyama, T. (2008). Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Cardi, L. (2013). A Fool will never be Happy: Kurahashi Yumiko’s Retelling of ‘Snow White.’ (M. SebastianJones, ed.). Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 27 (2): 194–204. Fraser, L. (2017). The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hill, R. (2005). Displacements in Oba Minako’s Urashimaso: The Magic of the Third Space. Jinbun kenkyū / Kanagawa daigaku jinbun gakkai 155: 19–50. Kawai, H. (1996). The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan, 2nd ed. Woodstock: Spring Publications. Koda, A. (2016). “Der Amerikawillm”: Some Notes on Kurahashi Yumiko’s Adaptation of Mori Ogai’s Translation of a Nineteenth-century German Tale. Bulletin of the Graduate School (Toyo University) 53: 241–51. Kurahashi, Y. (1966). Tenkyo no oshirase [Notication of Change in Address]. In Mugen no utage [Feast of Dreams]. (pp. 16–21). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1970). Dokuyaku to shite no bungaku [Literature as a Poison, 1966]. In Watashi no naka no kare he [To him inside me]. (pp. 299–304). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1984). Otona no tame no zankoku dōwa [Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults]. Tokyo: Shinchō. ———. (1986a). Otona no dōwa [Fairy Tales for Adults, 1982]. In Saigo kara nibanme no dokusō [Second-tolast Poisonous Thoughts]. (pp. 97–101). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1986b). Zankokuna dōwa. [Cruel Fairy Tales, 1985]. In Saigo kara nibanme no dokusō [Second-to-last Poisonous Thoughts]. (pp. 131–32). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2005). Yomotsu hirasaka no ōkan [Back and Forth to the Slope of Yomotsuhira]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Matsuki, H. (1992). Mori Ōgai no honyaku: ‘Sensō’ ‘Shinsekai no Urashima’ ni megutte [Mori Ōgai’s translations: ‘Military chaplain’ and ‘Urashima of the New World’]. Ōtsuma kokubun 22: 105–15. Mifune, T. (2009). Urashima Tarō no Nihon shi [The Japanese history of Urashima Tarō]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan. Miura, S. (1989). Urashima Tarō no bungaku shi: ren’ai shōsetsu no hassei [The literary history of Urashima Tarō: The birth of romance novel]. Tokyo: Goryūshoin. Mori, K. (2001). Urashima densetsu no kenkyū [Research on the legend of Urashima]. Tokyo: Ōfū. Nishi, M. (1998). Urashima Tarō wa Nihon bungaku ka? [Does “Urashima Tarō” belong to Japanese literature?]. Nihon bungaku kyōkai dai gojūni kai taikai hōkoku [Bulletin of the 52nd Japanese Literature Association Convention] 33–44. Noma, H. & Ōba, M. (1977). Taidan: Urashimasō ni tsuite. [A conversation about Urashimasō] Tokyo: Kōdansha. Ōba, M. (1977). Urashimasō [Urashima Grass]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ————. (1982). Shima no kuni no shima [The Islands of the Island-country]. Tokyo: Ushio. ————. (1983). Yume wo tsuru [Fishing Dreams]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ————. (1995). Urashimaso. (Yu Ōba, trans.). Center for Inter-Cultural Studies and Education, Jōsai University, Saitama. Orbaugh, S. (2001). A Female Urashima Tarō: Ōba Minako’s Return to Japan. In Y. Nagashima (ed.), Return to Japan from “Pilgrimage” to the West, (pp. 300–319). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Ōtsuka, T. (2006). Urashima densetsu no kindaika wo megutte [On the modernization of the Legend of Urashima]. Gogaku bungaku 44: 1–10. Sakaguchi, T. (1955). Urashima setsuwa no kenkyū [Research on the Tale of Urashima]. Osaka: Shingensha. Shindō, M. (2004). Maihime to Shin Urashima: ikai no ōkan [The dancing girl and the new Urashima: Return trip to another world]. Mori Ōgai Kenkyū 10: 129–142. Tachibana Nemoto, R. (1996). Hiroshima in Ōba Minako’s Urashimasō: Desire and Self-Destructiveness. The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 30(1): 1–21.

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Chapter 6 Women and the Non-human Animal: Rewriting the Canine Classic—Tsushima Yūko, Tawada Yōko, Matsuura Rieko, and Sakuraba Kazuki Lucy Fraser  

An increasing number of Japanese women writers in the late 20th and early 21st century are writing canine-centric novels. This chapter focuses on women’s writing that engages with what I dub “canine classics”: well-known tales of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and more. The contemporary works are rich subjects of examination, questioning gendered nature-culture dynamics and offering sociohistorical commentary. These effects are produced by women writers who do not “overturn” but rather expand upon and explore the canine presence in the classic stories.

Introduction What does a Japanese woman writer in the 20th or 21st century see in a late 19th-century British imperialist narrative about India? Or an early 19th-century historical fantasy novel centered on male warriors in 15th-century Japan? The writers examined in this chapter are drawn to the dogs, wolves, and other canines that these classic works feature.1 In this chapter, I firstly take up Tsushima Yūko’s Warai ōkami (2000, Laughing Wolf), which is set in the early postwar years in Japan and structured around Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1893–1895) and Hector Malot’s Sans Famille (1878, Nobody’s Boy). Then, I turn to Tawada Yōko’s dynamic retelling of obscure Asian “dog bridegroom” folktales in Inumukoiri (1993, translated as The Bridegroom Was A Dog*). Finally, I look at retellings of the Japanese classic Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan of Southern Fusa,2 1814–1842) in two works: Sakuraba Kazuki’s Fuse: Gansaku Satomi hakkenden (2010, Fuse: A Counterfeit Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan) and Matsuura Rieko’s Kenshin (2007, The Dog’s Body). Literary animals offer a lens with which to gaze upon a particular society and a particular point in time. The works examined here reflect some of the shifting relationships of human

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and nonhuman animals in Japan in the context of modern nation building, colonization, war and its aftermath, changing ideas of gender and other social norms, and global mobilities of cultural products, ideas, and people. However, I argue, this is not their main aim but rather their effect. It is the trail of the canine presence itself that these contemporary authors are most dedicated to sniffing out. Growing bodies of work surrounding animals in literature have emerged in recent years: they are housed under labels such as eco-criticism, environmental humanities, animal studies, critical animal studies, animality studies, and more. However, the topic of re-imaginings of nonhuman animals in contemporary Japanese literature, particularly in the work of women writers, still deserves more attention. In the preface to the edited collection JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life, Pflugfelder (2005) observes that when this project was developed in the 2000s, “scholarly silence on nonhuman animals in Japan was practically deafening” (x). More than a decade later, Murakami Katsunao addresses the neglect of animals in studies of postwar Japanese literature with his award-wining monograph Dōbutsu no koe, tasha no koe (2017, The voice of the animal, the voice of the other). Murakami observes that existing research on animal literature tends to address individual works or individual authors foregrounding animals, with some work also done on animals in children’s books and classic literature (Murakami 2017, 22–23). He also notes that his own work in this area is focused on male authors, and predicts a great difference in the way women authors may represent animals, a topic that calls for further examination (338). One approach to the “nonhuman animal” in literature is to categorize works under their engagement with a particular creature. The Canidae family that is the subject of this chapter includes dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, dingoes, tanuki (raccoon dogs) and more. Dogs and wolves are the main focus here; foxes and tanuki are native to Japan, but they have quite different folkloric and narrative associations that deserve separate attention (e.g., Cardi 2020). Dogs and wolves have a long history in Japan. Although the Japanese (Honshu) wolf and the Hokkaido (Ezo) wolf have been extinct for over a century, wolves live on in the cultural imagination, and their image in Japan has morphed to include Western agricultural and fairy-tale interpretations of big, bad (male) wolves in particular. Imagined together—as they often are—dogs and wolves invoke ongoing tensions around domesticity and wildness. On the domestic side of this imaginary binary, however, cats have enjoyed far more time in the spotlight than dogs: from modern and contemporary Japanese authors and, correspondingly, literary critics. Japan’s literary love affair with cats is evident in the range of works from Natsume Sōseki’s famous Wagahai wa neko de aru (1905–1906, I Am A Cat*) to a spate of recent novels enjoying translation into English, such as Arikawa Hiro’s Tabi neko repōto (2012, translated as The Travelling Cat Chronicles*). However, while dogs are less popular, they have not been entirely neglected. Hakkenden and other such dogcentric favorites have been the subject of much research, and overviews such as Bungaku no naka no “inu” no hanashi (1995, Dogs in literature, Ochanomizu bungaku kenkyūkai, ed.) are also available. Notably, though, of some sixty-five Japanese literary works cited in the latter collection, only about eight have female authors. More canine works by women writers emerged from the 2000s; Takeuchi Kayo sees these works as a response to the lack of appealing literary depictions of dogs in 20th-century Japanese literature (2020, np). Literary animals are more than a light to shine on human society. The focus here is on the notion of the “real” animals that run among these texts. I argue that the contemporary works, though they explore gender in complex and troubling ways, should not be framed Chapter 6: Women and the Non-human Animal

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as “radical feminist retellings”; this presumes a simplicity and conservatism on the part of the source texts being retold, and glosses over their concern for actual canines. In fact, the source texts themselves have one eye open to the animal presence, and an ear cocked to the howl of the nonhuman. The retellings unearth animal presences in the page. They express a yearning for something “beyond the human” (Lundblad 2017, 1), and they explore the ethics and the impossibility of capturing and domesticating beasts—wild or otherwise—within the confines of human literary production.

Raised by wolves: Tsushima Yūko Tsushima Yūko (1947–2016) established her interest in canines from her debut work “Rekuiemu—inu to otona no tame ni” (1969, Requiem: For Dogs and Adults). Later in her career she was to engage with Hakkenden in “Fuse-hime” (1984, Princess Fuse) and with dogs again in the novella “Inu to hei ni tsuite” (2014, Of Dogs and Walls*). Tsushima’s highly regarded work delves into the inner worlds of its characters, often women, as well as exploring the experiences and effects of imperialism, colonization, and conflict. Her multilayered, groundbreaking literary style shows her enormously diverse breadth of reading and interests. As well as classic Japanese literature and many other traditions, Tsushima became particularly interested in oral literatures such as the epic chants (yukar) of the Ainu people, contributing to their translation into both Japanese and French. Here I will examine one of Tsushima’s later works that forms an extended expression of this interest in canines: the novel Warai ōkami. Laughing Wolf covers major themes associated with Tsushima’s writing and her own life: a female character experiencing the death of an older brother with physical and cognitive disabilities; an absent father; and a psychological conflict with a mother. At the same time, the novel is deeply entangled with two Western canine classics. The first is Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, comprising a collection of stories published as The Jungle Book, 1893–1894, and The Second Jungle Book, 1895. The second is Hector Malot’s French novel Sans Famille (1878, Nobody’s Boy). Laughing Wolf opens with a young man who remembers himself as a four-year-old living with his impoverished father in a fire-bombed Tokyo cemetery. The two led a wild existence, sleeping under dead leaves, catching and eating wild birds, urinating into the snow in the graveyard. On the loss of his father, the boy is officially designated an “orphan”; he is taken into “civilization” and raised in a home. At the age of seventeen, the young man seeks out a twelve-year-old girl with whom he feels a strange connection. As a four-year-old in the graveyard, the boy discovered the body of the girl’s father, dead in a sordid love-affair suicide. The girl grew up with a disabled older brother who has now died, and she has a somewhat distanced and troubled relationship with her mother. The lonely young man invites the girl on a trip that begins with a night train out of Tokyo. The book follows their travels as they zigzag through time and space into different situations in the aftermath of World War II. The postwar Japan scenes of disaster and poverty that the two encounter illuminate, in ways that are both down-to-earth and dreamlike, the difficult circumstances faced by ordinary people in this period. Excerpts from newspaper articles (from the young man’s collection of clippings) are placed throughout the novel, often at the end of a chapter so that they seem to provide reflective evidence and context for the experiences that have just been described through the children’s point of view.

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The young protagonists frame themselves and their own experiences through two canine classics about orphans. For the first half of the novel, the children adopt names from characters in Kipling’s The Jungle Books: the young man bestows their monikers, dubbing himself after the wise wolf leader Akela; the girl he names Mowgli after the defenseless human boy in need of protection in the harsh jungle world. While The Jungle Books may now be considered rife with problematic imperialist and orientalist ideas, they are also beguiling and poetic narratives of adventure and savage nobility. Tsushima’s protagonist Akela is drawn to the dignity of the world of Kipling’s jungle, the clear rules that govern it, and the sense of community and connection between its inhabitants, into which the orphaned and alien human child Mowgli is inducted. Kipling’s jungle chant, “We be of one blood, ye and I,” becomes the young people’s repeated refrain through their journeys. Equally this pack identity helps Akela, in Tsushima’s book, to articulate his sense of isolation from others in his own life, as he dismisses the irritating people around them as lawless, trouble-making monkeys who do not respect the jungle’s sophisticated social hierarchy. However, Akela soon second-guesses his choice of namesake. “Akela began to regret all over again that he had chosen to become Akela. Why had he selected that name? In The Jungle Book, Akela eventually fails during a hunt and has to cede his position as leader of the pack; and when he grows old, he meets the fate that all must suffer” (Tsushima 2011, 46). Perhaps the powerful serpent Kaa or the devoted bear Baloo would have been preferable, he thinks. He reflects very little on his choice of Mowgli for the girl, assuming that she is very much like the “wretched, naked little one” with “neither claws nor fangs” (80) in need of paternal care and guidance. Like her namesake, Mowgli certainly holds her own in their adventures; however, having grown up with her mother in relative suburban comfort, the orphan boy role does not seem entirely apt for this girl; rather, it is the young man who lived in the wild conditions of the graveyard who more closely resembles a human child raised by wolves. About halfway through Tsushima’s story, the young man decides that they will drop their Jungle Book names and instead refer to themselves as Remi and Capi. These names are taken from, respectively, the orphan boy and clever (male) dog from Hector Malot’s French novel Sans Famille, which was first translated into Japanese in 1903 by Gorai Kinzō as Mada minu oya (Parents Yet Unseen), with subsequent translations and film adaptations released over the next few decades. Tsushima’s child characters show themselves to be familiar with both the (translated) novel and the film and its music, likely the Japanese music written for the 1935 Japan release of a 1934 French film adaptation (Shouji 1935, “Ie naki ko”). Nobody’s Boy is another tale of a wandering human “orphan” who enjoys animal companionship and eventually finds a home, reunited with his kind, wealthy human family. The Jungle Books and Nobody’s Boy are mediated for the reader of Laughing Wolf through the perspectives of the young people, who approach these classics with a youthful, selfcentered confidence in their position as central actors and protagonists in their own stories. Mowgli is rightly frustrated when she is asked to re-identify as Capi, realizing that this dog companion is a sidekick to the orphan boy narrator, Remi. She begrudgingly accepts the role when Akela/Remi points out how clever Capi is (Tsushima 2011, 125). Likewise, Akela/Remi’s use of these books makes painfully transparent his desire for a real family to belong to, which is what drove him to seek out the girl Mowgli/Capi in the beginning. Like Tsushima herself, the child characters also manipulate these texts; Akela/Remi says that he changed the

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endings when reading them to the younger orphans in his home, leaving out the reunions with real mothers so as to avoid building expectations (2011, 145). Certainly, the children’s intertextual sources seem anthropocentric. The dogs in Nobody’s Boy are narrated by their masters, largely the first-person narrator Remi; they have no voice of their own and they are forever at the whim of human cruelty and kindness. And The Jungle Books have been particularly accused of projecting problematic human hierarchies onto nonhuman animal societies. While the accusation is justified, this approach can elide some of the works’ appeal. Kipling sketches animal behaviors with a sharp eye; as Kaori Nagai points out, imperialist allegories in this text “coexist with Kipling’s awareness of, and adoration for, ‘real’ animals in the Empire” (Nagai 2015, 234), and his depictions were admired at the time of publication for their understanding of animals via knowledge of Indian folklore and jungle tales (C. Stein, 1896, cited in Nagai 2015, 235). Laughing Wolf displays a similar authorial attention to animal behaviors and presences that are perhaps not always remarked upon by the protagonists themselves. Tsushima’s novel seems to embody Donna Haraway’s assertion in The Companion Species Manifesto that “Dogs are not here just to think with. They are here to live with” (Haraway 2003, 5). The narrative and the postwar Japanese setting of Laughing Wolf runs wild with dogs, so that human characters and readers are forced to contend with them. Tsushima’s opening Prelude does not focus on the human history that created the postwar setting; its aim instead seems to be to emphasize the sociocultural importance of “real” canines, forming a short treatise on the history of wolves and dogs in Japan. It begins with describing the historical figure Hiraiwa Yonekichi, who kept wolves and researched canines, including their literary and cultural representations; we also read of Ainu people’s veneration of the Hokkaido (Ezo) wolf, and details about the extinction of wolves in regions in Japan, Europe, and the United States. The Prelude ends thus: The Japanese wolf went extinct in 1905, the year the Russo-Japanese War ended. A little more than thirty years later, the Japanese islands were engulfed first in the war with China and then in the Pacific War, which ended in 1945 with Japan’s unconditional surrender. The Japanese wolf was no longer around, but as things turned out, wild dogs who had lost their masters could be spotted running through the smouldering ruins of Japan’s cities. (10) The novel’s canines may be metaphors for the difficult existence of ordinary Japanese people in the aftermath of the war, but more literal examples also feature. Dogs and wolves manifest Tsushima’s great interest in everyday human and animal lives in relation to national and international conditions. In Laughing Wolf, dogs show up everywhere in the real time of the young man and the girl. Many are feral or semi-wild presences, eking out an existence in a difficult world alongside their human compatriots. Akela/Remi and Mowgli/Capi encounter independent dogs who follow them about. At one point they are even attacked by wild dogs; indeed, this is one of the story’s events substantiated by newspaper articles from 1947 at the end of the chapter (Tsushima 2011, 178). In contrast to these encounters with strays and dangerous dogs, they occasionally see someone walking a pet on a leash, and Mowgli/Capi also sadly recalls her own family dog, a “mutt that had once lived at some other house in the neighborhood,” killed by the dogcatcher when it strayed from home (2011, 134). As Skabelund (2011, 171–97) 84

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shows in Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World, the severe conditions of wartime and immediately postwar Japan made dog-ownership far out of the reach of ordinary people; those who did own dogs mostly adopted or received mixed breeds rather than buying purebreds from breeders or pet shops. However, over the following decades of economic recovery and growth, canine companions of recognizable and well-known breeds gradually become an evocative marker of middle-class family comfort. Tsushima’s novel, which skips unpredictably around the early postwar years, thus traces and foreshadows these social shifts. And, as Reiko Abe Auestad puts it, Laughing Wolf “not only weaves together stories of personal losses with public losses” but also addresses ethical questions for human obligations around the physical space we share and inhabit with other creatures, “staging for us an imaginary scene of an interspecies coexistence of humans and animals” (Auestad 2018, 4). Tsushima’s work acknowledges animal histories as part of human histories, and vice versa. Animals in her writing are both metaphor and beyond metaphor; her great interest in indigenous storytelling, including Ainu epic chants, may have informed this attitude (cf. Murakami 2020). Moreover, her use of dog and wolf imagery is embedded in corporeal reality. In its focus on the minutiae of postwar experiences, Laughing Wolf is drenched with bodily experiences of excrement, illness and infection, death and decomposition. Diarrhea is mentioned from the first pages—living in the cemetery, the four-year-old boy and his father suffer from poor nutrition and uncomfortable bowel movements. The condition again takes a leading role during the children’s journey, and both suffer from various unpleasant ailments. We read in excruciating realism as the girl suffers from lack of access to a private toilet on a crowded train, and with a cramping stomach is forced to use the toilet in front of others (Tsushima 2011, 109); later she soils herself and vomits as she seems to momentarily suffer from cholera (153). Akela/Remi even violently kicks a dog that sniffs at his (Akela/Remi’s) excrement, worried that the dog will also be infected with cholera should he eat it (174). Works such as Tsushima’s challenge the romanticism and mysticism that surrounds women’s bodies in the canon of modern Japanese literature and even canonized animal fairy tales such as “The Crane Wife,” which celebrate elegant, “pathetic” feminine figures (cf. Kobayashi 2015). Dogs in particular, with their messy interactions with the detritus of human society and their own waste, seem to appeal to women writers dealing in the personal repercussions of difficult social realities. The Jungle Books and Nobody’s Boy are not so interested in the unpleasant messiness of animal bodies, human and nonhuman. In Laughing Wolf, Tsushima’s extends the earthiness of these old favorites. Other women writers, as we shall see, excavate similar unpleasant realities of female bodies from the classic texts; the sources often contain the bones of such truths, but canonization and romanticization saw them obscured in modern periods.

The call of the wild: Tawada Yōko The radical contemporary writer, Tawada Yōko, use canines to insist on the corporeality of female bodies and in doing so explore complex sociocultural interactions through individual figures. As in Tsushima’s work, Tawada presents canine imagery by re-examining traditional texts and tales, yet she does not reduce dogs, wolves, and foxes to metonyms for human

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traits. While they are entirely rendered by words, these nonhuman animals seem to retain some sense of realness, of an existence independent to human cultural production. Tawada Yōko also voices another call of the wild: one felt by people trapped in suburban civilization, in her early novella Inumukoiri. Tawada was born (in 1960) and raised in Japan, but moved to Germany in her early twenties and has been based in Germany ever since. She writes fiction, essays, and poetry in both Japanese and her second language, German. Unlike Tsushima’s work described above (and indeed, unlike other works by Tawada herself), The Bridegroom Was a Dog does not highlight actual nonhuman animal bodies. With only a single mention of neighborhood cats and dogs (Tawada 2012, 29), the narrative instead focuses on humans. Its protagonist is Kitamura Mitsuko, a somewhat offbeat woman in her late thirties, who is the owner-teacher of a local cram school. A young man in his twenties, who gives his name as Tarō, a generic suffix on the names of male folktale heroes,3 appears at Mitsuko’s house one day and initiates a kind of love affair. His behavior—including his sexual behavior—is dog-like, characterized by licking, sniffing, panting, and gobbling large meals. Tarō’s family name is later revealed to be Iinuma, which includes inu, the Japanese word for dog. He has left his wife Ryōko, who seems associated with a different canine, the fox. Mitsuko, who becomes obsessed with smells after living with Tarō, notices when visiting that Ryōko’s house smells like inari fried bean curd (43), which, in Japanese folklore, foxes are known to love. In the end, the characters’ relationships shift into a new formation: Tarō is spotted leaving town with another man with whom he was vaguely rumored to be “playing around” (45). And Mitsuko says she has “escaped” with Fukiko (59), the daughter of the same man and one of her cram school students, whom she had already informally adopted. Like Tsushima, Tawada draws from oral storytelling traditions that are both connected to and beyond the Japanese literary canon. The novella, Inumukoiri, takes its title from folktales of the same name (“The Dog Bridegroom”). In many versions of these folktales, a young girl is promised in marriage to a dog, in return for the dog cleaning up her feces or by cleaning her bottom after toileting, which he does by eating or licking (Fukuda 1994). These stories and their endless variants are introduced to the reader in the first pages of the novella, which describe how Mitsuko has related this tale to her students, and how the students then relate their own, different versions to their mothers. The anxious mothers reassure themselves that this earthy story is acceptable as “authentic”: “someone who was taking a class in folklore at the Culture Center swore she’d seen that story in one of her books” (10). The story truly is “authentic,” found in many parts of Asia, and, as we shall see in the next section, indirectly influencing some Japanese literary classics also. As Mayako Murai details in her book From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West, Tawada’s story was inspired by Fukuda Akira’s research on different variants of the dog bridegroom tales across Asia (Murai 2015, 49). Murai discusses Tawada’s interest in the border-crossing nature of these dog folktales as opposed to the masculinist tale of Momotarō, pointing out that Tawada’s “aversion to ‘Momotarō,’ a tale once used to advocate Japan’s military invasion of other parts of Asia, seems to stem from her postcolonial standpoint and her transnational solidarity with diverse yet closely interrelated narrative traditions in Asia” (48–49). Tawada joyfully explores the possibilities the neglected, bordercrossing folktales introduce into the seemingly ordinary suburban setting. Tawada’s novella imagines what happens when people take on canine behaviors, confounding what Skabelund, in his history of dogs in Japan, calls “civilizationist discourses.” Skabelund writes that: 86

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The underlying expectation that dogs ought to adhere to a set of standards defined as civilized in the nineteenth century persists. People expect that canines ought to be and act completely domesticated, to conform to human control by not straying but staying close by (and even next to or under the same roof as) their human companion(s), and if they hunt at all, it should be for humans rather than for themselves. … In short, most people still expect dogs to not transgress the boundaries between culture and nature, domesticity and wildness. (Skabelund 2011, 195.) We see the local mothers of the students at the cram school trying to understand Mitsuko as well as their own children within a frame of civilized respectability that shares much with the expectations that humans impose on dogs. The adults, then, attempt to enforce the boundaries that Skabelund describes. However, the boundaries are increasingly exposed as artificial, and underpinning the mothers’ responses is a wistful fascination and desire for animality and otherness, as though they feel a tiny echo of the howl of the wild that Mitsuko, Iinuma, and others are more attuned to. Even before the appearance of the human-dog Tarō, Mitsuko is associated with base bodily functions, in no small part due to the time she spends with children in her role as a teacher. Instead of enforcing grooming and cleanliness, she seems to share their fascination with snot, nose wiping, bottom wiping, and bodies. In one scene, the girl students ask about Mitsuko’s large breasts, and she simply pulls down her top to show them; this makes the girls giggle but the boys cringe and hide (Tawada 2012, 16). When the parents hear rumors of conversations and encounters concerning snot and the like, they are vaguely disturbed but also flummoxed by the rules governing their social interactions. Unable to pinpoint what is happening or articulate the incursion, they decide that “Mitsuko might be telling her pupils about ‘dirty’ things on purpose, for educational reasons” (6). But “long after the kids had forgotten all about it” the mothers cannot help but recall the second-hand stories of Mitsuko’s advice about “snot paper,” the claim that it feels nice to re-use a tissue you have used to wipe your nose with (7). Again, when the man Tarō moves in, they are vaguely titillated and scandalized: “Mitsuko’s name was soon on the mothers’ lips throughout the apartment complex, along with the phrase ‘cutting the grass’, which took on a special meaning, though no one could have told you exactly what it was” (26). The narratives that Tsushima engaged with are strongly associated with children—The Jungle Books and Nobody’s Boy feature boy protagonists and are considered children’s classics. Folktales in general are also commonly viewed as children’s stories, though “The Dog Bridegroom” would not be considered appropriate material, as Tawada shows. The characters’ use of these canine classics highlights the important role of children as readers and very active retellers of old favorites. Tsushima’s orphans discuss and modify their favorite parts of The Jungle Books and Nobody’s Boy. Tawada also shows children retelling stories, giving their own spin to the dog bridegroom tale in ways that both reverse and reflect its transmission and divergence into different versions (Murai 2015, 53). Tawada also plays with ideas of children as animal-like, dirty little beasts in need of training and civilizing. She places children at the heart of her tale, pitching a mother-child relationship between Mitsuko and Fukiko. The two escape together, overriding the romantic, heterosexual pairing of Mitsuko and Tarō which—according to contemporary expectations around folktales and fairy tales, and according to social niceties as voiced by their very Chapter 6: Women and the Non-human Animal

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proper neighbor Mrs Orita—should have progressed to marriage at the end of the story. Nonetheless, Mitsuko’s and Fukiko’s bond is not reduced to sentimental stereotyping about maternal instincts and pure children. Fukiko herself defies the romanticization of the child; like her classmates, she is irrepressibly grotty and real. She is not especially smart but can be somewhat rude; she “hated books, and didn’t really care for food, either, unless it was flavored with ketchup or mayonnaise” (Tawada 2012, 52), and inspires in Mistuko “a love akin to irritation … so strong it hurt” (53). Laughing Wolf also muses on the ways childhood reading shapes our interactions with dogs, wolves, and other canines. While the dog may be a familiar friend, most readers are more likely to meet wolves in stories than face-to-face. But this exciting narrative encounter for a young reader can translate into action, such as departure from the safety of suburban life. Tawada uses canines to write about being haunted by, and about yearning for, wilderness, for the “other” animal world that overlaps our own. To invoke dogs, wolves, foxes, and other canines is to confound the very borders that, as Skabelund describes, humans expect dogs not to transgress. These non-human creatures speak to Tawada’s embodied experiences of bilingualism, of life as a Japanese woman writer outside of Japan. Tawada finds that classic narratives offer pathways for challenging entrenched norms, and pathways for the search for something “beyond the human.”

Metamorphosis: Matsuura Rieko and Sakuraba Kazuki Close relationships between women and dogs, as found in dog-bridegroom folktales, have been imagined in more recent novels by Matsuura Rieko and Sakuraba Kazuki. A similar, related dog-bridegroom story, the Chinese legend “Pán Hù,” forms the basis of an origin story for the heroic “dog warriors” in Japan’s foremost canine classic, Nansō Satomi hakkenden, Kyokutei Bakin’s epic novel first published in serial form 1814–1842. As we will see, Sakuraba retells (parts of) Bakin’s tale directly, while Matsuura takes it up in a more roundabout way. Both works extend and explore the possibilities of the human-animal connections proposed in Bakin’s novel, particularly using events of shape-shifting and physical change. Bakin’s early modern masterpiece Hakkenden is a sprawling historical novel set in 15thcentury Japan around Nansō (what is now Chiba Prefecture). It traces the revival and rise to power of one Satomi clan via eight male “dog” warriors (hakkenshi), who are born of a spiritual union between a human princess and a male dog. Bakin himself makes complex use of numerous intertextual techniques such as parody, allusion, quotation, retelling, and more, drawing upon Chinese classics such as Water Margin (Shuǐ hǔ zhuàn, or Suikoden in Japanese), as well as, of course, his Japanese literary forebears and contemporaries. One of the best-known episodes of Hakkenden is the aforementioned human-dog union that creates the dog warriors. The besieged General jokes that he will give his daughter’s hand in marriage to his loyal dog if the dog brings him the head of the enemy general. When the dog achieves this seemingly impossible task, the noble Princess Fuse keeps her father’s word and retreats with the dog into the wilderness. There she piously prays and refuses to consummate the marriage, bringing the dog to enlightenment with her own pure spirit. Through their spiritual connection she then becomes mysteriously pregnant. When confronted by her family and attendants who have sought her out in the wild, she cuts open her swollen belly to prove this is no ordinary pregnancy: she births not children but mystical beads, dying as she does

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so. The beads scatter, and to each recipient is born a child who will become one of the eight legendary dog warriors who restore the Satomi clan to glory. The centuries since the publication of Bakin’s novel have seen waves in its popularity and a number of retellings across different formats. Tsushima Yūko’s close engagement with canine classics is evident in the fact that she also retells this episode in “Fuse-hime” (Princess Fuse), a story with a contemporary setting included in Ōma monogatari (1984, Twilight Tales) (cf. Monnet 1993). One 21st-century woman writer to take up Bakin’s story is Sakuraba Kazuki (1971). Sakuraba is an author of a range of works, from the GOSICK popular series for young adults to literary fiction such as Watashi no otoko (2007, My Man) that has been adapted to film. Her retelling, Fuse: Gansaku Satomi hakkenden was, like Bakin’s, a novel originally published in serial format (in Shūkan bunshun magazine from 2009 to 2010; a modified and expanded stand-alone novel version was then published in 2010). Sakuraba takes her lead from Bakin’s sharp observations of canine behavior and doghuman interactions, for example: [General] Yoshizane looked and saw that it was big-boned and sharp-eyed, twice as tall as the average dog, and its drooping ears and curly tail were such to evoke love in the onlooker, and a desire to train him up as one’s own. His coat was white with black intermingled, with eight spots scattered over the length and girth of his body, so that Yoshizane named him Yatsufusa. (Kyokutei [1814] 2021, 160) While Bakin insists on Fuse-hime’s piety in her “marriage” with the dog Yatsufusa, Sakuraba’s take is more grittily embodied and is in some ways a return to earlier dog-bridegroom stories (cf. Fraser 2018). Sakuraba’s princess listens to the call of the wild, becoming uncivilized very quickly. She loses an eye in her time in the forest and returns to the human world pregnant, with no sanitized, mystical explanation for her condition. In fact, Sakuraba shifts most of her human characters closer to the “beast” end of the spectrum. We find the dog heroes have been turned to villains. No longer Bakin’s kenshi warriors of dog-descent whose virtue triumphs over their beastly aspect (Walley 2017, 271), they are now dubbed fuse after their mother: they take human form but have a canine sensibility, falling prey to the base instincts to fight and kill and feed. Though they live in the city of Edo, they also hear a call of the wild, making a wistful pilgrimage to the forest of their origins where Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa had retreated from human society and conceived their ancestors. In another instance, the girl Hamaji, who in Bakin’s work is a tragic victim of lost love, becomes in Sakuraba’s take a young hunter from the mountains who has a nose for her prey, seeking out and killing the dog-human fuse who plague Edo. Sakuraba also plays with human notions of gender and childhood in ways that, rather than being entirely contemporary innovations, hark back to Bakin’s work. Sakuraba’s Hamaji, as noted, is characterized by her very unfeminine hunting skills. Other female characters of Sakuraba’s who depart from gender norms include the proprietor of an eatery, Funamushi, whose murky past as a thief links to Bakin’s scheming woman of the same name. Sakuraba also introduces female fuse dog-hybrids, equally dangerous as their male counterparts. Likewise, Sakuraba’s dog-human Shino is a male kabuki player of female roles, much admired for his sensitive beauty (2010, 280). This must be a nod to Bakin’s Shino, whose parents give him a female name and dress him as a girl in his early years (Kyokutei, [1814–1842] 2003-2004, Chapter 6: Women and the Non-human Animal

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II.IV.XVII; 1, 401–2.). In fact, Sakuraba seems to take up Bakin’s imaginings of cross-dressing and gender-swapping and general “penchant for blurring gender categories” (Walley 2017, 200). For example, Sakuraba also revises Fuse-hime’s brother into a sickly boy who, to the horror of their father the General, likes to play with dolls and dreams of being a courtesan when he grows up (Sakuraba 2010, 127–29). Human gender norms are thus exposed as cultured and artificial by these figures and scenes of performance and by the animal presence that leaps from Bakin’s story to Sakuraba’s. Matsuura Rieko’s novel Kenshin makes many nods to canine classics, including direct mentions of Hakkenden and “The Dog Bridegroom” (Matsuura 2007, 24), and allusions to others such as Tawada’s novella.4 The novel is not a parodic or unauthorized retelling as Sakuraba’s “Counterfeit Hakkenden” was. Instead, as the title indicates, Matsuura’s novel is about transforming both bodies and texts: Kenshin uses the characters for “dog” and “body” and plays on the word henshin, metamorphosis. Fantastical physical changes set off a chain of unexpected events in Matsuura’s work, as seen in her earlier Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (1993, translated as The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P: A Novel*), which begins with a young woman whose toe transforms into a penis. Matsuura’s key revisioning of Hakkenden lies in the relationship at the heart of her novel. Kenshin is told from the perspective of Yatsuzuka Fusae, a woman in her thirties; the first characters from each name, when combined, form Yatsufusa, the name of the dog husband in Hakkenden. Indeed, Fusae has for her whole life felt that she is a dog born in a human body, describing herself as “dog sexual” and suffering from “species identity disorder.” With the help of a mysteriously powerful werewolf, she is able to achieve her dream of transforming into a dog, retaining her identity but physically becoming a male dog, Fusa (who is later de-sexed). This dog becomes the loving companion to a human woman named Tamaishi Azusa, who is ill-treated by human men. The name Tamaishi Azusa also recalls a Hakkenden character, Tamazusa, who is a kind of femme fatale—likewise ill-treated by men—who embodies yet more canine connections. In Hakkenden, Tamazusa is the one to curse the General: “I will lead your descendants along the way of beasts—I shall make them dogs of the passions of this world!” (Kyokutei 1814 [2020], 131). The General executes Tamazusa, and her “angry spirit” (Walley 2017, 262 citing Kyokutei Chapter VIII) returns to exert an influence on a tanuki that suckles the orphaned puppy Yatsufusa, confounding Japanese lore that tanuki and dogs, while fellow canines, are natural enemies. In other words, Bakin’s original character Tamazusa is a pseudo-, cross-species mother to the dog who will later marry a human princess. Where many retellings of Hakkenden, including Tsushima’s “Fuse-hime,” pick up on the provocative pairing of a human woman and dog bridegroom, Matsuura chooses to retell a more obscure and even more convoluted human-canine connection involving two women, a dog, and a tanuki. Takeuchi Kayo describes the relationship between Matsuura’s womanturned-dog Fusae/Fusa and the human woman as “a relationship that has transcended the gender binary, and yet is simultaneously one of love between two women—a complex and ambiguous relationship based on an ethics of care that can only be called queer” (Takeuchi 2020, 150). In Hakkenden the direct connection between the woman Tamazusa and the dog Yatsufusa occurs via the tanuki who suckles the puppy. However, in Kenshin, the relationship between dog and woman reflects neither the malignant transmission of a curse nor the maternal nurturing from Bakin’s story. Instead, theirs is a “companion species relationship”

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of “mutual dependence” and “mutual care” (Takeuchi 2020, 147f.; cf. Haraway), one that extends and invigorates the queer possibilities offered by Hakkenden. What Matsuura seems to take from Bakin is his habit of confounding the limits of physical forms: characters can and do change gender, species, and form. They can even return from the dead: Fusa does so in Kenshin. Likewise, in Hakkenden, after their tragic deaths, Princess Fuse and Yatsufusa re-appear to other characters in close companionship, the princess riding on the dog’s back. Again, we see that shapeshifting and challenges to gender and sexuality norms that are latent in the classic source texts are unearthed by contemporary authors. Retellings of Hakkenden in the intervening years have very much enjoyed the witchy figure of Tamazusa and the virtuous sword-fighting dog warriors. They have been less excited, we might say, by its quite thoughtful troubling of hierarchies (cf. Walley 2017).

Conclusion Dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, and tanuki have featured in many literary works by Japanese women, with dogs enjoying more time in the limelight in recent decades. One strand of canine literary works is writings such as these, that take up “canine classics.” As I have argued, the authors I have discussed do not simply overturn the conservative, simple classics: rather, they are drawn to the scent of “real animals” they find in these source texts, and engage with their more complex aspects. This is seen in the work of another woman author not touched upon in this chapter: Itō Hiromi, who is known as a poet of the female body, of birth, and now of ageing, and who expresses an interest in canines across many of her works. In her poem “Watashi wa Chitō deshita” (2007, translated as I Am Chito*), Itō draws upon her childhood reading of the canine classic “Tito, the Story of the Coyote that Learned How,” which is featured in Lives of the Hunted, published in 1901 by Canadian author Ernest Thompson-Seton (1860–1946). In the poem, Itō explores the reasons she moved from Japan to the US (which she did in the 1990s): When people asked me why I’d come, I said I’m a poet, I’ve come to learn about the oral traditions of the Native Americans And that was true. (Itō 2017) But she adds another reason, a base animal instinct to follow a partner, a possible mate: There was someone I barely knew, I’d only barely caught his scent But still I followed my nose and pursued him. (Itō 2017) Beyond that still is a desire to connect with actual animals, a call of the wild heard from the words on the page of the beloved story by Seton that she read when she was young, and rediscovered as an adult: But the real reason I came Was because I wanted to encounter a coyote I wanted to prick up my ears and listen to its howl Rattling dryly over the roads, through the darkness of night. (Itō 2017)

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In this way, Tsushima, Tawada, Sakuraba, and Matsuura listen to the echoes of canine howls, and dig up the bones of canine classics, reminding us that there is still much to be gained from another gnaw.

Notes 1

My thanks to Laura Clark and Sam Schraag for their support and wisdom. This is Walley’s title translation (Walley 2021, xiv). 3 For example, Momotarō (peach boy, who is born from a peach), and Kintarō (golden boy, who wears the kanji character kin for “gold” on his bib), and more. 4 See Satō (2008) for a discussion of the different ways in which intertextual references function in the work. 2

References Arikawa, H. (2019). The Travelling Cat Chronicles (P. Gabriel, trans.). London: Random House. (Original work published 2012) Cardi, L. (2020). A Japanese fox in a woman’s body: Shifting performances of femininity in Kij Johnson’s reworking of Konjaku Monogatari. In I. Holca and C. Săpunaru Tămaş (eds.), Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture (pp. 17–33). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Fukuda, A. (1994). Inumukoiri [The Dog-Husband]. In Inada K., Kawabata T., Mihara Y., Ōshima T. & Fukuda A., (eds.), Nihon mukashibanashi jiten [Dictionary of Japanese Folktales] (pp. 71–73). Tokyo: Kōbundō. Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Itō, H. (2017). I Am Chito. (J. Angles, trans.). Poetry Foundation. July/August. (Accessed 4 September, 2021). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142862/i-am-chito. (Original work published 2007) Kipling, R. (2015). The Jungle Books. Illinois: Top Five Books. (Original work published 1893–1895) Kobayashi, F. (2015). Japanese Animal-Wife Tales: Narrating Gender Reality in Japanese Folktale Tradition. New York: Peter Lang. Kyokutei, B. (2003–2004). Nansō Satomi hakkenden [The lives of the eight dogs of the Satomi clan of Southern Fusa]. In Hamada Keisuke (ed.), Shinchō Nihon koten shūsei bekkan (Shinchō Japanese classical collection, special volumes): Nansō Satomi hakkenden. (12 vols.). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. (Original work 1814–1842) Kyokutei, B. (2021). Eight Dogs, or Hakkenden: Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest (Glynne Walley, trans.). Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press. (Original work 1814) Lundblad, M. (2017). Introduction: The end of the animal—Literary and cultural animalities.” In M. Lundblad, (ed.), Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human (pp. 1–21). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Matsuura, R. (2009). The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. (M. Emmerich, trans.). New York: Kodansha. (Original work published 1993) Monnet, L. (1993). The Politics of Miscengenation: The Discourse of Fantasy in “Fusehime” by Tsushima Yūko. Japan Forum 5(1): 53–73. Murai, M. (2015). From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Murakami, K. (2017). Dōbutsu no koe, tasha no koe [The voice of the animal, the voice of the other]. Tokyo: Shinyosha. ———. (2020). Dōbutsu kara sekai e: Tsushima Yūko Mahiru e ni okeru Ainu no shizenkan to kyōmei [From the animal to the world: Resonances with Ainu perspectives on nature in Tsushima Yūko’s Mahiru e]. Gengo shakai 14(3): 112–28. Nagai, K. (2015). The Beast in the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books as an Imperial Beast-Fable. In K. Nagai, K. Jones, D. Landry, M. Mattfeld, C. Rooney & C. Sleigh, (eds.), Cosmopolitan Animals (pp. 233–45). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Natsume, S. (1962). I Am A Cat. (K. Shibata and M. Kai, trans.). 2nd ed. Tokyo: Kenkyusha. (Original work published 1905–1906) Ochanomizu Bungaku Kenkyūkai. (1995). Bungagku no naka no “inu” no hanashi [“Dogs” in Literature]. Tōkyō: Shūeisha. Pflugfelder, G.M. (2005). Preface: Confessions of a Flesh Eater: Looking Below the Human Horizon. In G.M. Pflugfelder (ed.), JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life (pp. ix–xvii). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sakuraba, K. (2010). Fuse: Gansaku Satomi Hakkenden [Fuse: A counterfeit chronicle of the eight dogs of the Satomi clan]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Satō, Y. (2008). Inutsukushi no aironī: Matsuura Rieko Kenshin ron [The irony of a multitude of dogs: On Matsuura Rieko’s Kenshin]. Tamamo 44(3): 1–10. Seton, E.T. (1901). Lives of the Hunted. New York: Scribners. Shouji, T. (1935). Ie naki ko. Music composed by Tamura Shigeru. Dainippon Yubenkai. Skabelund, A.H. (2011). Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Takeuchi, K. (2020). The cared-for dog and the caring dog: Ethical possibilities in Matsuura Rieko’s Kenshin (The Dog’s Body). In I. Holca and C. Săpunaru Tămaş (eds.), Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture (pp. 138–51). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Tawada, Y. (2012). The Bridegroom Was a Dog. (M. Mitsutani, trans.). New York: New Directions. (Original work published 1993) Tsushima, Y. (1969). Rekuiemu—inu to otona no tame ni [Requiem: For Dogs and Adults]. Mita Bungaku 56 (Feb): 70–91. ———. (1984). Ōma monogatari [Twilight Tales]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2011). Laughing Wolf (D. Washburn, trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 2000) ———. (2018). Of Dogs and Walls (G. Harcourt, trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published 2014) Walley, G. (2017). Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, & Kyokutei Bakin’s Nansō Satomi hakkenden. Ithaca, NY Cornell University East Asia Program.

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Part 3 Sexual Trauma, Survival and the Search for the Good Life

Chapter 7 Writing Women and Sexuality: Tamura Toshiko and Sata Ineko Michiko Suzuki For women writers during the 1910s through the 1940s, writing sexuality meant negotiating various restrictions from social censure to censorship. With this context in mind, this chapter discusses short stories by Tamura Toshiko and novels by Sata Ineko, focusing on the complexities they articulate in confronting patriarchal systems and the status quo. These tales exploring sexuality cannot be seen simply as expressions of celebratory decadence (Tamura) or socialist resistance (Sata); they grapple with early 20th-century realities of male-female inequality, as well as the challenges of treating taboo topics such as sexual violence and adultery.

Introduction “Sexuality” can encompass many things, from identity to sexual practice. This chapter focuses on female sexual awakening, expression, desire, and violence (in heterosexual contexts) in works by Tamura Toshiko (1884–1945) and Sata Ineko (1904–1998). These narratives are powerful: some feature intimate or even taboo aspects of female experiences, while others investigate love (including its sexual expression) as a key part of modern female subjectivity.1 As works published in early 20th-century Japan (1910s–1940s)—when women did not have the same rights as men and means of self-expression were limited—these stories are all the more courageous for challenging male-centered voices and perspectives. Female narratives about sexuality are often viewed as liberatory, but it is important to remember that prewar women writers had to navigate restrictions in ways that did not apply to their male counterparts. Both men and women may have faced similar issues of censorship, but women were burdened by additional concerns when writing sexuality “authentically” (based on personal experience or not).2 In a world where male authorship was considered the standard (Copeland 2006), women authors writing about female sexuality from a woman’s point of view could convey a sense of authenticity and authority. But at the same time, such writing could lead to social censure and other problems. Writing about adultery as a married woman, for example, would have invited unwanted suspicions and even danger, due to the existence of kantsūzai (crime of adultery), which punished a wife’s infidelity but not a

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husband’s (men could only be punished for sexual liaisons with married women). Married women could even be jailed for adultery (Suzuki 1994, 124; Mackie 2003, 23–24; Molony 2005, 243; Tipton 2005; Suzuki 2013, 330–31). From this perspective, it is important to consider women’s works about sexuality beyond a simplistic optic of resistance. We also need to examine the complexity and ambivalence often found in such works, keeping in mind the historical context of their production. In this chapter, I focus on two short stories by Tamura, “Kuko no mi no yūwaku” (1914, Temptation of the Wolfberries) and “Hōraku no kei” (1914, Punishment by Fire), and two semiautobiographical I-novels (watakushi shōsetsu or shishōsetsu) by Sata, Kurenai (1936–1938, Crimson*) and Suashi no musume (1940, Barefoot Girl). My analysis pays particular attention to ways these narratives negotiate the limitations of the times, while also celebrating female voices, challenging the status quo, and producing a multifaceted view of women’s sexuality.

Tamura Toshiko Tamura was born 1884 in Asakusa, Tokyo, and published her first work in 1903. In 1909 she married writer Tamura Shōgyo; although the union may not have been legally registered, it was carried out with a formal ceremony (Odaira and Naitō 2014, 8).3 She soon won a major literary award for Akirame (1911, Resignation), which launched Tamura’s career and propelled her into the limelight. That same year, she also published “Ikichi” (1911, Lifeblood*) in the inaugural issue of Seitō (Bluestocking, 1911–1916), the first Japanese feminist journal. Tamura’s marriage was tumultuous and eventually she fell in love with journalist Suzuki Etsu, a married man, and in 1918 followed him to Vancouver where he took a job at a Japanese-language newspaper. They lived together and were legally married in 1923; Suzuki died in 1933. Afterwards, Tamura lived for a time in Los Angeles and returned to Japan in 1936. However, she moved again, this time to China two years later, after publishing a story based on her affair with leftist writer Kubokawa Tsurujirō (1903–1974), the husband of fellow writer Sata Ineko. In 1942, she started a Chinese-language women’s magazine titled Josei or Nü shēng (Women’s voice, 1942–1945) in Shanghai, continuing this work until her death in 1945 (see Muramatsu and Watanabe 1990, 211–13; Odaira and Naitō 2014, 2–23, 180–82; Fowler 2006, 339–44; Tanaka 1987, 5–10). Tamura is still best known for her works from the 1910s, thought to have been inspired by her romantic and marital experiences and stints as an actress.4 Scholars associate certain key concepts with her writing, such as “sensuality” (Odaira and Naitō 2014, 49) and “male-female conflict” (Muramatsu and Watanabe 1990, 212); she is also recognized for having a deep awareness of writing as a woman and of gender performativity.5 Whether it is “Lifeblood,” which explores the protagonist’s feelings of turmoil after what appears to have been her loss of virginity (Tamura 1987, 187–99; Tamura 2006, 348–57), or Resignation, which includes various forms of desire and sensuality including same-sex romance (Tamura 1987, 7–186), Tamura’s depictions of female identity and sexuality are groundbreaking. In this essay I highlight her nuanced and often ambivalent explorations of female sexuality, aspects of her writing that underscore her ability to navigate the social and ideological landscape of 1910s Japan.

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“Kuko no mi no yūwaku” (Temptation of the Wolfberries) Published in Bunshō sekai (Writing world) in 1914, this short story explores a horrifying event—the rape of a young girl. Thirteen-year-old Chisako spends every day after school picking wolfberries in a field with her friend Nobuko.6 They are obsessed with these red “berries like coral” (Tamura 1988, 111), gathering and handling them for play. One day, Chisako goes to the field by herself and she meets a young man who cuts down for her a branch full of wolfberries that had been growing out of reach. He then leads her to a secluded area and violates her. Chisako, found bleeding after the assault, is kept inside the house and mistreated by her family. Although she is a victim, she is blamed for having been raped; she is kicked by her older brother who tells her to die, and her mother heaps verbal abuse on her daily for being “a dirty woman,” “a laughingstock,” “a cripple,” and “no child of mine” (125–26). After the attack, Chisako stays home from school and her mother forbids her to leave the house. One day, she desires to see the wolfberries again and goes out to the field, her first outing in three weeks since the incident. She is happy to see the red fruit and does not associate them with the assault. After she returns home, her family does not understand her explanation for going out and even considers the possibility that she had left to meet the rapist. The story ends on an ambiguous note, suggesting that as Chisako continues to study at home alone to prepare for a move to a different school, she begins to experience a kind of sexual awakening. Like the short story “Lifeblood,” sexual scenes and related violence are not represented directly but largely suggested through symbolism. The luscious, red wolfberries represent “sensuality”; the multiple dangers that threaten Chisako in the field are indicated by the wild, overgrown landscape, as well as by the group of boys who try to catch her hair ribbon with their nets, like hunters going after “prey” (Kurosawa 1988, 432–33). Although Chisako appears oblivious to this aspect of her surroundings, all of nature seems dangerous, as locusts jump on her thighs that peek out from her kimono when she kneels, and dust from the grass, hot from the sun, “breathes softly on her legs” (Tamura 1988, 114). The attack by the young man is shocking enough, but the way in which Chisako is treated by her family makes the story even more disturbing. Writer and critic Nakano Shigeharu comments on the cruelty of the “male-centric” and “family-centered” ideologies shown in the text but suggests that this depiction is not intended as a direct critique of social attitudes (Kurosawa 1988, 433). Literary scholar Kurosawa Ariko agrees with this view, suggesting that this work, written in the Neo-Romantic style in vogue at the time, essentially creates “a kind of sexual fantasy.” The ending, she argues, is meant to show the triumph of the girl’s personal “world of sensuality” over the society (including both her family as well as the rapist) that attacks her (Kurosawa 1988, 432–33). The short story ends with this paragraph: Chisako studied, lonely, by herself. Eventually, the true [hontō no], red temptation of the wolfberries came to Chisako. From the red shade of the wolfberries, the man’s hand eventually began to appear in Chisako’s hallucinations. Chisako’s tactile sense clearly began to awaken to the man’s hand. The man’s hand, seeming to press on [appakusuru yōna] the much beloved red berries, slowly grew, looming larger. (Tamura 1988, 129)

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Kurosawa suggests that Tamura’s endeavor to romanticize the girl’s triumph over social oppression was not entirely successful (Kurosawa 1988, 433–34). But I think it is important to push beyond the suggestion that the story fails in its goal of celebrating female sexuality (or that it never intended to criticize Japanese society per se), and examine the ending more closely. Chisako awakens to her own “true (hontō no), red temptation,” experiencing feelings beyond that of a child who simply collects wolfberries for pleasure. Yet the text is unclear as to whether this is something she has embraced, or even if she is in control of her rather ominous “hallucinations.” The name Chisako is repeated numerous times in this ending, along with the repetition of “the man’s hand,” almost indicating a battle for agency. At the time, a woman was essentially viewed as a tabula rasa, unaware of sexual desires until touched by a man (Yoshikawa 1998, 103). From this perspective, the ending more or less traces the standard narrative for female sexuality: Chisako awakens through male intervention. The violence and the misogyny of this suggestion extend the horrors of the rape and the relentless way that the family treats her as damaged goods. The man’s hand appears to be pressing on or oppressing (appakusuru yōna) the wolfberries, eventually expanding, with phallic connotations. This depiction of the girl’s awakening illustrates the multi-layered ways in which society oppresses, traps, and attacks female identity. After all that she has endured, she still cannot escape male control, even in establishing the one “true” aspect of her being. The text itself shows that whatever it tries to articulate, it can never transcend the established, dehumanizing narrative in which an innocent girl begins to feel desire after sexual assault.7 The “true” sexual identity she tries to establish remains connected to the wolfberries and to male-oriented “yūwaku” (temptation or seduction). And in the long term, if her father follows through on his idea to secure a future for Chisako “in religion” (Tamura 1988, 124), presumably as a nun, sexuality will always remain something forbidden and tainted. Rather than seeing this ending as a sign of Tamura’s shortcomings, I prefer to view the opacity and brevity of the final paragraph as a message in and of itself. Just as Chisako cannot escape her physical limitations (“damaged” body; confining household; oppressive society), she also cannot escape male discourse even while attempting to establish her own experiences and views. The unsatisfactory outcome of this story shows that this adolescent remains trapped in a society that normalizes rape while punishing and silencing the victim. Although this outcome is often read as a sensual adolescent awakening, especially by those who identify Tamura as a decadent writer, I see the abrupt ending instead as a sign of the narrative’s dissatisfaction with its own attempt at liberation, even as it obfuscates the details to avoid censure (and censorship). The ending is not a failed erotic “sexual fantasy,” but a social critique performed through its own deficiencies: Chisako is unable to reframe the pleasures of the wolfberries in her own terms, nor escape the man’s hand, even within her hallucinations. “Hōraku no kei” (Punishment by Fire) This story, published in Chūō kōron (Central review) in 1914, is similar to “Temptation of the Wolfberries” in that it underscores the limitations of writing about female sexual agency even while celebrating such liberation. Told in third person, the narrative is about a love triangle—the protagonist, Ryūko, lives with Keiji, but they quarrel because she has also fallen

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in love with another man, Kōzō. Ryūko has only kissed this other man, but Keiji beats her for her infidelity. He leaves Tokyo in mental turmoil for town K, leaving behind a letter apologizing for his violence and suggesting they break up; Ryūko quickly follows him on the train, as she does not want to end the relationship. She has feelings for both men but refuses to apologize for her actions. Rather than to be told to feel “remorse” so that she can be “forgiven” by him, she wants to be “burnt to death” by Keiji so she can accept his “revenge” (Tamura 1988, 53, 55, 56, 57). After staying with Keiji in K overnight, Ryūko returns by herself to their house in Tokyo. The next day, she discusses the situation with Kōzō, who has come to visit. But she does not want to commit to either man and wonders if she should simply go to her father’s house in Korea. She sees Kōzō off, and they are seen together near the train station by Keiji, who has returned. In the end, Keiji lies in wait for Ryūko on the street, grabs her arm roughly and pulls her behind him as they walk: “I’ll burn you to death just like you wanted,” Keiji moaned in a low voice and breathed heavily. Ryūko remained silent as she was dragged along. Fear attacked her whole body, but she suppressed it with remarkable strength. “I’ll undergo [aimasu] anything. Do it if you can [Awashite goran nasai].” Such a miracle can happen, even in my own life—cynically laughing at herself [reichōteki ni sō omoinagara], Ryūko looked at the sky. The blue sky was shining, full of happiness. (83) Scholars have focused on the masochistic desires of Ryūko (her wish to be “burnt to death”) (Hasegawa 1996b, 124), some even positing such masochism as an inherent part of Tamura’s writing (Yazawa 2005, 193). Hasegawa Kei reads the text as a rejection of the patriarchal system in which a woman belongs to a man and must apologize for her sexual freedom—a system represented by the law of kantsūzai (Hasegawa 1996b, 116–17, 119–21, 129–30). She especially sees this as a triumphant text in which Ryūko (dragon child) successfully “ascends to heaven from the human world” and “overcomes … patriarchal society” (Hasegawa 1996b, 117). Hasegawa also notes that even an early critic like Nakamura Kogetsu, writing in 1915, characterized the story as that of a “newly awakened woman” who demands her own “sexual freedom,” recognizing that this is not “corruption” but a part of a broader quest for women’s “freedom in life” (Hasegawa 1988, 440). “Punishment by Fire” certainly raises issues of women’s sexual agency and gender equality. But I would suggest that despite its feminist stance, the text is highly ambivalent— even as it exalts her voice and positionality, it simultaneously contains Ryūko. Indeed, although the text offers a critique of patriarchal systems and worldviews, Ryūko—like Chisako in “Temptation of the Wolfberries”—is ultimately unable to escape them. Furthermore, it may also be tempting to read “Punishment by Fire” through an autobiographical lens, as a window into Tamura’s own love triangle (with Shōgyo and Suzuki) and associate the author’s sexual self-expression with that of the protagonist. It is worth noting, however, that Tamura’s relationship with Suzuki likely did not fully develop until 1917, although there may have been a liaison with another man before him (Odaira and Naitō 2014, 14–15). Regardless of whether or not the story is based on the author’s experiences, it is important to consider the text within the historical and literary context of its time. Chapter 7: Writing Women and Sexuality

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In suggesting that “Punishment by Fire” resists patriarchy, critics have been eager to emphasize the issue of infidelity and the crime of adultery. There is, however, no indication in the text that Keiji and Ryūko are husband and wife—either through an actual legal marriage or what we would now call a common-law marriage. Just as there is no sexual infidelity (Ryūko has only kissed Kōzō), it is ultimately unclear if an actual marriage is being threatened. Some critics are aware of this ambiguity, but most treat the relationship as a marriage and discuss the couple as husband and wife (Hasegawa 1996b; Iida 2016, 257; Larson 2005, 39).8 Yazawa Misaki argues that it may not be a legal marriage, but a “love marriage,” the “most advanced form” of “cohabitation” at the time (Yazawa 2005, 191). Certainly, many marriages were not legally registered during this period; nevertheless, it is a fact that the text clearly avoids all words that might suggest this is a husband-wife relationship. By avoiding the notion of marriage and limiting the infidelity to a kiss, the work can protect itself against censorship while depicting a woman’s refusal to commit to one man. It is important to remember that this type of story was not unique—for example, the idea of an attached woman falling in love with another man was explored in earlier texts published in Bluestocking. Araki Iku’s (1890–1943) “Tegami” (1912, The Letter*), about a married woman who writes a letter to her former lover expressing her desire for a rendezvous, famously led to the first censorship of the magazine. Although there is no depiction of adultery per se, the letter suggests that the lovers had a physical relationship prior to her marriage (and may again). A married woman who expresses illicit sexual desire and refuses to be limited by social conventions was shocking enough for the censors to issue their ban (Iwata 2003, 170–76; Bardsley 2007, 27–29).9 Another Bluestocking work, Itō Noe’s (1895–1923) “Dōyō” (1913, Shock) shows a love triangle depicted through letters. Published with a note that it is “a report of facts” and “not fiction,” Itō depicts her emotional state as she wavers between two men while living with one of them (Itō 1913, 194). As a work based on reality, Itō is particularly careful to show that no actual physical transgressions occurred.10 Tamura’s “Punishment by Fire” strategically takes precautions against censorship while questioning the generally held notion that a woman belongs to a man. Yet the ways in which a woman is able to stake out her own individual agency with regard to desire are not successfully delineated in the work. It is difficult to see how a refusal to capitulate and admit to her “sin” is resolved by a mortal punishment by fire that Ryūko seems to welcome as a “miracle” (Tamura 1988, 26, 83). Although being burnt to death is clearly only a metaphor, Keiji has beaten her before, and it seems likely that he will do so again as he drags her home. This ending appears more punitive than triumphant, even if we allow for a reading that suggests female masochistic desire as one way of questioning established power differences between the sexes. “Hōraku no kei” of the title can also be translated as “sentence by fire.” This term is recognized as referring to an inhumane execution method using fire, carried out by Zhou (c. 11th c. BCE), the tyrannical king of the Yin (Shang) dynasty (Iida 2016, 275; Hasegawa 1996b, 119). Although it may not refer to the actual torture, Ryūko embraces an ancient, barbaric form of punishment rather than accept modern social norms in which respectable women, unlike men, are required to be monogamous. Perhaps she sees this as a “miracle” because her transgressive desires are acknowledged; her sentence promises to be spectacular and unforgettable, unlike the prosaic treatment of modern-day infidelity, and she cynically embraces her terrible fate. The modern notion that women could attain liberation and sexual equality

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through love falls short for this individual once she ventures into experiences and emotions reserved only for men. According to Hasegawa, the “blue sky … shining full of happiness” (Tamura 1988, 83) appears to “bless” Ryūko’s proud, triumphant “self ” that refuses to apologize (Hasegawa 1996b, 130). However, it seems that Ryūko’s cynical view of the situation (reichōteki ni sō omoinagara) casts a pall on the scene—the sky appears to shine on without any concern for this woman who will be beaten again (Tamura 1988, 83). Even if we consider masochism as having liberatory possibilities, the “happiness” in this scene is very different from the exhilaration she experienced going home on the train by herself, when she felt “free” to think and do whatever she wished and thought that “from now on her life would go in whatever ways she desired” (67). “Punishment by Fire” ultimately shows that society does not allow women the same level of self-exploration through sexuality afforded men. Not only does the text itself have to assiduously avoid the appearance of actual adultery, but Ryūko’s love and attachment to two men must be punished in the end. Her effort to figure out her own desires ends disastrously, without reaching any conclusions. Whether she stays with Keiji, leaves with Kōzō, or goes to her father’s house, ultimately as a woman in early 20th-century Japan she can never be free to pursue her desires—or even examine what her desires are. The best “miracle” she can hope for is a dramatic showdown—a fiery spectacle that forces readers to rethink the promise of female agency and liberation. While showing Ryūko’s quest to define and experience love in her own terms, the story also underscores its own limits in depicting female desire and individual choice.

Sata Ineko Sata was born 1904 in Nagasaki as a result of a teen romance between students from established families. Her mother died young, and her father failed to adequately support the family. Sata never finished elementary school and took her first job at age 11 in a Tokyo factory; she had a series of jobs throughout her youth. Her first marriage ended in divorce (1924–1926) after several suicide attempts. Raising a daughter by herself, she worked for a time as a café waitress and was encouraged in her literary endeavors by her customers, writers associated with the journal Roba (Donkey, 1926–1928). She married one of them, Kubokawa Tsurujirō, in 1926 and both become committed proletarian writers; she joined the Japan Communist Party in 1932 (and was removed as member in 1964 after criticizing the organization). Her famous first story, “Kyarameru kōjō kara” (1928, From the Caramel Factory) is based on her childhood experience of having to quit school to work under inhumane conditions. Sata had two children with Kubokawa, and in the 1930s, the couple was jailed at various different times for their activism. The difficulties in their marriage during this period are depicted in her I-novel, Crimson (1936–1938). During the war, she wrote works complicit with imperialism, but expressed deep remorse for this in the postwar years. In 1945 she divorced her husband and subsequently began to write as “Sata Ineko” rather than “Kubokawa Ineko” (Muramatsu and Watanabe 1990, 145–47; Tanaka 1987, 159–65; Sata Ineko kenkyūkai 1979, 495–528). Although she is remembered as a prewar proletarian author, Sata also enjoyed a long, productive career as both writer and activist during the postwar period, and passed away at age 94 (Sata 2016, 1).

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Sata wrote in different modes but is particularly known for works based on her experiences. Her 1940 bestselling novel, Barefoot Girl, features a teenager awakening to sexuality while living in Ō (currently Aioi), Hyōgo prefecture. Watashi no Tokyo chizu (1946–1948, My Map of Tokyo), presents memories from her youth, creating a “history of both narrator and city” (Tanaka 1987, 166). Haiiro no gogo (1959–1960, Grey Afternoon), similar to Crimson, explores the marital problems of a couple who are both writers (Tanaka 1987, 165–66; Sata Ineko kenkyūkai 1979, 497, 512–14, 523–24). Sata’s focus on herself opens new ways of understanding the individual and her world—not only issues of labor and class, but also questions of female identity, sexuality, and liberation. Kurenai (Crimson) This I-novel, based on Sata’s marital conflict during 1935, was serialized from January-May 1936 in Fujin kōron (Ladies’ review) and August 1938 in Chūō kōron (Sata Ineko kenkyūkai 1979, 504–8). Problems in the marriage between Sata and Kubokawa had been reported in the media, and the publisher urged her to write about the topic (Sata 2016, 10; Sata 1978a, 420).11 As the main breadwinner of the family—which also included her two young children and grandmother—Sata wrote Crimson “frantically” (gamushara) even though she did not initially feel comfortable writing about such matters (Asahi Shinbun 1961).12 The novel depicts a couple, Kōsuke and Akiko, in a constant power struggle, both writers fighting for space and resources to focus on their craft.13 As Tamura Toshiko depicted in “Kanojo no seikatsu” (2011, Her Life, 1915; translated as Her Daily Life*), once married, women writers were burdened with domestic duties and pressured to place their husbands’ needs above theirs (Tamura 1988, 237–68; Tamura 2011, 9–25). Tamura’s protagonist who weds in a love match finds this reality difficult to navigate; similarly, Sata’s Akiko also expresses frustration and blames herself for falling short. At the same time, Akiko is disappointed in her spouse, who is supposed to be an enlightened comrade working for similar goals. Akiko has gotten used to “freedom” while Kōsuke was in prison and considers how sad it is to want to be apart, even though she loves him (Sata 1978a, 22).14 Most discussions of Crimson focus on its importance as proletarian literature, the insight it offers into the couple’s actual life, or the way it highlights female subjugation.15 In the last case, most critics do not fully address the central conflict within this text, the husband’s refusal to be monogamous and his celebration of “a new love”: Kōsuke lifted his face and said, “Kōsuke has a woman now,” and immediately proceeded to grasp Akiko’s face with both his hands, kissing her mouth so as to cut off her response. Akiko pressed her lips together tightly in a straight line and shook her head. “Why?” Kōsuke said. “But,” Akiko said forcefully, “that’s not acceptable.” “Why not [datte iijanaika]?” (51–52) Akiko is trapped in a love triangle with a woman who, according to Kōsuke, resembles her in looks and character. The intellectual husband embraces his new experience of love as a

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life-affirming force that will nurture his writing; he makes plans to move in with this woman, while suggesting that he and Akiko should enjoy living together for a while longer. Akiko reflects that in this woman Kōsuke will be gaining a proper “wife” who will focus solely on his needs, a role she has never been able to fulfill (53). She feels jealous, lonely, and later even considers suicide, but when she tries to move on, Kōsuke steps in to keep her for himself. He effectively precludes any possibility of her achieving sexual freedom—she is neither allowed to feel “liberated” (be free from her husband) nor conversely, to “stay pure” (refrain from sex with him) in preparation for a new life without him (53, 87). Regardless of her husband’s actions and indiscretions, she must remain his wife without question. Kōsuke is free to explore his desires while Akiko, though traumatized, has to figure out practicalities such as custody, and whether they should legally divorce or simply separate. Kōsuke is so uninformed that he wants to mail his “notice of marriage” to friends, and is reminded by Akiko that “bigamy” is illegal and he cannot simply marry another person (66). In a society where male infidelity is condoned, men may not have to pay attention to such matters, but Akiko cannot enjoy such luxury. Such sexual double standards (legally codified by the crime of adultery law) are, as Crimson powerfully illustrates, a fundamental form of inequality for women. Unlike in Tamura’s “Punishment by Fire,” Kōsuke suffers no consequences, and Akiko is forced to accept the situation. Sexuality is never celebrated in Crimson. Rather it is depicted as a burden, something shameful that manages to keep the couple together. Although never directly illustrated, sexual activity is prompted by erotic seduction or expressions of jealousy on the part of both parties. When Akiko rebuffs his sexual advances, intimating that she may have other romantic possibilities in the future, Kōsuke runs after her like a madman and rips her yukata to shreds. After having sex (we assume), the couple looks at each other with “quiet sadness” and agrees to try to “keep emotions under check” because such behavior will only impede progress with their “work” (88). Ultimately, the extramarital relationship fizzles out in a farcical manner; the woman in question cuts ties with Kōsuke, and she turns out to be another man’s mistress. Akiko has mixed feelings about the outcome because Kōsuke did not terminate things himself. By the end of the novel, their relationship is worse than ever. Sata is careful not to describe sex directly, but she is even more careful about the presentation of her politics. Ironically, during the 1930s—what she calls “tenkō jidai” (age of conversion)—an I-novel based on a famous socialist couple’s marriage (and love triangle) is acceptable for publication, but their activism can only be discussed as occurring in the past (49). Akiko is depicted as someone who is lost and unable to be free; her financial and literary successes only create awkwardness with her husband and burden her with familial responsibility. She is clearly ambivalent about Kōsuke but cannot leave him—sexual desire appears to be a component of her reluctance to end this relationship “colored only with grey” and permeated with “defeat” (104). In Sata’s postwar I-novel, Haiiro no gogo, she writes about her life during 1936–1938 (when Crimson was being serialized). Even after Kubokawa’s infidelity with Tamura Toshiko comes to light in the fall of 1938, Sata and her husband carry on with their marriage (Sata Ineko kenkyūkai 1979, 507; Hasegawa 1996a, 126–27). Critics suggest that in Grey Afternoon, sexuality is an element of the protagonist’s downfall, her acceptance of an unfaithful husband and fall into “decadence” (Hasegawa 1996a, 134). The nihilistic attitude expressed in the story is, in turn, interpreted as having led to Sata’s eventual complicity with the empire (see Hasegawa 1996a, 133–35; Hasegawa 1978, 4–5; Kobayashi 1978, 5–6). Chapter 7: Writing Women and Sexuality

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Despite political suppression, social scrutiny, and the pain she must have faced in narrativizing aspects of her private life, Sata produced a work that goes beyond personal experience to speak to broader women’s concerns. At one point, Akiko says to her friend that she is committed to writing about “the various pain and sadness of women” which is the only way she can achieve “salvation” (Sata 1978a, 64). Within the idealism of early Japanese feminist thought, this character should have been liberated through love and sexuality, and she should have achieved empowerment through financially compensated, fulfilling artistic labor. These do not exactly come to fruition for Akiko. Although this husband-and-wife relationship cannot be reduced to a simple ideological equation, it is clear that the couple was not radical enough to escape from patriarchal power dynamics. While the text has certainly been read as feminist, particularly within the context of leftist politics, the fundamental inequality of their sexual identities as highlighted in the story has not been given due weight. Regardless of individual circumstances, the novel makes it clear that a wife who cannot enjoy the same legal rights or freedoms as her husband can never be his equal. This work rejects the hope that love and sexuality can be a liberating force in this social context. Suashi no musume (Barefoot Girl) Similar to Crimson, Barefoot Girl is modeled on Sata’s life—this time featuring her teen years. Published as a novel in 1940 by Shinchōsha, it became a notable bestseller (Sata Ineko kenkyūkai 1979, 509; Sata 1978b, 398–99). This coming-of-age tale begins with the protagonist, Sata Momoyo, arriving in Ō to live with her father as a 15-year-old.16 In this town she experiences sexual awakening as well as sexual violence, and the story ends with her returning to Tokyo and embarking on a new life there.17 By 1940, the female bildungsroman depicting self-discovery and sexuality (and often geographic mobility) was a familiar genre, particularly after Hayashi Fumiko’s (1903–1951) bestselling Hōrōki (1928–1930, Diary of a Vagabond*), also loosely based on the author’s life.18 By this time, authors could not write about leftist themes or ideas contrary to wartime ethos; although women writers still faced obstacles in exploring sexuality (particularly in I-novels), such topics were likely safer and more marketable than anything construed as socialist/communist or antiwar. Depicting a young woman’s sexuality thus enabled writers to present various feminist ideas, but it also offered escapism. Critics like Hasegawa Kei and Kobayashi Yūko consider Barefoot Girl a “refreshing” and/or “bright” tale with a liberating message of resistance (Hasegawa 1996a, 95; Hasegawa 1978, 6; Kobayashi 1997, 79). But I would argue that it is also important to examine the darker aspects of this work—a text born from an oppressive sociopolitical context. From this perspective, we can read in it the difficulty of indicting patriarchy and escaping male violence. Momoyo, who lives in Tokyo in dire poverty with her grandmother and aunt, writes to her father volunteering to sacrifice herself for the family by becoming a geisha. The irresponsible father who works for a ship manufacturing company in Ō (but does not send the family any money), is startled by this and takes Momoyo in to live with him. As she grows up in this environment, she experiences menarche and begins to have crushes on men; she also loses her virginity to Kawase, a married man, while they are both lost in the mountains and looking to join others on an outing. Several lines in the description of this encounter are censored and edited out, but this is clearly a rape in which an older man takes advantage of a young girl who feels close to him as a family friend. Subsequently Momoyo wonders

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why she felt “blank” and was unable to run away. She also contemplates what it means for an unmarried woman to have lost her virginity, but ultimately rejects the view that she has become sexualized or that she no longer has “the right” to fall in love (Sata 1978b, 93, 146). Momoyo spends her time reading at home or running outside “barefoot” (not wearing tabi socks like a properly attired girl) with her dog. As requested by Kawase, she keeps the rape a “secret,” and one day, when sheltering from rain in his house, even anticipates something to happen between them while his wife is out. When he does not act on this opportunity and sends her home with an umbrella, Momoyo finally feels like “forgiving him” and thinks that “he is a good person, after all.” Her father eventually remarries and Momoyo leaves the household, returning to Tokyo to help support her grandmother and aunt once more. Lying about her educational background, she manages to get a job in a bookstore. Although their financial circumstances improve, Momoyo feels lost and wonders if someone “will light a flame in my heart.” At the end, she says to her grandmother, “Something good will happen soon, I’m sure,” appeasing her and also expressing her own hope for the future (79, 93, 125, 148, 150). Barefoot Girl is a work that normalizes female desire and emphasizes the need for “female liberation” (Hasegawa 1996a, 110). It challenges the value society places on female virginity and rejects the restrictive moral codes women are expected to follow (Hasegawa 1996a, 93–97; Kobayashi 1997, 227). In contrast to Tamura’s “Temptation of the Wolfberries,” this text makes an effort to depict female sexual awakening that does not begin with or rely on male intervention. Momoyo does not believe the incident with Kawase (or her feelings for Nakazato, a man she has a crush on) has anything to do with the “natural awakening to real desire” that comes upon her when she is alone (Sata 1978b, 107). Literary scholar Kobayashi Yūko presents a compelling analysis of Momoyo’s bare feet, which appear throughout the text, suggesting that they signify her desires but also serve as “a symbol of resistance against hypocritical morality and the oppressive norms demanded of women” (Kobayashi 1997, 215). Sata’s use of bare feet in this way thus deviates from male authors who have traditionally used them as fetishistic signs of the naked female body (Kobayashi 1997, 212–15).19 Barefoot Girl certainly celebrates aspects of Momoyo’s emerging sexuality and questions prejudicial views about female purity. At the same time, however, because of outside forces of censorship, the text is limited from fully exploring issues of male sexual violence. The rape scene (which Sata explains elsewhere is not based on experience) was not published in its entirety, as noted in the zenshū (collected works) edition:20 I didn’t want him to realize that my body was shaking but the shuddering would not stop. (Subsequent 4 lines cut) I felt empty. What remained was only lost will—I could not even think about resisting. I felt revulsion running throughout my body. He stopped talking to me. (Subsequent 4 lines cut) Chapter 17 Kawase helped me dust off the dirt from my kimono. I learned for the first time that men could demonstrate this sort of kindness after being so rough.

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My hair that I had coiffed so carefully, the obi that I had tied so carefully [for the day’s outing]—all was sadness. Turning away from him I put my hand up to my head, while my teeth chattered with fear that still gripped me. “Put yourself together. Make sure people don’t think something is not right.” People might think something is not right? I heard this with great surprise. Ah, this is not my fault. Still standing, I bit my lip as tears welled up. I looked ahead, still, with tears in my eyes. I didn’t want Kawase to realize I was crying. Yet at the same time, when thinking about Kawase also fixing his appearance behind me, I felt it was very comical—that adults were so comical. (Sata 1978b, 78–79) The text is not permitted to speak in its entirety through censorship; this erasure may also have led to an undermining of the violence, especially in the context of a time when sexual assault could be couched in terms such as “mischief ” (itazura; 70).21 Even feminist scholars in the 1990s seem to focus on the Momoyo–Kawase encounter as primarily a sexual act and not an act of criminal violence; they do not call this “rape” but use terms such as “sexual relations” (seiteki kankei; Kobayashi 1997, 217), or “mistake” (ayamachi; Hasegawa 1996a, 98, 100, 108), a common euphemism for forbidden sex such as an affair.22 I would argue that it is critical to read the scene as a rape, a violence that continues beyond the act itself—forcing Momoyo to be silent. Only then can we recognize aspects of the novel that critics have not fully addressed—specifically, that the protagonist is haunted throughout by endless threats of male violence. This ominous element has been overlooked because of the dominant characterization of the novel as a fresh, liberating text championing female sexuality. Barefoot Girl begins with Momoyo being rescued from a possible life in the demimonde, but this leads to another precarious situation. She lives with her father in the same lodgings as numerous male factory workers; at one point, when Kawase first moves to town, she even has to sleep in the same futon with her father and Kawase who are both exceedingly drunk. The text incessantly dwells on the fact that there is an uncomfortable tension in the father-daughter relationship because she is easily mistaken for his “young wife” or even a “lover” (Sata 1978b, 12). This is clearly not an incestuous relationship, but the 33-year-old father is described as “an unfulfilled young man” whose “sensuality” is affected by Momoyo’s growing maturity; Momoyo herself recognizes this as the reason she is sent to sleep in a different room at one point. Her father also accuses her of having a relationship with a fellow lodger, “persistently and obscenely, like a man uncovering a wife’s infidelity” (60, 70).23 Eight pages later, Momoyo is raped by Kawase. The father is an unreliable guardian who often goes away and leaves Momoyo to fend for herself. After moving to another house, for example, Momoyo is sleeping alone when the landlord’s son breaks into her room, presumably to violate her and test if she is really pure (he believes “women who have lost their virginity will always succumb to temptation”) (111). She feels his touch and runs out of the house as quickly as she can, escaping her assailant.

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Momoyo desires “freedom” more than anything in the world but is contained by the male gaze even as she runs through the village with her dog: the young men standing on the corner whisper to each other, “there goes the barefoot girl” (58–59, 93). Potential danger is everywhere in the town. Even after she returns to Tokyo, she continues to be vigilant with regard to male attention at work and elsewhere. Barefoot Girl shows that young women like Momoyo, who lack adequate social, familial, and legal protections, face constant danger and anxiety. Her violation by Kawase functions to highlight these threats and her ongoing vulnerability. Sata explained in 1978 that she decided to write this episode in the mountains because she had read in an advice column about a woman who “carried this type of past experience as a heavy burden” (Sata 1978b, 401). By treating this topic, Sata rejects the notion of virginity as an all-important virtue for women and shows Momoyo’s resilience. However, here Sata is also powerfully highlighting the general dangers of being female—especially in a society where aggression is more or less accepted as part of male sexuality. With restrictions on the freedom of expression, Sata negotiated numerous barriers in this text. In her 1978 commentary, she quotes from the novel’s afterword and suggests that even there she refrained from writing what she really wanted. Looking back, she recalls this period as a “dark” time of the “National Spiritual Mobilization Law” when she actively sought escape in entertainment, such as going to the cinema and watching foreign films. Sata implies that the runaway success of Barefoot Girl was also due to this social atmosphere, when people needed to focus on something other than the war (399).24 Certainly, the novel’s best-selling status did not necessarily indicate that the public embraced Sata’s feminist message. Momoyo’s story may have had other unintended effects, such as the eroticization/objectification of the female (authorial) body or perpetuating problematic views regarding sexual assault as well as male and female sexualities. Sata herself considers the novel and its financial success as having played a part in her (and her husband’s) turn away from their ideals (399).25 As a work published within the context of rising militarism and the silencing of voices, Barefoot Girl eloquently emphasizes women’s suffering and the limits of liberation, while illustrating Momoyo’s coming-of-age and questioning of gender inequality.

Conclusion Women writers of the early- to mid-20th century faced many restrictions in writing about sexuality. Regardless of whether or not they were articulating an experience considered autobiographical, they had to negotiate the limits of censorship, the climate of the times, and their own public positionality. While it is important to consider liberatory and triumphant aspects of their writing on sexual matters, it is also critical to think about elements that do not fit neatly with such characterizations. As a feminist critic, my goal here has not been to undermine the feminist resonances of these works, but to engage with them further—in order to understand the barriers that these writers broke as well as those that continued to hinder them. These works by Tamura Toshiko and Sata Ineko emerged from different socio-historical contexts but similarly grapple with real-life obstacles for women, and also demonstrate the limits placed on literary voices exploring sexual awakening, male-female relationships, and sexual violence.

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Notes 1 So-called modern love ideology suggests that women can achieve gender equality and liberation through the experience of (heterosexual) physical and emotional love; this also helped promote modern love-based marriages as opposed to traditional arranged marriages. For more on this concept see Suzuki 2010. 2 For more on censorship in general, see Abel 2012. 3 Such unregistered marriages were not uncommon at the time. 4 On her works from 1936–1938, see Sokolsky 2015. 5 See for example Odaira 2008, 56–105; Yoshikawa 1998, 88–96; Kuge 2007; Van Compernolle 2012; Yoshio 2014. 6 I have translated “kuko no mi” as wolfberries, a known English name for this fruit. Currently, they are better known as goji berries. 7 Hasegawa Kei seems to unconditionally accept the idea that Chisako has “a sexual awakening … as a result of her unfortunate experience” (Hasegawa 1988, 441). 8 Hasegawa acknowledges that the terms “husband” and “wife” are never used in the text but uses them in her discussion (Hasegawa 1996b, 120). 9 For the English translation of “The Letter” see Bardsley 2007, 30–34. 10 Itō did not marry the man she was living with until 1915. On this text and sexology, see Suzuki 2018, 262–68. 11 Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun reported their “imminent divorce” on Sept. 1, 1935 (Sata 2016, 10). 12 See Asahi Shinbun 1935 regarding the importance of her income. In 1977, Sata explains that due to her reluctance, she chose the title Crimson rather randomly (Sata 1978a, 421). 13 Translations from Crimson are my own, but I have consulted Samuel Perry’s translation in Sata 2016, 126–61 and follow his rendition of the husband’s name. Tanaka’s partial translation of Crimson renders it “Hirosuke” (Tanaka 1987, 167–80). 14 Hasegawa suggests this was a common experience for proletarian activist couples and that the movement did not adequately address gender equality. See Hasegawa 1996a, 70–73. 15 For examples of feminist analysis, see Hasegawa 1996a, 70–91; Sata 2016, 11–13; Kobayashi 2005, 33–50. 16 Hasegawa notes that the name “Momoyo” (age of peach blossoms) suits this youthful character (Hasegawa 1996a, 95–96). 17 The work does not follow Sata’s life exactly but appears to be modeled on various experiences she had during 1918–1923 (ages 14–19) (Sata Ineko kenkyūkai 1979, 497–98). 18 Kobayashi Yūko calls Barefoot Girl a “bildungsroman” (Kobayashi 1997, 69). For publication details of Hōrōki, including sequels, see Ericson 1997, 121–22. For discussion of another example of this genre, Okamoto Kanoko’s (1889–1939) Shōjō ruten (Wheel of life, 1939), see Suzuki 2010, 118–45. 19 Although Momoyo’s “real desire” is presented as “existing only as itself, separate from all other things” (Sata 1978b, 107), the text does not entirely escape from presenting a male-centered role for female sexuality. The work focuses on Momoyo’s bare feet after the rape and often in scenes that include Kawase. 20 Sata explains in 1978 that the insertion of this fictional scene into a narrative “largely based on reality” and with characters based on “real people” caused problems for “a real person,” presumably the man who was the model for Kawase. She says that she knew the consequences for herself in having readers consider the work “autobiographical,” but felt extremely contrite about the trouble she caused for another. Because Momoyo’s last name is “Sata,” the impression of the work’s autobiographical nature also intensified after 1945 when Sata Ineko divorced Kubokawa and took the name “Sata”—something she presumably did not know would happen when writing this work (Sata 1978b, 401–2). 21 The use of this word to indicate rape still continues in some contexts today. 22 Kitagawa Akio, who argues in 2016 that Sata was “ahead of her time” in representing sexuality identifies this as “rape” (reipu), but some aspects of his discussion are problematic (Kitagawa 2016, 24, 26, 30). 23 Kitagawa discusses their relationship as “psychologically incestuous” and that “the danger of incest” is avoided by the father’s marriage (Kitagawa 2016, 22, 24). 24 She also notes that people told her that the book’s title or the picture of “an exotic girl” on the cover was the reason for the success (Sata 1978b, 399). 25 Kitagawa Akio suggests that this work’s success paved the way for her subsequent novels about women that ultimately “matched wartime values” (Kitagawa 1993, 182).

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References Abel, J.E. (2012). Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Asahi Shinbun. (1935). Onna sakka ryūchijō de genkō kasegi no fude [Woman writer writing for money while in jail]. June 2. ———. (1961). Waga shōsetsu 9: Sata Ineko [My novel 9: Sata Ineko]. November 11. Bardsley, J. (2007). The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. Copeland, R.L. (ed.). (2006). Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ericson, J.E. (1997). Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Fowler, E. (2006). Tamura Toshiko (1884–1945). In R.L. Copeland & M. Ortabasi (eds.), The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (pp. 339–47). New York: Columbia University Press. Hasegawa, K. (1978). Kaidai: Kussetsu e no dōtei [Commentary: The path to distortion]. In Sata Ineko zenshū dai 3 kan geppō 3 [The Collected Works of Sata Ineko volume 3, monthly note 3] (pp. 4–8). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1988). Kaidai [Commentary]. In Tamura Toshiko sakuhinshū [Selected works of Tamura Toshiko] (vol. 2) (pp. 438–57). Tokyo: Orijin Shuppan Sentaa. ———. (1996a). Sata Ineko ron [Discussions on Sata Ineko]. Tokyo: Orijin Shuppan Sentaa. ———. (1996b). “Tsuma” toiu seido e no hangyaku: Tamura Toshiko “Hōraku no kei” o yomu [Rebellion against the system called “wife”: Reading Tamura Toshiko’s “Punishment by Fire”]. In Hasegawa K. & Hashimoto Y. (eds.), Gendai joseigaku no tankyū [Research in contemporary women’s studies] (pp. 115–30). Tokyo: Sōbunsha. Iida, Y. (2016). Kanojotachi no bungaku [Women’s literature]. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai. Itō, N. (1913). Dōyō [Shock]. Seitō 3(8): 87–194. Iwata, N. (2003). Bungaku to shite no Seitō [Bluestocking as literature]. Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan. Kitagawa, A. (1993). Sata Ineko kenkyū [A study of Sata Ineko]. Tokyo: Sōbunsha. ———. (2016). Sata Ineko bungaku no kaiwa hyōgen ni miru sekushuariti ni tsuite: “Kyarameru kōjō kara,” “Suashi no musume,” “Aru onna no koseki,” “Nenpu no gyōkan” o shiza ni [Sexuality as seen in the conversational expressions in Sata Ineko’s literature: From the perspective of “From the Caramel Factory,” “Barefoot Girl,” “A Certain Woman’s Family Register,” and “Between the Lines of a Chronology”]. Himeji dokkyō daigaku gaikokugo gakubu kiyō 29: 15–30. Kobayashi, M. (2005). Shōwa 10 nendai no Sata Ineko [Sata Ineko during the Shōwa 10 era]. Tokyo: Sōbunsha. Kobayashi, Y. (1978). Kaidai: Teikō to seijuku no jidai [Commentary: Age of conversion and maturation]. In Sata Ineko zenshū dai 2 kan geppō 2 [The Collected Works of Sata Ineko volume 2, monthly note 2] (pp. 4–8). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1997). Sata Ineko: Taiken to jikan [Sata Ineko: Experience and time]. Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō. Kuge, S. (2007). Politics of doodling: Tamura Toshiko’s “A Woman Writer.” positions: east asia cultures critique 15(3) (Winter): 487–509. Kurosawa, A. (1988). Kaisetsu [Commentary]. In Tamura Toshiko sakuhinshū [Selected works of Tamura Toshiko] (vol. 2) (pp. 427–37). Tokyo: Orijin Shuppan Sentaa. Larson, P. (2005). “I am my own”: Tamura Toshiko’s narratives of resistance in Taishō Japan. U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 28: 32–48. Mackie, V. (2003). Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Molony, B. (2005). Women’s rights and the Japanese state, 1880–1925. In G.L. Bernstein, A. Gordon & K. Wildman Nakai (eds.), Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan 1600–1950: Essays in Honor of Albert M. Craig (pp. 221–58). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Muramatsu, S. & Watanabe, S. (eds.). (1990). Gendai josei bungaku jiten [Modern Japanese women’s literature dictionary]. Tokyo: Tokyōdō. Odaira, M. (2008). Onna ga onna o enjiru: Bungaku, yokubō, shōhi [Women performing women: Literature, desire, consumption]. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha.

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Odaira, M. & Naitō, C. (2014). Tamura Toshiko, vol. 7 of 21 seiki Nihon bungaku gaidobukku [Twenty-first century Japanese literature guidebook]. Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō. Sata, I. (1978a). Sata Ineko zenshū [The Collected Works of Sata Ineko] (vol. 2). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1978b). Sata Ineko zenshū [The Collected Works of Sata Ineko] (vol. 3). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2016). Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works (S. Perry, trans. and Introduction). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Sata Ineko kenkyūkai. (1979). Nenpu [Chronology]. In Sata Ineko. Sata Ineko zenshū [The Collected Works of Sata Ineko] (vol. 18) (pp. 495–539). Tokyo: Kōdansha. Sokolsky, A.E. (2015). From New Woman Writer to Socialist: The Life and Selected Writings of Tamura Toshiko from 1936–1938. Leiden: Brill. Suzuki, M. (2010). Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2013). The Husband’s Chastity: Progress, equality, and difference in 1930s Japan. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(2): 327–52. ———. (2018). The science of sexual difference: Ogura Seizaburō, Hiratsuka Raichō, and the intersection of sexology and feminism in early-twentieth-century Japan. In V. Fuechtner, D.E. Haynes & R.M. Jones (eds.), A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (pp. 258–78). Oakland: University of California Press. Suzuki, Y. (1994). Haha to onna: Hiratsuka Raichō, Ichikawa Fusae o jiku ni [Mothers and women: With a focus on Hiratsuka Raichō and Ichikawa Fusae]. Tokyo: Miraisha. Tamura, T. (1987). Tamura Toshiko sakuhinshū [Selected works of Tamura Toshiko] (vol. 1). Tokyo: Orijin Shuppan Sentaa. ———. (1988). Tamura Toshiko sakuhinshū [Selected works of Tamura Toshiko] (vol. 2). Tokyo: Orijin Shuppan Sentaa. ———. (2006). Lifeblood. (E. Fowler, trans.). In R.L. Copeland & M. Ortabasi (eds.), The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (pp. 348–57). New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (2011). Her daily life. (K. Selden, trans.). In K. Selden & N. Mizuta (eds.), More Stories by Japanese Women Writers: An Anthology (pp. 9–25). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Tanaka, Y. (ed.). (1987). To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers 1913–1938. Seattle: Seal Press. Tipton, E. (2005). Sex in the city: Chastity vs. free love in interwar Japan. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 11 (August). Online at http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue11/tipton.html. [accessed 31 August 2020]. Van Compernolle, T.J. (2012). Why a good man is hard to find in Meiji fiction: Tamura Toshiko’s Akirame (Resignation). U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 43: 11–32. Yazawa, M. (2005). “Hōraku no kei” no hyōshō sekai: Yokubō to hakai to [The signifying world of “Punishment by Fire”: Desire and destruction]. In Watanabe S. (ed.), Ima to iu jidai no Tamura Toshiko [Tamura Toshiko in today’s world] (pp. 191–98). Tokyo: Shibundō. Yoshikawa, T. (1998). Kindai Nihon no “rezubianizumu”: 1910 nendai no shōsetsu ni egakareta rezubiantachi [“Lesbianism” in modern Japan: Lesbians depicted in novels of the 1910s]. In Kondō K. (ed.), Sei gensō o kataru [Discussing the illusion of gender] (pp. 75–110). Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō. Yoshio, H. (2014). Performing the woman writer: Literature, media and gender politics in Tamura Toshiko’s Akirame and “Onna sakusha.” Japanese Language and Literature 48(2) (October): 205–36.

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Chapter 8 Voicing Herstory’s Silence: Three Women Playwrights—Hasegawa Shigure, Ariyoshi Sawako, and Dakemoto Ayumi Barbara Hartley This chapter examines selected works by three women playwrights, Hasegawa Shigure, Ariyoshi Sawako and Dakemoto Ayumi. Notwithstanding very different times of production, a common thread runs through their works. This is the insistence of the male-constructed hegemon on diminishing the significance of women, or eliding their presence altogether, and a concomitant masculine disinterest in the torment created. Discussing two plays by each dramatist, the chapter notes how these women create spaces for audiences to hear the voices of those erased from history and thereby interrogate the highly gendered assumptions underpinning social institutions inside, and also outside, Japan.

Introduction Recent decades have seen an exponential rise in English-language scholarly interest in writing by women in Japan. During this time, the focus has often been on fiction and non-fictional narrative, with some attention also given to selected verse and poetry. With the production of plays and theatrical material often overlooked, few women playwrights are well-known outside Japan. M. Cody Poulton notes how dramatic production generally, including that of men, has been given “remarkably short shrift in Japanese literary studies over the past century or so” (Poulton 2010, vii). This chapter addresses that oversight by examining the contribution made to Japanese theater by three women: Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941), Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–1984), and Dakemoto Ayumi (1967–). Discussing two plays by each, including a translation by Ariyoshi that confirms her position—completely forgotten today—as a leading figure in the early 1970s Japanese theater world, the chapter notes how these dramatists create spaces for audiences to hear the voices of those erased from history and thereby interrogate the highly gendered assumptions that underpin social institutions inside, and also outside, Japan. While Hasegawa and Ariyoshi are relatively well-known to English language readers for their

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prose narratives, each also produced material for the Japanese theater world. Dakemoto is a contemporary playwright whose scripts speak to the erasure experienced by many women in modern Japan. In commentary that applies well to Dakemoto’s work, pioneering feminist and queer studies scholar, Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) notes how a growing number of contemporary writers attempt to capture: “Unspeakable memories, memories that cannot … or resist being historicized. Fragments of memories. Memories connecting to the current lives of the survivors.” To Takemura, such writing is an attempt to grasp “something missed, erased, plundered by nation states and dominant cultures” (Takemura 2010, 25). We can, in fact, apply these words not merely to Dakemoto’s scripts, but to the dramatic productions of each playwright discussed below. The three women featured had no direct connection with each other. Yet, a common theme runs through their dramatic material in that each profiles the ordeal imposed upon women by male-centric social structures. It is while advocating for women’s experiences to be at the center of dramatic production that Misako Koike, writing before Dakemoto’s work appeared, applauded Hasegawa’s capacity to create “revolutionary [kabuki] scenario,” while acclaiming Ariyoshi as “one of the most imaginative women in … modern Japanese drama” (Koike 1997, 44). Several plays discussed foreground women currently working, or who previously worked, as jorō, women traded for sex. While the setting is often what malecentric nomenclature refers to as prewar Japan’s pleasure quarters (hereafter licensed quarters), there is little pleasure for the women involved. In fact, these jorō appear as metonyms for the Sisyphean struggle of some women and girls simply to survive. Historic settings notwithstanding, the works resonate today also. The United Nations 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, for example, noted that seventy-seven and seventy-two percent of all trafficked women and girls respectively are traded for sexual exploitation (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2020, 33). Accordingly, much material discussed evokes the lives of contemporary women from Japan and other places.

Hasegawa Shigure Hasegawa Shigure was a major prewar literary figure whose reputation was diminished by claims of war collaboration related to her role as editor of the magazine, Kagayaku (Radiant). Initiated by Shigure in 1933 to support the families of young military conscripts, Kaga­ yaku indeed had an imperialist bent. Sarah Frederick nevertheless argues that the magazine presented “conflicted and unexpected affiliations” that demonstrated how “cultural, ethnic, colonial and national identities had ambivalent relations with gendered and embodied experiences and myriad Japanese and international feminisms” (Frederick 2013, 397). Editor Hasegawa herself embodied this complex mix. Produced well before Kagayaku, the material discussed here confirms Hasegawa’s confidence as a playwright, while also demonstrating her strong understanding of the forces constraining women in prewar Japan. Born in 1879, the eldest daughter of Japan’s first notary lawyer, the young Yasu—Hasegawa’s birth-name—was refused an education by her samuraibackground mother who regarded learning as unfeminine. Married at nineteen to a wealthy miner’s profligate son, Hasegawa experienced first-hand the restrictions imposed on intelligent young women of the time.1 The penname “Shigure,” meaning late autumn or early winter rain, suggests a haunting sense of loss and lingering sorrow.

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Although Shigure was active in modern theater, Poulton points out that she first made an impact in the traditional kabuki sphere (Poulton 2010, 192). In particular, she collaborated closely with a towering figure of 20th-century kabuki, Onoe Kikugorō VI (1885–1949; hereinafter Kikugorō), whom Shigure regarded as something of a younger brother (Furuido 1995, 16). Even within kabuki, however, she pioneered subtle new twists. Carole Cavanaugh, for example, notes how the playwright introduced modern lighting techniques into traditional theater forms (Cavanaugh 2006, 272–73). This talent was apparent in her more contemporary theater activity also, with Inoue Yoshie arguing that Shigure wrote in modern realist style well before prominent male playwrights such as Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) (Inoue cited in Poulton 2010, 193). The Hasegawa Shigure plays discussed here are a kabuki work, Sakura fubuki (1910, Cherry Blossom Tempest; performed 1911) and the more modern and realistic Ko’ori no ame (1926, Rain of Ice*). The first confirms Shigure’s position, now overlooked, as a powerhouse woman of Japanese theater in the first decades of the 20th century. The second demonstrates her profound understanding of women’s lot in imperial Japan. Cherry Blossom Tempest, originally entitled Misao, chastity, features the usual complicated kabuki storyline (see Leiter 2013, 675; Terada 2005, 166–67). Set during the second half of the Warring States era (1467–1615), the play is based on a narrative that continues to circulate throughout 21st-century Japan and that tells of a real-life woman, Katsuko (sometimes Katsuno, birth-death dates unknown).2 In Shigure’s play, Katsuko was played by up-andcoming kabuki star, Kikugorō, performing in onnagata (actor playing women’s roles) mode. The play opens following the murder of Katsuko’s betrothed. The murdered man also had a mistress, Sayuri. Upon his death, Sayuri takes the tonsure and retires close to Mino Castle where the murderer hides. Sayuri and Katsuko become friends and vow to seek joint revenge on the dead man’s behalf. Pretending to be Sayuri, Katsuko finds work with the mother of a young samurai in Mino Castle. Katsuko and the young samurai develop feelings for each other. After shooting the murderer dead during a horseback archery bout, Katsuko rejects a relationship with the young samurai to take her own life instead. Prominent postwar kabuki theater scholar Samuel L. Leiter explains this in terms of her not wishing to cause strife between various men involved in the plot (Leiter 2013, 675). Pre-war commentator, Ihara Seisei-en (1870–1941), however, regards Katsuko’s death as an expression of her desire, in terms of the play’s original title, to preserve her “chastity” as the dead man’s betrothed (see Furuido 1995, 16). In the 21st century, Shigure’s play may appear distressingly traditional in terms of the path chosen by the protagonist, Katsuko. Yet 1911 audiences received the play as a modern cultural production. In order to understand this seeming conundrum, we might consider the context in which Shigure presented Katsuko’s “chastity” to audiences. Chastity was imposed upon women in Japan at least from medieval times. Amy Stanley, for example, notes how warrior class legal codes penalized married women for non-conjugal sex without penalizing men (Stanley 2007, 313). The introduction of Christian concepts of love and marriage that followed the Meiji Restoration, however, brought a different perspective to relationships between the sexes (see Ballhatchet 2007). This included the right, previously denied, of a woman actively to choose monogamy. In other words, chastity now became a choice. In that sense, Shigure cleverly overlaid the old with the new, presenting a long-time kabuki theme that resonated with modern social mores. That is, by giving her

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protagonist woman the right to choose or reject a sexual partner, Shigure made a direct challenge to the prevailing “women as commodity” norm. Terada Shima notes that revenge was a tried-and-true kabuki theme, with women avengers being “not all that rare” (Terada 2005, 168). In fact, examining earlier “Katsuko narratives,” Terada concedes that the first three sections of Shigure’s Cherry Blossom Tempest were largely standard fare (Terada 2005, 167). The concluding section, however, differs markedly from previous tales. Citing Ihara, Terada observes that in Cherry Blossom Tempest Katsuko innovatively took revenge without the assistance of a man (Terada 2005, 169–170). This, furthermore, became possible only through the introduction of the Sayuri character who, although absent from previous iterations, became almost a Katsuko double in Shigure’s account. On the chastity theme, Furuido Hideo cites Ihara’s argument that the modern ambience of the play derives from the fact that, although she loves the young samurai, Katsuko determines to “inochi de misao o tsukutta” (save her chastity with her life) and remain faithful to her dead betrothed (Furuido 1995, 16). While the preservation of chastity through death is anathema to contemporary women, Ihara’s reading confirms the innovative nature in 1911 of such a plot. Katsuko’s tale had long been known throughout Japan (Terada 2005, 168). Nevertheless, it took Shigure’s brilliance to update the narrative in a way that drew audiences to the kabuki theater at a time when modern European drama was becoming the rage. In doing so, moreover, Shigure provided a vehicle that propelled Kikugorō to fame. Although Furuido’s 1995 discussion acknowledges that Shigure’s play facilitated Kikugorō’s emergence as a leading kabuki star, the critic largely relegates the woman playwright to the background. Once more citing Ihara, he notes how Kikugorō rejected “traditional” onnagata art in his performance. Instead, the actor based Katsuko’s appearance on a certain “Nabekura-san” (Furuido 1995, 16), probably one of two daughters of a well-known Tokyo banker (Terada 2005, 177). Pointing out that Kikugorō had a strong interest in the new western theater forms, Furuido commends this radical approach (Furuido 1995, 16). While Kikugorō clearly strived to innovate, Carole Cavanaugh’s comments cited above confirm that Shigure too was a transformative force. We can therefore imagine the playwright urging her “younger brother” as he reflected on how best to interpret the new role: “Go on, use a contemporary model for Katsuko—maybe one of the Nabekura girls.” Regardless of the exact process involved, we can be certain that Kikugorō consulted closely with Shigure when preparing to play Katsuko. We accordingly do her a great disservice if we overlook the way in which she nurtured one of prewar Japan’s great kabuki talents. Shigure’s Cherry Blossom Tempest was one element of this process that we should never forget. Neither should we forget the ground-breaking nature of the play at the time. Shigure was also a force in modern theater and the second play discussed here, Rain of Ice, was written for that performance genre. The play’s protagonist is the aging Tamayo, a sex worker in her youth who now lies terminally ill in the final stages of “cancer of the womb.” The title—linked by Poulton to Shigure’s “late autumn rain” penname—suggests the bleak conditions of Tamayo’s life and also of the lives of the other women characters (Poulton 2010, 193). In addition to Tamayo, the play features the ailing geisha’s twenty-year-old daughter, Toyoko, a young maid, Okei, a character referred to as “Granny,” and, Otaku, a friend from Tamayo’s youth. Otaku is now the proprietor of what is probably a house of assignation where men dine before purchasing sex. Illness has been a persistent trope in the modern literature of Japan. In his essay “Sickness as Meaning,” Karatani Kōjin probes the manner in which ill health was deployed in Meiji-era 116

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works such as Hototogisu (1898-1899, The Cuckoo, also Nami-ko*) (Karatani 1993, 97–113). Karatani emphasizes the link between illness and sexuality, theorizing the flushed color and labored breathing of the tubercular young woman as a metonym for the heteronormative orgasmic experience. Hasegawa, however, turns this interpretation on its head. Vividly recalling Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection, illness here is merely hopelessness and painful decay. In Karatani’s “sexual pleasure” template, women are ill or weak, and in need of masculine protection. The women in Rain of Ice, however, are partnerless. No man offers support. Nevertheless, Tamayo fantasizes about a lover whom she believes could have swept her off her feet to happiness, while her daughter plans a tryst with a man who may be her father. Hasegawa’s exquisite narrative strategy embeds incest, the greatest social taboo of all, into an already transgressive plot. As evident also in the works of the other playwright women discussed, Tamayo’s repeated abandonment demonstrates how, outside the suffocating confines of the prewar family system, women’s welfare in Japan was irrelevant to men. Decay associated with the diseased woman’s body—in fact, her reproductive organs— permeates this text. The opening line has the daughter, Toyoko, declare to the young maid, Okei: “It stinks in here. The smell is really unbearable” (Hasegawa 2010, 195). After a brief exchange with Okei, Toyoko repeats her discomfort: “I can’t bear another minute breathing in this putrid air.” Okei responds, “To tell the truth, that is an awful smell. … Goodness! The smell’s got to me as well” (Hasegawa 2010, 196). As the younger women leave, references to the abject are taken up by Otaku, the friend from Tamayo’s past, who initially focuses on a sailing ship, a gift from the previous lover about whom the ill woman fantasizes. While, to Tamayo, the ship represents everything that could have been, to Otaku it is “dirty,” “filthy” and “ugly.” The stage directions explain that Otaku “heavily spray[s] the air with perfume” (Hasegawa 2010, 199). Hasegawa’s play probes the mother-daughter relationship, exposing how a society that idolizes the mother-son bond with religious fervor contracts the mother-daughter connection to a viscously destructive yet ineffaceable link. On the other hand, however, this link perhaps does not exist, with the daughter feeling ambushed when a woman “showed up calling herself my mother” (Hasegawa 2010, 196). Little wonder then that, rather than displaying compassion, the daughter decries the stench emanating from the decaying maternal body. This brutality makes more sense when the mother confesses that she did not, in fact, want her daughter. She, the mother, nevertheless announces on her deathbed that “she’s the only one I care about now” (Hasegawa 2010, 200). In Cherry Blossom Tempest, although both are marginalized, Katsuko and Sayuri join forces to deliver justice. Their collaboration is made even more powerful by Koike’s observation that the two occupy “distinctly separate positions in a hierarchical society” (Koike 1997, 44). In Rain of Ice, on the other hand, poverty-stricken women must cannibalize each other to survive. Although in the prewar family registration system the Japanese father gave legal status to the child, Shigure is adamant that males had little concern for women impregnated outside marriage. These women and their children therefore had no option but to engage in dog-eat-dog tactics. In the play, we see a daughter displaying a complete lack of care—on the contrary, showing repugnance—towards her dying mother, generational conflict between younger and older women, and a viciously discordant clash between Tamayo and her lifelong “friend.” Like the exemplar oriental/orientalized woman, Madame Butterfly, Kiyū, the high-ranking prostitute discussed below, takes her own life and thereby remains young and Chapter 8: Voicing Herstory’s Silence

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beautiful in the public imaginary. Hasegawa’s Tamayo, on the other hand, confirms the bitter experience of one everyday woman who wastes away to putrid old age.

Ariyoshi Sawako Ariyoshi Sawako’s entry to the literary community came via theatrical activity. As a university student, she submitted essays to Engeki kai (Theater world), while later producing material on a regular basis as a freelance writer for the journal. Also participating in the Zero no kai (Zero Club) group for young theater aspirants, she worked for, became a lifelong friend of, and eventually wrote material for, prominent buyō (Japanese dance) exponent, Azuma Tokuho (1909–1998). In 1956, Ariyoshi’s short story, “Jiuta” (Ballad*), a beautifully constructed work depicting tension between a traditional theater world father and daughter, was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.3 Handa Yoshinaga connects Ariyoshi’s theater activities to her early fictional narratives (Handa 2021, 4). Indeed, in the year that “Ballad” appeared, the writer produced two scripts which, like that prize-nominated work, involved the traditional theater world. These were Aya no tsutsumi (The Drum of Twill) based on the traditional Noh piece translated by Arthur Waley as The Damask Drum,* and Yuki wa konkon sugata no mizu’umi (The Hunter and the Female Fox).4 Ariyoshi’s interest in traditional theater contested postwar trends, with literary identities rejecting Japanese arts as out-of-date. Satō Haruo (1892–1964) was one of several Akutagawa Prize judges who dismissed the traditional theater narrative, “Ballad,” on these grounds (Bungei shunjū 1982, 457–67). Ariyoshi, however, early demonstrated a refusal to comply with mainstream—that is, hegemonic masculine—demands. With her contribution to the theater world continuing almost until the abrupt end to her life, her knowledge was prodigious. Yoko McLain discusses how, during time on study-exchange in the United States, Ariyoshi schooled Donald Keene (1922–2019) on the kabuki dramatist, Kawatake Mokuami (1816–1893) (McLain 1977, 231). Yoshie Inoue further observes that Ariyoshi created “many works for … shinpa [new drama] and shingeki [new theater] companies” (Inoue 2014, 172). Izumo no Okuni (1969, Okuni of Izumo; translated as Kabuki Dancer*), the writer’s fictional account of the woman credited with “inventing” kabuki, moreover, suggests a shared passion for the theatrical arts by both the eponymous O-Kuni and the author. Regarding Ariyoshi’s dismissal by the male bundan (literary establishment), Masako Ikenushi notes that, like Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji (1970, On Not Dampening My Kimono Sleeves with American Rain; hereinafter American Rain), discussed below, many Ariyoshi novels “focused on ‘outsider’ groups of women excluded by society” (Ikenushi 2018, 335). Explaining the masculine devaluing of the writer, Ikenushi argues that Ariyoshi “declared herself unconcerned by these assessments [remaining] undeterred from her goal of writing about women with an inner strength … ignored by male writers” (Ikenushi 2018, 357–58). Yet, repeated stinging male critique, the effective equivalent of pre-internet era trolling, took its toll and possibly hastened the writer’s untimely death. Ariyoshi’s impact, however, was beyond question. Hasebe Hiroshi observes how in 1982, two years before she passed away, no fewer than six Ariyoshi theater works were playing throughout Japan (Hasebe 2013). Two she produced herself. We can only agree with this critic’s conclusion that Ariyoshi was a sengyō no engeki-jin “a theater-world professional” (Hasebe 2013).

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In that context, I will briefly consider a work that, although not an original script, was translated from English by Ariyoshi in collaboration with Elizabeth Miller and staged in circumstances that confirm the writer’s unassailable position as, borrowing from Hasebe, a theater-world professional. The play is Katonzubiru jiken no kunin (1972, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine). In spite of interest in her environmental writing, few discuss Ariyoshi Sawako as politically progressive. While acknowledging that the writer is “a serious social critic” with a desire “to influence as well as improve [her] society,” McLain concludes that Ariyoshi’s popularity lay in her ability to bring “traditionalism and modernity together with her realistic optimism” (McLain 1977, 211, 226). Yet, Ariyoshi actively promoted social change as far as her punishing schedule would permit. She campaigned for the 1974 re-election of woman’s rights advocate, Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1991). Although her name is rarely associated with anti-Vietnam War campaigns, her promotion in Japan of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine was hugely significant in terms of opposition to that war while also confirming her unrivalled status in Japan’s 1970’s theater world. On 17 May 1968, in Catonsville near Baltimore, Maryland, nine Catholic anti-war activists entered the United States military draft offices, took records to a nearby carpark and set the materials alight with home-made napalm. In commercial form, this was the United States chemical substance of choice for torching the landscape and its occupants in Vietnam during the United States occupation of that land. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine was a play based on the trial of the group written by Jesuit priest and group member, Daniel Berrigan (1921–2016). The tenor of the work is summed up in the lines, “[We] burnt some papers because the burning of children is inhuman and unbearable… Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order…” (Berrigan 1971, 17) Following a semester lecturing at the University of Hawai’i, Ariyoshi visited New York in mid-1971 where she discovered Berrigan’s play. According to Miyauchi, Ariyoshi staged the work in Japan in support of the local peace movement (Miyauchi 1995, 77). To this end, she assembled a volunteer anti-Vietnam War production team and was also instrumental in securing the contribution of key actors who performed pro-bono. Only a figure of huge status in Japan’s theater world could have achieved the coup of staging the work in this way. Although invited to the 1972 October Kinokuniya Hall performance, playwright Berrigan was refused a visa. If The Catonsville Nine demonstrated Ariyoshi’s capacity to marshal the big names of Japanese theater, her scriptwriting brilliance was confirmed by American Rain. Written in 1970, American Rain was first performed in 1972, the year that Ariyoshi produced Berrigan’s work and also, extraordinarily, published the run-away best-seller, Kōkotsu no hito (The Twilight Years*). The original Japanese title of American Rain, Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji, involves a series of word plays that complicate translation.5 The key pun in the original involves the verb, nurasu, to make wet, recalling the body fluids involved in coitus. Thus, the title indirectly declares: “I will not have sex with an American.” American Rain was written for iconic actress, Sugimura Haruko (1909–1997). Developed from Ariyoshi’s 1961 short story, “Kiyū no shi” (The Death of Kiyū), the play demonstrates how powerful men use then callously discard women’s bodies to achieve political ends. The setting is Miyozaki, the Yokohama “licensed” quarters established following the port city being opened to the west in 1859. Here, as Ikenushi argues, women “became sexual commodities” whose role was “to advance the interests of the nation” (Ikenushi 2018, 332). Tamayo from Hasegawa’s Rain of Ice longs for the “Capitane” and the ship whose red and blue Chapter 8: Voicing Herstory’s Silence

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sails suggest western imperialism.6 Ariyoshi’s play, however, has the piteous Kiyū take her own life rather than be sold to a foreigner. To consider 21st-century responses to Ariyoshi’s work, we can turn to no more authoritative source than the great kabuki onnagata, Bandō Tamasaburō (b. 1950). On a 2008 site operated by Shōchiku (Japan’s kabuki theater corporation) that discusses American Rain’s inclusion in Shōchiku’s Shinema Kabuki (Kabuki on Film) series, Tamasaburō explains that he first played the Sugimura role of narrating character, O-Sono, in 1988. The site informs readers that the forthcoming 2008 performance will be his ninth in the role.7 To Tamasaburō, American Rain is nothing short of a modern masterpiece (kindai no meisaku). Particularly significant, moreover, is his assessment of the “densetsu” (legend) that underpins the play. While narrator O-Sono has the focal role, she tells the story of Kiyū, the ethereally beautiful oiran (prostitute of highest rank) who takes her own life. The “legend” is the claim that Kiyū ended her life in order to keep Japan pure from foreign incursion. Once this claim circulates throughout the licensed quarters, Kiyū’s narrative is appropriated in the name of nationalistic fervor. Reflecting on the play’s cynicism towards the fundamental substance (tokoro) of Japan, and remarkably channeling notions of “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992), Tamasaburō laughingly speculates that perhaps other legends of the land were similarly constructed. While McLain read “realistic optimism” as characterizing Ariyoshi’s work, Tamasaburō is more sanguine. He suggests that, by “profoundly depicting” the “deep recesses of the human psyche,” American Rain almost qualifies as theater of the absurd (fujōrigeki no yō) (Bandō 2008). Although Tamasaburō’s words occur in the context of Shōchiku advertising, his familiarity with the play gives the actor’s comments serious weight. In the turbulent pre-Meiji Restoration setting of American Rain, adherents of the sonnō jōi (revere the emperor, expel the “barbarian”) movement seek to overthrow the Tokugawa regime. The oiran, Kiyū, loves and is loved by Tōkichi, a translator at her place of work. With the relationship doomed by rigid licensed quarter regulations that forbid consorting between workers, Tōkichi determines to leave for America. His sole barrier is money. Notwithstanding street opposition to the “barbarian,” Kiyū’s master cannot resist the financial benefits of accepting foreign clients. When one expresses a desire to purchase Kiyū—who works only with Japanese men—the offer cannot be refused. In spite of Tōkichi’s attempts to intervene, the girl is sold at an absurdly enormous sum. Before being “handed over,” however, Kiyū takes her own life. The reason is ambiguous. Was she, as nationalists later claim, fearful of the foreigner? Or was she gripped with despair at being denied happiness with the man she loved? Inferring that the interpreter perhaps sold the dead girl’s story in return for an overseas passage, a tabloid-type article sensationalizing Kiyū’s death begins to circulate following Tōkichi’s departure for the United States. Although it was unlikely that Kiyū could read or write,8 the article includes a will in Kiyū’s hand fundamentally declaring her devotion to the racial purity of Japan. The dead girl’s narrative thus becomes a rallying cry for sonnō jōi followers who flock to her former house. Fortified by alcohol, O-Sono reluctantly performs a farcical tribute in the room where Kiyū allegedly died. Eventually, one nationalist, realizing that O-Sono understands how the dead girl’s narrative has been exploited, threatens the geisha who, paid to hold her tongue, barely escapes with her life.

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I wish to consider narrator O-Sono and the pressure that operates on talented women in an utterly masculinized world. As Ikenushi notes, Act 4 of Ariyoshi’s play, set five years after Kiyū ’s death, depicts O-Sono’s experiences as the “silencing of women’s voices and the reality of their lives” (Ikenushi 2018, 344). O-Sono certainly provides an overt example, as Ikenushi very comprehensively argues, of the denial of women’s discourse. Ikenushi also notes how O-Sono is depicted as “a chatty, meddlesome lover of sake” (Ikenushi 2018, 339). While it may indeed have been her “mostly drunken rambling” that led to O-Sono “unwittingly deconstruct[ing] the mythology surrounding Kiyū’s motivations of suicide” (Ikenushi 2018, 342), we must consider how and why O-Sono took to drink. O-Sono is a courageous woman who demonstrates unusual leadership skills. Although she may be “chatty,” her garrulousness is arguably a deliberate ploy devised by a gifted woman as a means of negotiating a world in which men seek to suppress the workings of her intellect. This, in fact, as much as being physically threatened, is the silencing of O-Sono. Disapproval of her drinking, too, confirms the nature of gender constraints. Writing on the “fondness” of great 20th novelist, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) for the poet, Li Bai (701–762), Atsuko Sakaki notes the “celebration of intoxication in [the Chinese writer’s] poetry” (Sakaki 1994, 214). Even a 2012 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article lauds Li Bai as one of China’s “superstar drunken poets” (Gracie 2012). So, while drunken men become superstars, O-Sono is merely “rambling.” Silenced well before being paid-off by nationalists, O-Sono’s experiences suggest that, in addition to controlling women’s bodies, male structures refuse women the right to display intellectual prowess. After playing O-Sono, Tamasaburō commented in 2004 that the role helped him “very much feel” factors impinging on the lives of women “that welled up from deep within the unique heart of Ariyoshi Sensei” (Bando 2004, 19). Suggesting that O-Sono’s depiction of Tōkichi recalled Ariyoshi’s entrepreneur husband, Jin Akira (1922–1998), who worked overseas and spoke a second language, Tamasaburō also noted the geisha’s acumen in identifying the foolishness of the masses, misled by both the authorities and rumor or hearsay (Bandō 2004, 20). Homi Bhabha notes how rumor connects to “panic” and becomes an effect of “insurgency” (Bhabha 1994, 286). Rumor was rife in the Miyozaki licensed quarters, while the creation of panic and insurgency was the mission of the nationalists who stole Kiyū ’s tale. Ikenushi concludes that, her body sold and driven by men to her death, Kiyū was “doubly exploited” (Ikenushi 2018, 350). While this is undoubtedly the case, O-Sono, too, endured multiple assaults on both body and mind. Being garrulous and imbibing too much were strategies for negotiating these. While acknowledging that the idea is “my private fantasy” (watashi no katte na kūsō), Tamasaburō speculates that aspects of O-Sono may be representations of Ariyoshi herself (Bandō 2004, 20).

Dakemoto Ayumi Musashino University instrumental music major, Dakemoto Ayumi, worked in theater before forming her own production company, Memento C. In addition to scripting plays based on events such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, she adapted literary works for the stage. Work on a narrative by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992), Japan’s first recognized postwar-born writer from the hisabetsu buraku community (community of discriminated people), took Dakemoto to Nakagami’s birthplace in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture. Taiheiyō shokudō (2013, Pacific

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Refreshment Room) and Kano sō no musume (2016, Daughter of a Well-known Priest), the plays discussed here, both concern Shingū’s involvement in the 1910 High Treason Incident (see Hartley 2013b). Known for the execution of anarchists, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and Kanno Suga (1881–1911), the Incident saw charges laid against twenty-six defendants, all convicted, six of whom were from Shingū. Twelve were hanged, including Shingū medical doctor, Ōishi Seinosuke (1867–1911), and boatman, Naruishi Heishirō (1882–1911). Dakemoto’s meticulous research creates a work which, obliquely recalling director Chloe Zhang’s embedding of real-life people in the 2020 fictional film Nomadland, references a plethora of historical persons and events. The play spans the time from the Refreshment Room’s opening in autumn 1904, when the Russo-Japanese War was in full swing, to the 1910/11 High Treason Incident trial and sentencing. Dakemotos’s dramatization specifically profiles the position of women in late-Meiji Japan. A dark concluding scene featuring the protagonist climbing to the gallows notwithstanding, Pacific Refreshment Room is a gloriously chaotic long play narrating the life of medical practitioner, Ōhoshi Seinosuke, based on the real-life Ōishi. Permitting a flexible “magical realism”-type chronology, the work is structured as a narrative embedded in the memory of Christian pastor, Okita Saburō, drawn from historical Shingū minister, Okino Iwasaburō (1876–1956). A third significant figure is Takahagi Kenmei, modelled on Takagi Kenmyō (1864–1914), the Buddhist priest, imprisoned for high treason, who presided over Shingū’s hisabetsu burakumin community parish. Driving the play’s direction, however, is the complex persona of Ōhoshi, whose nonchalance and cynicism mask a passion for social justice and desire for change. Dakemoto variously profiles the doctor’s flirtation with bomb-making while “spiking” the device with Vaseline to prevent an explosion, his insistence on nonviolence when advising striking laborers, and the conflict that characterized his relationship with his much younger wife, Ei. While some characters are deliberately two-dimensional, Ōhoshi runs the full gamut of hope and joy, despair and desperation. Key themes are the protagonist’s ardent advocacy of peace and compassion for the poor. In an early scene, the doctor promotes the September 1904 edition of the journal, Myōjō (Bright star), in which the famed poet, Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), lamented the military conscription of her younger brother (see Rabson 1991, 45–46, and chapter 18 in this volume). To mark the Pacific Refreshment Room opening, Ohoshi invites a cross-section of Shingū society to the event where he will prepare and serve dishes that he learned to cook as a student in the United States. In addition to the mayor, invited guests include the priest, Kenmei, and several of his parishioners. In 1904, the notion of hisabetsu burakumin community members sharing a meal with public officials was unthinkable. When the perplexed Kenmei asks how the poor might benefit by eating western food, Seinosuke cries, “Liberty, equality, fraternity” (jiyū, byōdō, haku’ai) (Dakemoto 2013). Vociferously anti-war, Ōhoshi cannot abide public enthusiasm for the conflict with Russia or the victory celebrations marking that bloody war’s end. With the ubiquitous “Gunkan maachi” (Battleship March) occasionally playing, crowds give three cries of “Banzai” (Long Live the Emperor). Ōhoshi transforms this into “manzai” (comic exchange), and eventually “abunai” (dangerous). He “frenetically” responds to militarist slogans by crying: “Dai Nippon teikoku, abunai” (the great empire of Japan is dangerous) (Dakemoto 2013). Contemptuous of wealthy war-backers, Ōhoshi demonstrates great concern for Kenmei’s parishioners. The depiction of members of this impoverished community, including a scene in which Seinosuke refuses to take a consultation fee from patients beset by “chronic malnutrition and exhaustion, and poor public hygiene” 122

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(Dakemoto 2013), reveals the deep social divisions of the time. Dakemoto’s script also evokes Japan’s 21st-century kakusa shakai, economically divided society. Various narrative strategies foreground the sale of women. One young hisabetsu burakumin woman loses her husband to war and must sell herself for sex. Bereft, Kenmei witnesses “carts carrying pails” leaving the licensed quarters “with the bodies of dead prostitutes” (Dakemoto 2013). With the sympathetic Kenmei pondering whether these women will achieve enlightenment, Dakemoto successfully profiles the institutional norms that result in women being judged as disposable. Although a theoretical supporter of women’s rights who confirms Ei’s domestic labor as “[legitimate] economic activity” (Dakemoto 2013), Ōhoshi also denounces her looking old “when you frown” (Dakemoto 2013). The historical Ei, a shadowy photographic presence in history, becomes with Dakemoto’s intervention a fully rounded woman. Displaying some conservatism, she nevertheless confirms that she is no simpering Yamato nadeshiko, feminine flower, or model ryōsai kenbo, good wife wise mother, by repeatedly questioning Seinosuke’s ideas. More powerful in terms of asserting the rights of women is Kanzaki Yūgetsu, based on Kanno Suga, the only woman executed in the January 1911 purge. Coming to Shingū as a journalist and determined to “do away with unchaste men,” Kanzaki courageously declares, “I use my elbows, and also my words, as weapons” (Dakemoto 2013). In a poignant scene, she and Ei remain alone on stage. When Ei observes that, lacking learning, she must seem strange to a woman journalist, Kanzaki replies. “You over-estimate me. For a woman alone in the world like myself there is only writing or becoming a geisha” (Dakemoto 2013). Kanzaki initially appears as a metamorphized match girl who, appalled at cries of “Banzai,” decries “a society that delights in winning … by sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men, a society that oppresses women who are half the world” (Dakemoto 2013). This contrasts with fellow High Treason Incident leader, Kōtoku Shūsui, who visited the real-life Ōishi in Shingū in 1908. Kōtoku succinctly articulates the processes that result in capital and the grotesque myth of empire creating the poverty that commodifies women’s bodies. The anarchist leader nevertheless demonstrates his lack in other respects when, in response to Seinosuke’s advocacy of monogamy, he responds by citing a friend: “A wife is like green tea and rice. But you’ll be hungry if that’s all you eat—you need an extra side-dish too” (Dakemoto 2013). Pacific Refreshment Room features a powerful intertextual element. Closing scenes, for example, reference the final courtroom address of the High Treason Incident defense team member, Hiraide Shū (1878–1914). The historical Hiraide met literary heavyweight, Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), to learn the finer points of the socialism and anarchism that the prosecution alleged threatened Japan. Giving versions of both Hirade’s bravura speech and the verdict, Dakemoto tempers history by extraordinarily having Okita declare: However, the people continued to throw bombs. And when more and more people were sentenced to death, there were not enough gallows to hang the condemned. With forests felled, a shortage of fuel occurred. Cities fell into ruinous wastelands when the people all froze. That was how much the monarch had to forgo. In other words, not a single subject remained to be ruled. (Dakemoto 2013) The “ruinous wasteland” referred to recalls the devastation that beset Japan during the closing stages of the Second World War. Dakemoto’s script hints that the country’s road to wartime Chapter 8: Voicing Herstory’s Silence

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perdition commenced with the High Treason Incident process. From this perspective, the chief prosecutor in the case was Hiranuma Ki’ichirō (1867–1952) who, after being appointed prime minister of Japan from January to August 1939, hawkishly advised Hirohito during wartime. Further intertextual references include a letter urging hope written by Ōhoshi to his wife based on a letter that the historical Ei received the day after her husband’s execution. The play concludes with a modification of the 1911 verse, “Seinosuke no shi” (The Death of Seinosuke),9 by tanka luminary, Yosano Hiroshi/Tekkan (1873–1935). This is recited by a character playing the poet himself: Seinosuke died. Perhaps that was his just desserts Pursued by the machine, he died There are many named Seinosuke But my friend was unique Never again will we meet But I don’t give a damn My foolish, foolish friend, Seinosuke. (Dakemoto 2013) While the wildly ambivalent verse laments Seinosuke’s death, it also demonstrates caution before official surveillance and a reluctance to give the dead man unreserved support. Yosano was probably wise to be cautious. The final scene of the play sees the executed man’s wife issue a plea that Japan allow truth to be heard when rebuilding after the Second World War. Narrator Okita explains how the authorities relentlessly pursued the families of the Shingū accused and how the calamitous event bought excessive fear to the town. This pursuit of family members of those sentenced for high treason is the theme of the second Dakemoto play discussed. Daughter of a Well-known Priest dramatizes the almost unbearable burden placed by her father’s conviction on Takayo, the daughter adopted in infancy by Takagi Kenmyō, the Shingū priest and High Treason Incident accused featured in Pacific Refreshment Room and in this play also as Takahagi Kenmei. Although the child’s real-life name was Kayako, Dakemoto emphasises the fate of being sold that befell her by using Kayako’s geisha name, Takayo, throughout. Opening with samisen music that evokes the licensed quarters, the play is interestingly narrated by a former member of the Tokkō keisatsu (Special Higher Police) whose role was the surveillance and often brutal control of prewar Japanese dissidents. Yoshie Inoue’s observation that many of Shigure’s plays had a “strong element of fantasy” suggests an unintentional sense of hierarchy that places such works beneath the playwright’s “realist drama” with “contemporary theme[s]” (Inoue 2014, 168). Yet fantasy—magical realism—is a staple of women’s writing that empowers the imagination both to construct alternate worlds and to create possible experiences for those erased from the historical record. These powerful functions of fantasy are well demonstrated in this Dakemoto play. Daughter of a Well-Known Priest is a more reflective text than the energetic Pacific Refreshment Room in which characters literally run on and off the stage. Opening on a windswept beach, waves pounding the shore, the play has Takayo contemplating objects that wash back and forth with the tide, as the sand that is a metaphor for the young woman’s lack of ability to direct her own life flows through her hands. Nine at the time of her father’s arrest, she recalls crying out as a rickshaw moving with “incredible speed” spirited the priest away (Dakemoto 2016). As Takayo sorrowfully observes that she never understood the reason 124

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for her father’s detention, the scene shifts to a police station foyer. She explains to the desk officer, later identified as the narrator, that she was instructed to report that day to the authorities. A registered geisha in Hamamatsu, she must present herself for surveillance each time the imperial train passes through the town. Returning home in the “bitter wind (karakkaze) and snow,” she chants the Namu Amida Butsu (Praise Be to the Enlightened Buddha) prayer while recalling how her father, a “wonderful (rippa na) priest” (Dakemoto 2016), once declared—in opposition to Takayo’s teacher at school—“There is no war in Paradise” (Dakemoto 2016). A strong element of Buddhist resignation permeates this work as expressed in Takayo’s observation: “This is all that there is” (Dakemoto 2016). The protagonist further laments that, for her, happiness is not permitted. Dakemoto weaves her script with memories of conversations between Takayo and her dead father. In one long monologue, delivered after the girl asks why poverty-stricken temple precinct children do not attend school, Kenmei declares the equality of all and the power of the Buddha’s teachings. Yet, Takayo feels abandoned by “Hotoke-sama” (the Buddha), especially when, to cries of “rebel” (muhan-nin) and “traitor” (gyakuto), she is told to “get out of Japan” (Dakemoto 2016). The tokkō sources her ordeal to “kono kuni no daigen” (commanderin-chief of the land) (Dakemoto 2016). When the tokkō at one point visits her workplace, she is a well-regarded geisha who, confirming the forced mobility of many women, came from Toyohashi to work in Hamamatsu. Her current “madam” gives Takayo’s background as bought at age nine or ten, geisha apprentice at fourteen, fully-fledged (ippon-dachi) geisha at sixteen, sold to another master when her contract ended and then to a geisha agency (Dakemoto 2016). This sequence evokes the sense of women being marketed interminably. Forced as a child to perform cleaning duties, Takayo must eventually train as a geisha. When she expresses fear of being punished for making an error during practice, the madam retorts, “Do you want to be sold as a prostitute?” (Dakemoto 2016). Recalling the talented girl protagonist from Kyameru kōjō kara (1928, From the Caramel Factory), by Sata Ineko (1904–1998), whose indolent father demands his daughter leave school to earn money, the madam declares schooling unnecessary for a trainee geisha. This is in spite of the fact that, like Sata’s protagonist girl, Kayako is praised by her teachers. Following the intervention of an older prostitute—who later takes her own life—Takayo does attend school. Other children, however, throw stones and cry, “Here comes the geisha girl. She stinks!” (Dakemoto 2016). Takayo’s childhood ends when, at twelve, she learns that her father in prison took his life by hanging (Dakemoto 2016). Of the plays discussed here, Daughter of a Well-known Priest is the most confronting in its depiction of the suffering of licensed quarters women. Neither theoretical rejection of the term “victim” nor a recognition of a woman’s right to sell her body for sex can elide the fact that the inability to prevent one’s body being traded for whatever purpose effectively reduces the subject involved, within the institutions of the society so structured, to sub-human status. To Takayo, women treated in this way are “colored carp swimming in filthy water” (Dakemoto 2016). Before taking her life, O-Tsuru, the senior prostitute who supported Takayo’s schooling, attempted to cleanse her “soiled” body by scrubbing herself obsessively. It is these and similar women to whom Dakemoto gives voice. From that perspective, it is interesting to compare the intertextuality of the two Dakemoto plays. As discussed above, Pacific Refreshment Room references a high-profile poet and historical documents circulated by High Treason Incident scholars. Daughter of a Wellknown Priest, however, features material that has become almost invisible. There is a series of Chapter 8: Voicing Herstory’s Silence

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samisen tunes, such as “Kuro kami” (Black Hair), once known to all living in the “pleasure” precincts, now confined to a few esoteric private performances sometimes viewed on YouTube clips. There is reference to the Shingū legend of a princess who lured away children at dusk. There is a woman’s voice singing a shiritori round (whereby the last syllable of one word becomes the first syllable of the next) in which the phrase “Nihon no/ Nogi Taishō ga/ gaisen su” (Japan’s/ General Nogi/ claimed victory) loops the song into repetition. Nogi Maresuke (1849–1912) was an Imperial Army general lionized for his feats during the Russo-Japanese War. An undated Wikipedia entry explains that the lyrics reproduced in the play were sung during games of handball (temari) and jump-rope (nawatobi). In spite of the mainstream “Nogi subduing the Russians” theme, the almost absurd nature of the randomly connected words subverts the dignity inherent in the official lyrics which, Peter Cave notes, featured in school textbooks in prewar Japan (Cave 2016, 15–17). The play closes with the Meiji-era children’s song, “Hato poppo,” written by Shingū-born Higashi Kume (1877–1969), the first lyricist in Japan to create songs from oral material (see Mori’ue 2001). There is also a note— barely a scrap—left by Takayo referenced by the tokkō. Intertextuality of this nature arguably emphasizes how the voices of the characters that appear in this play have been silenced within hegemonic structures. Even the tokkō voices a possibility that was suppressed by prewar authorities when he tentatively questions the guilt of the High Treason Incident accused. And yet, through all this, Takayo survives. While she loses her business in the June-July 1945 Hamamatasu fire-bombing and warship bombardment, she and a younger companion emerge physically unscathed. Like the real-life Kayako, who became prominent in the Tenrikyō new religion, Dakemoto’s fictional representation dedicates her postwar life to aiding the dispossessed. The play concludes with Takayo on a beach—perhaps in Shingū—explaining to her grandchild how life can only be lived through “yurusu koto,” here the character for release, toleration and trust, rather than the usual “giving permission.” In the evening chill, Takayo leads the as-yet-uncomprehending child home. With the curtain falling, the narrator tokkō, his recollections concluding, perhaps passes away while listening to the “Hato poppo” children’s song.

The Power of the Dramatic Voice Live theater provides a space in which performers and audience momentarily participate together in a fictional world. Through this brief experience, pressing social issues can be canvassed, deconstructed, and critiqued. There is an immediacy to drama, to being immersed in alternate possibilities which, through the power of shared proximity, has the potential to motivate all participants—audience and actors—to contemplate constrictive social assumptions related not merely to gender, but also to race, class and disability. While Shigure’s Katsuko—the role that established Kikugorō’s star-power—magnificently avenged her dead lover, Rain of Ice stripped away male-imposed artifice to lay bare women’s lives. In the same year that she translated and produced a play opposing the Vietnam War, Ariyoshi created the geisha, O-Sono, forced to conceal her sharp intelligence behind a drunken, chatty façade. After profiling the complexity of a socially aware doctor from Shingū and demonstrating how prewar Japan commodified women, Dakemoto further confronted her audiences by depicting a woman bought and sold while being harshly monitored by the prewar state. Once seen or read, these works cannot be forgotten. Nor can audiences claim to be unaware. We

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may or may not agree with the approach of the playwrights or the conclusions they suggest. Nevertheless, experiencing their work transports us to spaces in which silenced voices are heard and in which the imperative for social change is irrefutable.

Notes 1

Poulton and Hartley give background to Shigure’s life (Poulton 2010, 191–94; Hartley 2013a, 315–17). “Katsuno’s Revenge” appears in the 2006 collection, Katsuno’s Revenge and Other Tales of the Samurai, with 1920 foreword by Asataro Miyamori (Miyamori 2006). A January 2021 Excite News Japan online article outlines Katsuko’s revenge against Shichiroemon (Japaaan [sic] 2021). 3 Miyauchi provides a comprehensive account of Ariyoshi’s life (Miyauchi 1995). 4 The English translation of the title appears on the undated Barbara Curtis Adachi Bunraku website. 5 For alternative English translations, see Ikenushi and the undated Japanese Drama Database (Ikenushi 2018, 333). 6 Photographer, Kristian Laemmle-Ruff, also associates red and blue with western imperialism in images of the American “star wars” spy installation, Pine Gap, Central Australia (Laemmle-Ruff 2016). 7 Ikenushi also provides details of the history of the role (Ikenushi 2018, 334). 8 At various points throughout her article, Ikenushi reviews scholarship on the Kiyū model and other historical questions raised by the text (Ikenushi 2018). 9 The poem was first published in Mita Bungaku (Mita Literature) April 1911. 2

References: Ariyoshi, S. (1970). Furu Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji [On Not Dampening My Kimono Sleeves with American Rain]. Tokyo: Chūōkōron. ———. (Undated). Furu Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji [On Not Dampening My Kimono Sleeves with American Rain]. Japanese Drama Database, The Japan Foundation Performing Arts Network Japan. https:// performingarts.jp/e/data_drama/theatre/d-00029.html. Ballhatchet, H. (2007). Christianity and Gender Relationships in Japan Case Studies of Marriage and Divorce in Early Meiji Protestant Circles. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 34(1): 177–201. Barbara Curtis Adachi Bunraku Collection. (Undated). Ariyoshi Sawako. Columbia University Library. https://bunraku.library.columbia.edu/authors/111/. Bandō, T. (2004). Ariyoshi Sensei to Furu Amerika [Ariyoshi Sensei and American Rain]. In Inoue K., Handa Y. & Miyauchi J. (eds.), Ariyoshi Sawako no Sekai [The world of Ariyoshi Sawako] (pp. 18–21). Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō. ———. (2008). Tamasaburō Shinema Kabuki Furu Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji o kataru [Tamasaburō talks about the Cinema Kabuki production, On Not Dampening My Kimono Sleeves with American Rain]. Kabuki bito [The Beautiful People of Kabuki]. https://www.kabuki-bito.jp/news/2702. Berrigan, D. (1971). The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. New York: Samuel French Inc. ———. (1972). Katonzubiru jiken no kunin [The Trial of the Catonsville Nine] (Ariyoshi S. & E. Miller, trans.). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. (Original work published 1971) Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bungei Shunjū (1982). Dai san-jū go kai Akutagawa-shō senpan [Thirty-fifth Akutagawa Judging Panel Comments]. In Akutagawa-shō zenshū 5 [Akutagawa Prize collection 5] (pp. 457–67). Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Cavanaugh, C. (2006). Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941). In In R.L. Copeland & M. Ortabasi (eds.), The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (pp. 267–73). New York: Columbia University Press. Cave, P. (2016). Story, Song and Ceremony: Shaping Dispositions in Japanese Elementary Schools in Taisho and Early Showa. Japan Forum 28(1): 9–31. Dakemoto, A. (2013). Taiheyō shokudō [Pacific Refreshment Room]. Kawasaki: Memento C. ———. (2016). Kano sō no musume [Daughter of a Well-known Priest]. Kawasaki: Memento C. Frederick, S. (2013). Beyond Nyonin Geijutsu, Beyond Japan: Writings by Women Travellers in Kagayaku (1933–1941). Japan Forum 25(3): 395–413.

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Furuido, H. (1995). Kabuki haiyū no shin-buyō [A kabuki actor’s new Japanese dance]. Buyō-gaku 18: 16–18. Gracie, C. (2012). Li Bai and Du Fu: China’s Drunken Superstar Poets. BBC News Beijing (online), 11 October. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19884020. Handa, Y. (2021). Ariyoshi Sawako Ki no kawa no kenkyū: shi to shinjitsu [A study of Ariyoshi Sawako’s The River Ki: Poetry and reality]. Kōgakkan Daigaku kiyō 59: 3-51. http://id.nii.ac.jp/1543/00000421/. Hartley, B. (2013a). The Space of Childhood Memories: Hasegawa Shigure and Old Nihonbashi. Japan Forum 25(3): 314–30. ———. (2013b). Ōishi Seinosuke and the Shingū Group. In M. Gavin and B. Middleton (eds.), Japan and The High Treason Incident (pp. 159–171). Abingdon: Routledge. Hasegawa, S. (1942). Sakura Fubuki (Cherry Blossom Tempest). In Hasegawa Shigure zenshū 5 [Hasegawa Shigure Collected Works 5] (pp.1–76). Tokyo: Nihon Bunrinsha. ———. (2010). Rain of Ice [Ko’ori no ame] (M.C. Poulton, trans.). In M.C. Poulton, (ed.), A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900–1930 (pp.195–205). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. (Original work published 1926) Hasebe, H. (2013). Kaimaku beru wa hanayaka ni: Kaisetsu [The Theatre Curtain Bell Sounds Brightly: Discussion]. Bungeishunjū: Hon no hanashi, 12 December. https://books.bunshun.jp/articles/-/1682. Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (1992). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ikenushi, M. (2018). Reinvigoration and Interrogation of the Political Myth of Kiyū’s Suicide in Ariyoshi Sawako’s Furu Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji. The Journal of Japanese Studies 44(2), (Summer): 333–60. Inoue, Y. (2014). Japanese Women Playwrights: From Meiji to the Present. In J.T. Rimer, M. Mori & M.C. Poulton (eds.), The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (pp. 167–174). New York: Columbia University Press. Japaaan [sic]. (2021). Sengoku jidai, korosareta koibito no kataki’uchi o shita higeki no retsujō: Katsuko no saigo [The fierce woman of the Warring States era who took revenge for her murdered lover: The final moments of Katsuko’s life]. Excite nyuusu, 14 January. https://www.excite.co.jp/news/article/Japaaan_136693/. Karatani, K. (1993). Sickness as Meaning (Y. Kawahara & R. Steen, trans.). In Brett de Bary (ed.), Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press: 97–113. Koike, M. (1997). Breaking the Mold: Women in Japanese Theatre. American Theatre 4(4) (April): 43–45. Kristeva, J. (2011). Power of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Laemmle-Ruff, K. (2016). Mind the Gap Exhibition. Available at: http://www.kristianlaemmleruff.com​ /mind-the-gap—-exhibition.html. Leiter, S.L. (2013). Kabuki at the Crossroads: Years of Crisis, 1952–1965. Leiden: Global Oriental. Miyamori, A. (2006). Katsuno’s Revenge and Other Tales of the Samurai. Online: Dover Books. https://www​ .gutenberg.org/ebooks/67650. Miyauchi, J. (1995). Hyōden: Ariyoshi Sawako [Ariyosho Sawako: Biography with commentary]. In Ariyoshi Sawako: Shinchōsha Nihon bungaku arubamu 71 [Ariyoshi Sawako: Shinchōsha Japanese literature album 71] (pp. 4–95). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Moriue, S. (2001). Higashi Motokichi, Kume no koto nado: “Hato poppo” kara “Kōen dōwa” made [Various things about Higashi Motokichi and Higashi Kume: From “Hato Poppo” to “Oral Narration of Fairy Tales”]. Yōji no kyōiku 100(3): 4–12. Poulton, M.C. (2010). A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Rabson, S. (1991). Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One’s Life or Not: A Question of Which War. The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 25(1) (April): 45–74. Sakaki, A. (1999.) Japanese Perceptions of China: The Sinophilic Fiction of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59(1) (June): 187–218. Stanley, A. (2007). Adultery, Punishment, and Reconciliation in Tokugawa Japan. The Journal of Japanese Studies 33(2) (Summer): 309–35. Takemura, K. (2010). Feminist Studies/Activities in Japan: Present and Future. Lectora 16: 13–33. Terada, S. (2005). Hasegawa Shigure Sakura Fubuki ni tsuite” [About Hasegawa Shigure and Cherry Blossom Tempest]. Engeki gakuron shū: Nihon Engeki gakkai kiyō 43: 165–78. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2020). Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, 2020. New York: United Nations. (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.20.IV.3). Wikipedia. (2021). Temari uta [Temari ball songs]. Available at : https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/手鞠歌.

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Chapter 9 Writing Women’s Happiness in the 1980s: Labor and Care in Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko and Yoshimoto Banana Nozomi Uematsu The 1980s marked the peak of the “bubble” economy in Japan. It was a time of a notable shift in literature and society. The policy changes and social disputes over women’s choice and liberty were such that the era was dubbed onna no jidai—“women’s decade.” Women writers began to assess and challenge the meaning and rhetoric around happiness. This chapter considers three Japanese women authors—Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko, and Yoshimoto Banana—exploring how their writing engages with the concept of happiness in relation to labor and carework in a time of neoliberalism.

Introduction This chapter will discuss women’s writing in the 1980s in Japan, a time when women’s political and social roles were subject to debate. I will focus on three writers—Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko, and Yoshimoto Banana—whose writing styles and literary genres differ from one another, yet whose literary works similarly encapsulate the way women’s happiness and liberty were at stake, especially in relation to the multiple meanings of labor in women’s lives: reproduction, care-work, and employment. The 1980s was a prosperous time for Japan, accompanied by the emergence of neoliberal politics. The country’s consumer power accelerated in the global economy due to a liberalized market—cities flourished and money was well spent around the world, as the Japanese bought artworks and skyscrapers (Katō 166). Economic stability strengthened the presence of right-wing politics in Japan and lessened the impact of more progressive agendas. As a result, women, who were newly gaining economic and political capital, became the subject of considerable debate. Indeed, 1980s Japan saw such impressive transformations in gender roles and categories that the era was dubbed the “women’s decade” (onna no jidai) (Suzuki 2010, 36). The debates during this period dealt with women’s life choices, particularly with questions of labor:

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whether to work or marry and become housewives, and then possibly to have children (or dreaming of the possibility to “have it all”). Women’s choices for their lifestyles and labor remain an on-going topic today in discussions of women’s choices (freedom) and happiness. This chapter will pay particular attention to the crucial ways this decade influenced gendered issues of labor and life choices in women’s writing. Over the course of the decade, the National Diet adopted a number of significant policies with direct impact on women. For example, 1986 saw the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL). With this law, in principle, workplaces could no longer discriminate on grounds of gender in their recruitment. However, the implementation of EEOL in 1986 ironically reinforced the division of labor in the workplace, as it “enabled companies to segregate male and female regular employees into general (sōgoshoku) and clerical career tracks (ippanshoku) on the normative notion that women’s domestic labor required protection from the demands of regular employment” effectively, limiting women “to clerical and support roles” and restricting women’s access to long-term career trajectories (Macnaughtan 2019, 169). It also reinforced the expectation that female employees would be the ones predominantly tasked with domestic care-work. In addition, controversy arose over the revision of the Eugenics Protection Law in 1982 (later renamed the Maternity Protection Law in 1992), in which the National Diet tried unsuccessfully to remove the economic rationale for abortion. This controversy fueled discussions on women’s liberty, especially a woman’s decision over her own body and led to the formation of the activist group Soshiren. Furthermore, revision of pension schemes for women invited argument. The so-called “No. 3 insured” policy, which guaranteed pensions for housewives whose husbands were in secure employment, resulted in encouraging women to remain housewives. Many argued that it negated the value of unmarried women, or of those whose partners did not have a stable income—which, in effect, contradicted the EEOL (Kobatake 2008). Contemporary “tax and pension schemes created financial incentives for married mothers to limit employment to part-time work and offered advantages, particularly to the families of men with management positions in large corporations who could support their family on a single salary” (Ezawa Aya 2019 quoting Osawa 2002, 108). Thus the revision of the pension scheme led to women continuing to engage in domestic care-work as “professional” housewives, who were “devoted to the well-being of [their] spouses and children” (Ezawa quoting Vogel 1963, 108). What these laws suggest—either in their implementation or attempted revision—is that, while some of the options and choices for women encouraged them to participate in the workforce, there was an equally strong incentive for women to remain at home, securing their work to the domestic sphere. Moreover, few women at the time could rely on access to contraceptives and other reproductive rights, thus lacking control over their own bodies. Social structures, such as the laws discussed above, did not guarantee women the freedom to determine their own life course or to make their choices about whether or not to have children, raising the question that this chapter addresses: what it meant to pursue happiness as a woman in 1980s Japan. This decade of women, onna no jidai, therefore, was one characterized by concern over questions of reproduction and caregiving, public employment, and marriage in relation to life security. These questions lead to deliberations over the meaning of happiness. What did it mean for a woman to achieve and pursue happiness? How was she able to fulfill her potential and capabilities? Looking back on this decade, a contemporary critique can show that the liberty that women were offered, was, in fact, conditional. 130

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This chapter will draw from both national and international critiques of neoliberalism, the dominant socio-economic model for many countries during this period. Critics of neoliberalism argue that the “choices” it provides are illusory, and feminist critics, such as Angela McRobbie and Miura Reiichi (discussed below), expand from this to challenge the concept of “postfeminism” and the issues of choice in women’s lives: domestic labor or labor in the job market; raising children or being breadwinners. Such choices, on one hand, appear to advance feminism, promising women the liberty to choose their lifestyles. On the other hand, however, these choices that society provides are only within the narrow scope of what benefits a neoconservative, capitalist society, with its demands for care-work and economic growth. From this perspective, I argue that these issues of women’s fulfillment and happiness, under the burden of societal expectations, are inextricable from analysis of the social attitudes placed upon care-work and employment. To analyze the issue of happiness upon which the writers in this chapter all focus, I will draw from affect studies, which is the critique of social discourses of emotion, not at the individual level, but in terms of structural and systemic narratives of what should make people feel certain emotions. In The Promise of Happiness (2010) Sara Ahmed refers to the way in which one feels happy when oriented towards certain objects of desire, as “affect attachment” (I will discuss Ahmed’s theories of happiness further below). Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) argues that optimism is cruel as subjects feel attached, long for, and orient themselves towards stories of success or a “good life,” a “moral-intimate-economic thing … people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work” (Berlant 2011, 2). In other words, to feel happy, to feel fulfilled and accomplished, is to be proximate to a convention of a “good life,” and for that, one is often drawn towards certain objects and indicators of happiness, such as marriage, family construction, and wealth accumulation. Considering these approaches to conceptualizing happiness and cruel optimism is helpful in the context of the 1980s in Japan, along with contemporary policies on a woman’s life course, for understanding the issues that arose in this decade around women’s fulfillment and their life choices. How does women’s happiness in Japan in the 1980s build from the premise of women’s engagement in care-work? What did it mean for women to have “a good life” in 1980s Japan? Issues of “care” have been discussed in various fields and recently connected with literary analysis (Ogawa 2021). Joan C. Tronto defines care in Who Cares? as “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto 2015, 3). Care is in fact not “only healthcare, child-care, and caring for the elderly” in Tronto’s understanding, as when we look to the idea of care in 1980s Japan, care-work seems most exclusively concerned with being mothers and housewives in support of the salaried adult man, as well as with the acceleration of the nation’s birth rate in the context of an aging population. In 1989, the drop in the birth rate was so alarming that it was called the “1.57 crisis,” referring to the fertility rate. “The drop in the birth rate shows that Japanese women are finding it increasingly difficult to accept the terms and conditions of motherhood” (Jolivet and Glasheen, 1997, 13). In such a time, it stands to reason that literary works wouldexplore these issues in relation to the the meaning of women’s happiness. The three women writers in this chapter, Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko and Yoshimoto Banana deal with women’s choices for life style and the (im)possibility of Chapter 9: Writing Women’s Happiness in the 1980s

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happiness during the onna no jidai. In Sugikoshi no Matsuri (1985, Passover*) Kometani writes about the challenges and difficulties of care-work, especially over a disabled child, and controversially writes the story of emancipation by rewriting Exodus. Hayashi Mariko’s Hoshi ni negai o (1986, Wish upon a Star) writes a woman’s success story from the perspective of postfeminism; the successful career in this novel is only achievable by opting out of carework. Finally, we will read Yoshimoto’s best-selling novel Kitchin (1987, Kitchen*) in terms of being in the shadow of happy women who prepare for marriage and family construction through training in care-work. Ultimately these texts explore how women’s happiness in the 1980s is in fact inextricable with the issue of labor and care, and their happiness lies in tense negotiation between their individual freedom and the societal expectation to care for others.

Writing freedom from care-work: Kometani Foumiko’s Passover Kometani Foumiko (1930–) is a painter, translator and writer from Osaka. She moved to the US in 1960 after she received a scholarship to study fine art in New Hampshire. She married the Jewish American playwright Josh Greenfeld, and they had two children, Karl and Noah. Her experiences in an international marriage and being the mother of a disabled child (Noah was born with a cognitive disability—Kometani refers to her son’s disability as brain damage), motivated her to write fiction. One of her short novels, Tōrai no Kyaku (1985, A Guest from Afar) was awarded a new-writer prize in Bungakkai, and a month later, her autobiographical novel Passover won the 94th Akutagawa Prize as well as the Shinchō Prize for New-Writers. Written as first-person narratives, both works vividly reflect her own experiences as an East Asian woman who leaves a misogynistic Japanese culture that she found intolerable, to pursue her own ambition for art in America, a country of freedom and liberty. In this sense, we can read her award-winning novel, Passover as a story of the American Dream by an East Asian immigrant woman, and her subsequent realization of the failure of this dream. The main protagonist’s struggle demonstrates the torment found between her liberty, which is strongly associated with her impossible desire for self-fulfillment, and her need to look after her disabled child. This section will read how this struggle echoes with the tension between women’s choices around labor: both work and care-work in the 1980s. Passover, an autobiographical novel, concerns Michi, a Japanese woman, who marries a Jewish American man named Al. The story starts when they travel to New York from Los Angeles with their eldest son, Jon, for Easter vacation. Their disabled son, Ken, has now been sent to an institution to be looked after by professionals. Exhausted from thirteen years of childcare, including “sleepless nights and dirty dinner tables and messy toilet accidents and violent temper tantrums,” a break for Easter made Michi “overjoyed” and the family “all enjoy the taste of freedom together” (Kometani 1989, 5). Michi planned to visit familiar places in New York with old friends. However, her plan to refresh herself and recover from exhaustion is ruined by Al’s sudden proposal to attend the Passover seder with his family. Both Michi and Jon are reluctant but agree to attend. During the seder, while the family shares a meal and retells the narrative of Exodus to commemorate the freedom of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, Michi recalls her struggles with cultural differences, both from Al’s family and her own, and her difficulties in bringing up a disabled child. Michi reflects:

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“Rabon Gamliel hayaw omer. Kol shehlo omar shihlosha divorim…” Heshie read in Hebrew. Al leaned over and pointed out the place to me. But I was busy looking at the opposite page, hurriedly reading the English meaning of the Hebrew. For over three thousand years the ancestors of these people have been looking for freedom. Freedom! Liberation! Right on! For me too! I had come to America looking for freedom. My Pharaoh was the conformity of Japanese society, its utter conventionalism, its complete male chauvinism. I came to America fully expecting to find the freedom to paint. (Kometani 1989, 46–47) She came to America to escape the misogynistic norms of Japanese culture and chase her own dreams, but in America, she only faced different kinds of difficulties, from which she also runs away. Jewish culture is, for her, something she cannot fully adjust to, and her life with her disabled child makes more visible the distance between the life she dreamed of and the one she has. Winning various prizes, Passover received generally positive responses from judges and critics in Japan. Many critics consider jiyū—“liberty” and “freedom”—key to understanding this text, echoing and layering the East Asian woman’s freedom in the US with the Jewish emancipation in Exodus (Sugii 2009, 150). Furui Yoshiichi, one of the Akutagawa committee judges, points out in his comment for the nomination that this short novel shows “the irony of liberty”—Michi’s American Dream for freedom did not come true, which she blames on the conventions of Judaism, and her responsibility to her disabled son.1 Oda Minoru, in his comment on a new edition of Kometani’s text, explains that Michi ran away from Japan, which she believed to be a chauvinistic society, and came to America for her freedom, a place where she also stands out as a heterogeneous other, as an East Asian woman. Furthermore, the protagonist feels she is excluded from her Jewish family-in-law, who are also others, marginalized from the dominant culture and society in the US. Oda describes this conflict among those who are othered as shuraba, a sight of carnage in the struggle for freedom. Contrary to the positive reception in Japan, Passover and Kometani herself are significantly criticized in other parts of the world, and charged with creating anti-Semitic content, especially depicting the “racial stereotypes of Jewish noses and worn-out calumnies about Jewish cliquishness” (Goodman & Miyazawa 1995, 241). David Goodman, who has researched the history of anti-Semitism in Japan, condemns Kometani, arguing that “the success of her Japanese original depends entirely on the ostentatious way it exploits Japanese stereotypes of Jews” (Goodman & Miyazawa 1987, 243). A heated correspondence ensued between Kometani and Goodman in the New York Times in 1987, where Kometani defended her work from these charges, claiming that “No Japanese writer has done more to bring Japanese racism and anti-Semitism to the fore than myself.” She “frankly cannot understand Mr Goodman’s reckless and careless charge of anti-Semitism,” and she “cannot think of a more traditionally Jewish story in its social protest” (Kometani 1987, n.p.). She concludes, “And I find the charge of anti-Semitism against me and my work not only abhorrent, but also ironic” (Kometani 1987, n.p.). In response to this correspondence, Goodman goes into further detail in his 1995 monograph, deeply analyzing the issues in Kometani’s work. It is important to note that this section on Kometani does not intend to defend her work from the charge of anti-Semitism.2 Rather, it aims to reconsider and reconfigure the work in the context of the women’s decade of the eighties. Observing the impossibility of achieving women’s freedom, this story presents the torment between care-work and the protagonist’s Chapter 9: Writing Women’s Happiness in the 1980s

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self-fulfillment, what it means for a woman to have and exercise her liberty for freedom, and ultimately exposes the betrayal of her American Dream. Michi’s quest for freedom is closely entangled with her struggle and labor for her disabled son, Ken. She explores in this text how, from her perspective, the cause of her unhappiness is in not fulfilling her potential as an artist, due to the duty that she is obliged to fulfill. During the seder, when her family members are reading the story, Michi recalls an incident with Ken, remembering how physically and psychologically painful his care has been. Michi gives the reader details of what happened when Ken had stomach flu before he was sent to the institution—at one point, he could not control his bodily functions and his hands were covered in his excrement. While Michi tries to wash his hands in the bathroom, Ken pulls on her hair. He did not always pull my hair straight up; sometimes he pulled it an angle and twisted it. Then the pain doubled and my twisted neck would go into spasm. Breathing would become difficult, and I would fear a blood vessel in my brain was about to burst. If he managed to pull out all the hair in his hands would I be left with a bald spot? I was frightened at the prospect but still I would try to loosen his grip without betraying my panic. Until finally, after a long struggle that left me gasping for my breath and my arms completely bloodied and scratched by his fingernails, I would be freed. But under my sleeves there were always scars; they would not fade away so easily. (Kometani 1989, 48) Kometani’s writing about her struggle to care for her disabled son depicts her, literally and metaphorically, scarred. In this quotation, being free for Michi directly means being free from the grasp of Ken’s hand, and on a different level, it is about the impossibility of being freed from care duties. On a third level, this memory is evoked as she feels the struggle to be free from her present moment with her Jewish family-in-law. Michi also states that she cannot be “happy and joyous” in the presence of her sister-in-law. Not only is Michi struggling with the specific care for Ken, but she also “had to do everything by [her]self, shopping, running the house, handling Jon’s school problems” (48). Michi feels that the people around her judge her as “a fool” to care for Ken at home, but her struggle is due to the further difficulty in seeking support for care in the US. The family tried hiring private caregivers, but they would not stay long. Michi was similarly afraid that the group residence that they sent Ken too would soon send him back. The more difficult the child like Ken, the less likely it is for a private institution to accept him in the first place. It means they might have to hire extra help or better-trained personnel to handle him, and they are never sure they can afford that. Particularly when the state government is in the process of changing from a Democratic to a Republican Administration, because that almost always means a cut in the budget for aid to the handicapped and the disabled. So there always would be the prospect of Ken’s having to return to our house. I might have found physical liberation for a month, but I knew I would never enjoy emotional liberation as long as Ken lived. (49) Kometani’s Passover foregrounds the struggles that an individual mother faces in her care-work, and care-work is represented as something that negatively interferes with and 134

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hinders her individual fulfillment. With lack of welfare support from the state, what is pointed out is that the American Dream that Michi dreamed of is founded on the idea of an individual who does not have caring responsibilities, and ultimately is founded in ablism. Michi’s freedom and her pursuit for happiness are goals that she feels are encumbered by family, especially evident because of the dearth of state support. During the ceremony, Michi sneaked out of the family gathering to the toilet, where she “was so frightened by the appearance of [her] face in the mirror” (83) as she barely looks alive. She affirms to herself: “Yes I was alive. And I had to take good care of the short remnant of the rest of my brief life. I had given twenty years of my life to sacrifice the purpose for which I was born. My life was too precious for that. I would get out. I could leave” (83). She grabs her coat and her handbag and decides to “go to Elaine’s apartment in Greenwich Village” (85) to think about her future. It would be easy. No one need notice. And outside was not the desert or the sea, like in the Bible and the Haggadah. There were taxis and planes. In one way or another, I had to get away from this family. Otherwise, my whole life would end up in bondage and servitude. The powerful hands I used to paint with had better things to do than just take care of other people. (83) […] I felt a generation younger as I hurried toward the taxi. (85) This is Michi’s private exit, her own Exodus from her family and care-work, for her own liberty, as we see the parallels she draws, in mentioning the Bible and the desert. It is her departure for the sake of her own fulfillment, exercising her liberty. The ending of the novel reminds the reader of that of Ibsen’s play The Doll House, where Nora leaves behind her family and its responsibilities to pursue her self-actualization.3 Michi’s departure alludes to her disappointment with, or betrayal by, the American Dream and so, ironically, the story also plays into the nationalistic success story of 1980s Japan, by pulling back the curtain on American “freedom.”

Hayashi Mariko and her 1980s: Wish upon a Star In 1985, the same year that Kometani won the Akutagawa prize, Hayashi Mariko was awarded the Naoki literary prize.4 While Kometani writes on freedom in relation to difficulties in care-work with family, Hayashi tells a story of another major issue of the women’s decade— employment. Hayashi Mariko (1965–) became an iconic woman writer in the 1980s, to the extent of being called “a prodigy of the decade” (Suzuki 2010, 50).5 Before becoming such an icon, Hayashi struggled to find employment after her degree at Japan University Art College. In this section, we will read her autobiographical novel Hoshi ni negai o (1984, Wish upon a Star; hereinafter Wish) in the contexts of the 1980s along with the issues of women’s employment. Considering Hayashi and her ambivalent positionality with regard to feminism, will help us to understand this postfeminist novel as an account of women’s fraught choices, success, and happiness in the decade of women.

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The adversity that Hayashi encountered in looking for employment was, in fact, not only about her individual case during the 1980s. Although admission to higher education for women reached 30%, when it came to recruitment for employment, female students significantly struggled with securing jobs (Nakajima 2021, 240).6 Hayashi’s job journey eventually led her into starting work as a copywriter, for which she won a TCC advertising copy award. From then her career blossomed as an essayist, gaining popularity among contemporary female readers: through her career as an office lady (OL), she witnessed and insightfully brought to light the survival skills needed for women in corporate cultures. Shimizu Yoshinori observes that Hayashi “gained the readers’ trust” from her insightful point of view, which “represents the silent majority of women’s true feelings [honne], living in the reality of society, who are different from ‘kawaii’ femininity, which is much appreciated from the male dominated society” (Shimizu 2006, 245). Wish is Hayashi’s autobiographical novel published in 1984. Wish is a bildungsroman narrative of Kiriko who is in search of a happiness and liberty of her own. Kiriko begins the story as a country girl who believes herself to be less than mediocre—physically and figuratively far from the latest trends in fashion, beauty and glamor—and ends the story as a successful celebrity in Tokyo. Initially unable to secure stable work, Kiriko moves through various jobs: as a telephone receptionist in a small electronics company; a factory worker; and a pseudo-medical supporter of hair implants for bald men. However, her ambition and her hard-nosed nature motivate her to be a “copy writer,” who creates advisements for products and services. Kiriko, Hayashi’s persona, focuses on her individual success. Exercising her liberty and freedom, she displays her drive for accumulating wealth, actively consuming, and embracing sexuality, all of which directly result from her tenacious pursuit of happiness. Such characteristics of women’s individualism and freedom lend themselves to discussions of postfeminism. Hayashi and postfeminism: Wish as a postfeminist novel Postfeminism responds to and challenges the claim that the goals of feminism are achieved and that women can therefore focus on individual success and consumer power (see Fraser 2013, McRobbie 2009 and Kikuchi 2019), rather than collective action. Shelley Budgeon defines postfeminism as follows: Postfeminism … relies upon a fundamental contradiction—feminism is both incorporated but simultaneously reviled. By asserting that equality has been achieved postfeminist discourse focuses on female achievement, encouraging women to embark on projects of individualized self-definition and privatized self-expression exemplified in the celebration of lifestyle and consumption choices. (Budgeon 281) In the Japanese context, Miura Reiichi (2013) claims that the EEOL and the social changes it prompted, gave birth to postfeminism. The individualism that ensued focuses on women’s success. This synchronizes with the characteristics of neoliberalism and “claims that the goal of ‘self-fulfillment as a woman (I, who is a woman)’ could be achieved by participating in commercialized culture as an individual, by throwing away the framework of political

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activism through social solidarity, and by criticizing and despising second-wave feminism as collective socio-political activism” (Miura 2013, 64). Since this postfeminist culture focuses on women’s individual self-fulfillment, distancing itself from the collective solidarity of first- and second-wave feminism, issues of women’s success and happiness are considered the consequences of individual choices (women exercising their freedom), their efforts and capability, dismissing the reality that these are often a matter of social structure and welfare (as discussed above with Kometani). Here, the relation between women’s freedom and happiness are complicatedly intertwined in this specific time period of the 1980s, and such understanding of women’s success and the politics of individual choice are important to read Hayashi’s text from this decade. Kurata Yoko argues that Wish demonstrates the tension and proximity between Hayashi and feminism, through the story of the protagonist’s development from dependent girl to autonomous subject, which is characteristic of neoliberalism (Kurata 2015, 8). Kurata’s point on Hayashi’s ambivalent relation with feminism and her neoliberalism, in relation to the protagonist’s success and the pursuit of happiness as a working girl in the novel, I contend, all lead to reading this text Wish as a postfeminist novel.7 Hayashi’s positioning in relation to feminism is described as making her an “illegitimate child of the women’s lib movement” (Saitō 2006, 137, quoted in Sanga 2019, 103). Kurata also points out that Hayashi’s texts demonstrate a severe skepticism towards the concepts of freedom or equality, and her interest in her personal success is motivated in having “power” to influence others, rather than being interfered with by others, and in this sense, having power over others is identified with happiness (Kurata 2015, 10–11). Furthermore, Japanese literature scholar, Luciana Sanga rightly determines Hayashi’s problematic feminist position: Hayashi—as the realization of the second-wave ideal—could not have emerged and thrived without the movement that preceded her, but Hayashi—the real-life person—is neither driven nor concerned by a movement. Instead, she is simply and justifiably concerned with her personal success. She is, therefore, a postfeminist. (Sanga 2019, 103). Sanga’s point to claim that Hayashi is a postfeminist who focuses on her individual success and self-fulfillment is helpful to read Wish and see the resonance of Hayashi’s attitude with the protagonist Kiriko’s. Quest for happiness in the bildungsroman Adhering to Kurata’s analysis of Wish with the echoing of neoliberal characteristics in this work, and Sanga’s argument regarding postfeminism, will help us to closely analyze the corelation between women’s individual success and happiness in the 1980s. Kiriko has always hungered for success, ambition and an endless series of objects of desire: work, money, lust, and fame. Her thirst to be successful always orients her towards achieving her desires, directly associating them with her own happiness. The orientation towards certain life choices is discussed in the aforementioned Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010). Ahmed defines happiness as something “consistently described as human desire, as being what we aim for, as being what gives purpose, meaning and order to human life” (Ahmed 2010, 1).

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It is helpful to examine “how happiness is associated with some life choices and not others, how happiness is imagined as being what follows being a certain kind of being. … The very promise that happiness is what you get for having the right associations might be how we are directed toward certain things” (Ahmed 2010, 2). In Wish, Kiriko’s quest for happiness develops from the mundane and ordinary to the more and more inflated ambitions (Hayashi 2008, 288). After graduation from university, she dreamed of “happiness like a normal person has” (Hayashi 2008, 295), such as getting married and having children with her boss, who was the head of an electronics company. This dream comes to an abrupt end when her boss elopes with another woman, and she is left jobless and in poverty. In her next job, Kiriko feels financially fulfilled, and buys new blouses and skirts, eats pork piccata in a restaurant, and feels incredibly happy (Hayashi 2008, 94). The narrator muses: “even if the power of money was hugely intervening into the sphere of happiness, Kiriko is indeed truly happy and nothing can deny that” (Hayashi 2008, 95). After losing another job from being involved in an affair in a top-end PR company, she loses her ambition and buries herself into a relationship, seeking happiness there instead of in her income: “embraced by a man, and being kissed crazily. If this is not happiness what is happiness? Since she started being loved by Takagi [her lover], she felt for the first time, she has been approved by society” (Hayashi 1984, 262). Embracing her sexuality, Kiriko feels that the relationship with her boyfriend provides her approval as a desirable woman in society. Approval from both her lover and society drives Kiriko to engage with care-work—rather than ambitiously work to advance in a career. Kiriko leaves her office early to efficiently and economically cook her handmade food for Takagi (Hayashi 1984, 259). When the relationship with Takagi starts to cool, and when her peer gets a copywriters’ award, this spurs Kiriko’s competitiveness to pursue her own success and recognition in work. Borrowing money from Takagi, as a settlement for their breakup, she decides to go back to copywriting school for professional success and self-improvement: “with this money, I will go to the course. And I will be approved by Masayuki Hattori. This will surely become an opportunity. I might get hold of a great deal of happiness” (Hayashi 2008, 279). As she believed and hoped, she is successfully acknowledged for her ability and talent by the authorities in the field, and gains the award that she aimed for. At the end of the novel, Kiriko reflects on her drive and desire for her own success as follows: Kiriko has just started to understand [about herself]. I am not a frail human being. She has always been moving forward single-mindedly and earnestly for things/what she wants. But, what in fact was it, that she was longing for? What Kiriko wants seemed to keep changing rapidly every single time. Work, money, lust, and fame… Yet who can blame me? thought Kiriko. When Kiriko wants it, she is always empty and hungry for it. She had never ever taken time to reflect on what her desire itself is. (Hayashi 2008, 307) With her material gains and financial success, Kiriko feels fulfilled in both her sexuality and reputation in work, but she feels lonely after breaking up with Takagi. She predicts that she will be a person who tries to keep gaining the start that she wishes for but cannot reach, and she will suffer in exchange for her success. The ending of the novel is foretelling in a way that, contrary to normal/normative happiness, Kiriko is rewarded with great happiness but also

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punished by wanting too much, and keeps wishing upon a star, and gaining new desires, with no stopping point to desiring. Hayashi and Kiriko’s stories are postfeminist, as they achieve their goals, gaining wealth, managing to fulfill themselves to make their dreams come true. Yet, this ending of the story also reminds us that the story of their success and the story of a “good life” are fantasies: the final satisfaction never comes, just as what Kiriko desires constantly changes. Written in the 1980s, Wish demonstrates the complex relation between women’s happiness, success and employment as a postfeminist fiction.

Writing family and happiness: Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen Banana Yoshimoto’s two short works, “Kitchen” and “Full Moon,” published together under the title Kitchen, won the sixth Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize, marking her debut as a professional writer in 1987. Yoshimoto would become one of the most successful women writers in the Japanese literary field, and an iconic literary figure of 1980s Japanese literature. Kitchen, not limited to its domestic success, was translated into 36 languages, which facilitated access for non-Japanese readers to this text. Furthermore, it has multicultural and transnational film adaptations: Yoshimitsu Morita directed a film version of the text in 1989, and a Chinese production company released its own adaptation in 1997 (directed by Yim Ho). Thus, this “global” appreciation of her work can be an example of Japanese contemporary literature going into the global market of the publishing industry in the late 1980s, synchronized with the legendary Japanese economic prosperity of this time. In this section, I will introduce how critics discuss and regard this novel as challenging the idea of blood-related family, and then examine other aspects of reading this novel through happiness and labor (work). Kitchen starts when the main character Mikage loses her only family member, with the death of her grandmother, who brought her up. Feeling alone, she finds she can only sleep well when she is next to the refrigerator in the kitchen in her old house, in which she spent all her time with her grandmother. She suddenly has a visitor from her neighborhood, Yuichi Tanabe, who is a friend from her university. He asks her to live with him and his mother until she feels more settled. After this strange invitation, Mikage starts living with Yuichi and Yuichi’s mother, Eriko. Even in this household, she prefers to sleep on their sofa next to the kitchen. Mikage starts a quasi-familial relationship with this mother and child. Blood-related maternal relations are challenged with this text, as Mikage is an orphan. The adoptive mother, Eriko, is a significant figure: she is a trans woman, who was assigned male at birth, and previously had the role of Yuichi’s father. Eriko’s transition from man to woman, from father to mother, was made soon after her wife died.8 Mikage spends time with Eriko and Yuichi and eats food together with them, recovering from the mourning of her grandmother’s death. In the sequel to “Kitchen,” titled “Full Moon,” Eriko is killed by her admirer, and Yuichi becomes an orphan as well.9 Sharing their mourning for Eriko, the relationship between Yuichi and Mikage becomes closer but ambiguous; when Yuichi falls apart and travels to heal his broken heart, Mikage goes on a business trip half a mile away from where he is staying. To cheer him up and through fear of losing him, Mikage brings him katsudon, a typical Japanese comfort food consisting of a bowl of rice with tonkatsu (fried pork) on it, and the novel ends with them affirming that they are “family,” and not two isolated orphans.

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Kitchen, family, and trans lives As the title of the novel suggests, the kitchen plays a significant role in this story: it is regarded as a well of comfort, where the novel presents a strong sense of domesticity—a place where happiness lies. The peculiar monologue at the opening of the novel (below) demonstrates that home, and specifically the kitchen, is the space that provides Mikage with comfort, space to sleep, and a place for peace: The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. … I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction—vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. (Yoshimoto 1993, 3) In a review in Wall Street Journal, John Bussey and Michael Williams write that this is Mikage’s “kitchen fetish” (quoted in Treat 1995, 275). Indeed, Mikage even wants it to be the place for her own death: “When I’m dead and worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen” (Yoshimoto 1993, 4). What is emphasized is the kitchen as a familial and social space. As mentioned above, the kitchen in this novel is considered as a space where Mikage intimately connects with her adopted family. Eating together is an act that forges their bond as a family, not with blood, but with food. Ueno Chizuko famously explains that Yoshimoto’s Kitchen is a story that explores intimacy by eating together, sitting at the table. She describes the Tanabe family as “shokuenkazoku,” a family that is related through eating, not by blood: “it is an eternal issue, how to deal with the sexuality of ‘family.’ However, it seems that Banana Yoshimoto just tries to avoid [answering] this question.” 10 Agreeing on her point about forming new family through eating, Alessandro Giovanni Gerevini (2001) argues that the kitchen is the space in which eating replaces sexuality, and as a consequence there is no reproduction.11 It is accurate to say that the Tanabes challenge the normative blood-related family through adoption and the trans mother: Kamata Tōji states that “here [in Kitchen], there is no such thing that we can call ‘family’; constraints such as blood, history and daily lives are completely wiped off ” (Kamata 1988, 395). However, such critics seem to largely focus on the “new” and “radical” portrait of family and they dismiss the possibility that blood relations are still tightly knotted to the concept of happiness in this novel. Contrary to these critics, my reading of this text will argue for the impossibility of imagining happiness without a blood line: Kitchen is about a girl’s development into a woman, seeking happiness by approximating the blood-related family and entering the work place through the domestic sphere. As I will discuss below, Kitchen predicted the ambiguous relationship between women and their possibility as part of the workforce: the rhetoric of “liberating” women into the business field conceals their domestic labor, while still, simultaneously, domesticity is set up as the place where happiness must be produced and retained. Ultimately, as we will see, the novel does not question or subvert the gender division of labor in the domestic sphere, despite Mikage’s occupation. Focusing particularly on Mikage’s questioning of the idea of happiness, I argue that this idea of a new model of family is troubled. Reading Kitchen only through the aspect of the “new-ness” of the queer family does not fully demonstrate the complicated relationship between heterosexism and desire. “Happiness” and “family” are tightly knotted together, and 140

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while critics focus on family, we will see that Mikage is most often interested in the idea of happiness. Labor and women’s happiness in Japan, 1985 Happiness is indeed an important theme in this novel, and it is something that one can learn to attain, through an education from this trans mother, Eriko. In particular, Mikage, through both “Kitchen” and its second part, “Full Moon” starts considering what happiness is for her and “learns” to gain it through spending time with her pseudo-family, in which the trans mother looks after her. At the beginning of Kitchen, in despair from her grandmother’s death and from being an orphan, Mikage does not know what happiness is for her. When she comes to the Tanabes for the first time to be part of their family, she loves a sofa in the living room next to their kitchen: I loved the Tanabes’ sofa as much as I love their kitchen. I came to crave sleeping on it. Listening to the quiet breathing of the plants, sensing the night view through the curtains, I slept like a baby. There wasn’t anything more I wanted. I was happy. (Yoshimoto 1993, 22) Mikage learns to feel happy staying and living at the Tanabes, and she starts finding her passion, cooking—Mikage’s happiness relates not only to her pseudo-family but also to getting her dream job as a teaching assistant at a cooking school, a choice of occupation which I contend is a major element of this novel. As seen in the introduction to this chapter, women’s labor in Japan changed significantly in 1986 with the passage of the EEOL. Published a year after the EEOL, Kitchen is suggestive about the relationship between women’s happiness and their career choices, and specifically about their associations with domesticity. Mikage and her career choice demonstrate that becoming a housewife and possibly becoming a mother still work as a desire to follow the norm of happiness.12 Her name, Mikage, is partly formed from the Japanese word kage, meaning “shadow” and, as her name implies, she is always in the “shadow” of this happiness, never able to gain it, but she desires to be “proximate” to this happiness through her work.13 Contextualizing Kitchen with the EEOL provides us a clue with which to undo the complicated process of gaining happiness in girlhood: in the process of her growth into a woman, the girl is willing to participate in the neoliberal market to be proximate to the normative sense of happiness. This “happiness” is described in the novel as something cultivated through the good care of (heterosexual) parents. The process is precisely that of the girl maturing and entering the market as part of its labor force. In this process, the girl is encouraged to fulfil the utmost of her ability with the newfound liberation of women to work, but, at the same time, the “ultimate” happiness is still claimed here to be contained in the kitchen, the place for domesticity inside the conventional family unit. As we will see below, her choice of occupation synchronizes with contemporary issues on women’s labor as well as on women’s happiness. After a summer of self-taught training for cooking, Mikage feels “incredible” (Yoshimoto 1993, 58) getting the job, as the application process was highly competitive. Egusa Mitsuko, a pioneering feminist scholar in Japanese literature, finds value in that Yoshimoto transfers

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the kitchen from its association with femininity and domesticity into professional life (Egusa 1988, 114). Contrary to her reading, I would argue that it is highly ironic that Mikage enters the professional sphere in as domestic a manner as possible. Mikage soon understands why she got this job, after she starts working at the cooking school. Her attitude was different from that of the female students in the school: Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. [One cannot choose w]hich is better … Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by “their happiness” is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles, and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that’s great. I wouldn’t mind that kind of life. Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life—my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing. (Yoshimoto 1993, 59) This scene is significant, as Mikage gains insight into two issues: firstly, that happiness is something that includes/excludes girls, and secondly, the disparity between herself and female students in the school is caused by their education from “caring” (Yoshimoto 1993, 59) (implicitly heterosexual) parents about happiness. Mikage too had a caring parent in Eriko, but as they are not blood related, Mikage sees their circumstances as fundamentally different. To those girls who come to the cooking school, cooking is a process of preparation to be certified as a bride, marry and perhaps become a mother. Mikage is nevertheless subtly envious of other girls’ lives, even though they do not know the experience that Mikage calls being “thrilled with pleasure” (Yoshimoto 1993, 59), which for her is being engaged in professional cooking, and the self-fulfillment she finds there. In the English translation, “I wouldn’t mind that kind of life” misses the subtle nuances of the original Japanese. Rather than not “minding” their choices, Mikage’s statement has more of a very subtle flavor of jealousy towards the other girls’ choices for their happiness. A closer translation would be “I also wish I had that kind of life” or “I think it’s kind of nice” (Yoshimoto 1985, 93). Mikage wishes that she could be happy in “that” way, but she does not have the choice. This subtle wish is significant, as even though Mikage is successful in her job, she remains a little envious of the girls whose life courses and choices are not to work, or whose work is more within the domestic sphere. Cooking Mikage’s her passion, and her love for the kitchen, despite her inability to gain or be included in their conventional “happiness,” seems to be her subtle desire to be proximate to that normative happiness. Not having any blood relatives, she could not receive the pedagogy of happiness, or more precisely, be taught how to gain and access normative happiness, how “not to exceed the boundaries of happiness” from the heterosexual parenting that the girls at the cooking school are said to receive. However, working in the kitchen, not as a chef, but as an assistant to the teacher, being close to the girls who never exceed normative happiness, she is constantly in the shadow of happiness, as close as she can be to it. Her occupation is, in a way, engaging in the reproduction of

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normative happiness for other girls, and in this way, she seeks to compensate for her lack of a conventional pedagogy of happiness, lacking blood-related parents. This understated wish of Mikage towards being included within the “boundaries” (Yoshimoto 1993, 59) of happiness implies the difficulty of imagining a happy life without a conventional family unit. Because she feels that this happiness is possible only by pedagogy from heterosexual parenting, even though she desires it, she is always in its shadow, trying to be as close to it as she can. In this way, reading Kitchen in the context of the 1980s sheds further light of reading women’s happiness, choice and labor, and those left in the margins of normative models of happiness.

Conclusion: Writing care-work and working women in the 1980s It is indeed difficult to define or grasp women’s happiness. In this “women’s decade” of the 1980s, women’s happiness and the meaning of freedom were constantly questioned and challenged by contemporary women writers. In this chapter, we looked at the meaning of freedom in relation to care-work and family responsibility from Kometani’s Passover, and we examined the relation between women’s happiness and professional work in texts by Hayashi and Yoshimoto. The protagonists of both of their novels, Kiriko in Wish and Mikage in Kitchen struggle to get a job, both enter their occupations at the entry level as assistants and build their careers from there. Their situations are similar, cut from the financial and emotional support of biological family, we see how these female protagonists start and establish themselves from nothing. When they reflect on their happiness, they often compare themselves with other women. Mikage, as an assistant instructor in a cooking school, looks at the other students who are training to become housewives and are likely to become mothers. These women, in keeping with the light-and-shadow metaphor embedded in the novel, occupy positions in the light. Against the glory of those shining women, Mikage’s name, as we saw above, suggests she will always be in their shadows. On the other hand, Kiriko has enormous drive and self-directed purpose (as an autonomous neoliberal and postfeminist subject). For Kiriko, the competition with others fuels her motivation and as her knowledge and skill progress, she is able to pull herself back up even after she falls off the track of success, and set off again. Her sense of inferiority, such as feeling disadvantaged by the regional location of her hometown, her style and her appearance, become motivation to bounce back to be on top of her competitors. Kiriko’s sense of happiness takes a journey. First, she tries to think that money leads to happiness: after experiencing extreme poverty where she only could buy a loaf of bread, she sees that money gives access to more opportunities, and fleeting happiness. She also spends two years buried in a romantic heterosexual relationship with her boyfriend, thinking that being loved by a partner is a woman’s happiness, only to find frustrations there, too. At the end of the story, Kiriko describes how she became a woman who cannot be satisfied with “normal” or “mundane” happiness. Wish and Kitchen are similar in many respects. Both deal with a woman’s encounter with the job market. And both, published in the 1980s, were popular and well received. The protagonists, Kiriko and Mikage, both reflect on what it means to be a woman and to be happy in the era of the bubble economy. What sets these two novels apart are the divergent paths the women take with their choices. In that respect, they demonstrate the social disparities among women. On the one hand they represent the prize of success that is earned from

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winning a competition. On the other, they show that in some cases the barriers of coming from disadvantaged positions cannot be breeched. Reading these novels leaves us to question how we could envision social solidarity for further change, beyond competition and excessive individualism.

Notes 1

Following Furui, other referees such as Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Minakami Tsutomu also comment on Kometani’s usage of the term “liberty” (Sugii 2009, 150). 2 While Goodman justifiably accuses Kometani of anti-Semitism, it is hard not to dismiss the issues arising from his description of Kometani’s son as “mentally retarded [sic]” (Goodman and Miyazawa 1995, 241). Being mindful and careful about respecting others and sensitivity to one’s protected characteristics, such as one’s religion, disability, race or gender, are required when examining the topics in their correspondence. 3 In Ibsen’s The Doll House (1879), the family’s financial struggle adds to the turmoil Nora feels and only exacerbates her longing to be “care-free” and to absolve her husband from his “obligations” to her. While Nora confronts her husband and exits the house for the freedom for both parties, Michi in Passover privately leaves the family. In both cases, women’s freedom is strongly associated with leaving the care-work that they were forced to bury themselves into by their family. 4 Hayashi’s novel Saishūbin ni maniaeba (If You Manage to Get on the Last Flight) won the award in 1985. The novel discussed in this section Hoshi ni negai o was nominated for the Yoshikawa Eiji literary award in 1984. 5 Her first essay publication was titled Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerō (1982, Buy Happiness and Go Home). Run run is an onomatopoeia for expressing joyfulness, and as the book title suggests, this joyfulness and high consumerism resonate with the time period of the bubble era. Hayashi gained popularity and a strong readership through her collection of essays Shiawase ni narō ne (1984, Let’s be Happy), and with the success of her publication, she was approached to publish a novel. We see the entanglement of women’s happiness and the significance of money in her career path as an OL. 6 Nakajima describes female university students in the 1980s as energetic, inheriting energy from the women’s lib movement in the 70s. The 1979 The UN General Assembly adopted The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and it became effective in 1981. Part of the reason Kiriko could not find a job easily was due to the effect of the so-called “oil shock” in the 1970s and 1980s. 7 Luciana Sanga also reads Hayashi’s Anego (Big Sister) in her thesis through the lens of postfeminism, in relation to working girls and their sexuality. 8 Irina Holca explains the details of the history and medical procedure on gender confirmation/affirming surgery in the 1960s, which Eriko may have gone through. Holca also points out the struggle for Eriko’s gender identity corresponds with the discursive and literary form of the letter delivered to her son Yuichi after she died. 9 From here on I will discuss “Kitchen” and “Full Moon” as integral parts of the same novel. These two works are sequels and published as one book, combined with the novella “Moonlight Shadow.” 10 “Ketsuen-kazoku” is usually used to describe a family with blood relations, with “ketsu” meaning “blood.” Here Ueno uses a pun on this term to explore the new kind of family, replacing “ketsu” with “shoku,” meaning “food.” (Ueno 1990, 29–32). 11 Alessandro Giovanni Gerevini is an Italian translator of Yoshimoto’s work. The first chapter of his doctoral thesis at the University of Tokyo is dedicated to Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. 12 This pursuit of her desires relates back to the above discussion of Ahmed and The Promise of Happiness. In the case for Mikage here, she is drawn into the particular object, happiness which encourage the narrative of family construction and hetero-normative marriage as a norm. 13 Aoyama Tomoko writes that “In Japan, as in many other countries, men’s cooking was confined to the professional sphere until relatively recently, while women were, and to a large extent still are, expected to take charge of the much less glamorous, unpaid work of everyday domestic cooking” (Aoyama 2008, 172).

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References Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aoyama, T. (2008). Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Budgeon, S. (2011). The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and “New” Femininities. In R. Gill & C. Scharff, (eds.), New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (pp. 279–90). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Egusa, M. (1988). Daidokoro (Kitchin) to bungaku kenkyu to [Kitchen and literary studies]. Nihon kindai bungaku 38: 113–17. Ezawa, A. (2019). Family, Inequality, and the Work-Family Balance in Contemporary Japan. In J. Coates, L. Fraser & M. Pendleton (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 106–114). Abingdon: Routledge. Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso. Gerevini, A.G. (2001). 80 nendai joseisakka ni okeru shintai no shomondai: Yoshimoto Banana, Matsuura Rieko, Ogawa Yōko no shōsetsu o megutte [Issues on bodies in women’s writing in the 1980s: The novels of Banana Yoshimoto, Rieko Matsuura, and Yōko Ogawa]. (UT51-2004-A182) [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Tokyo]. National Diet Library Call No.: UT51-2004-A182; NDL Bibliographic ID: 000004325115; Report No. (Dissertation): 甲第16695号 Goodman, D. (1987). Reason for Concern in Japanese Anti-Semitism. New York Times. March 25, Section A, p. 26. Accessed August 15, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/25/opinion/l-reason-for-concern​ -in-japanese-anti-semitism-814787.html. Goodman, D. and Miyazawa, M. (2000). Jews in the Japanese Mind: the History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Hayashi, M. (1982). Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerō [Buy Happiness and Go Home]. Tokyo: Shufu no Tomosha. ———. (1984). Shiawase ni narō ne [Let’s be Happy], Kōbunsha Shobō. ———. (2010). Hoshi ni negai o [Wish upon a Star]. Kōdansha Bunko. Holca, I. (2020). Bodies in the Kitchen (Yoshimoto Banana) Home Is Where Mother Is, and the Way to a Man’s Heart Goes through His Stomach in Forms of the Body. In I. Holca & Carmen Săpunaru Tămaş (eds.), Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture (pp. 73–86). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ibsen, H. (2017). A Doll’s House. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publishing Group. Jolivet, M. and Glasheen,A.M. (1997). Japan, the Childless Society?: the Crisis of Motherhood. London and New York: Routledge. Kamata, T. (1988). Oi to Shi no Fōkuroa [Folklores of ageing and death]. Tokyo: Shinyosha, 1988. Katō, K. (2008). 1980 nendai toYoshimoto Banana [The 1980s and Banana Yoshimoto], Kōkai: Rekishi Bungaku Shisō 68 (2008), 166–173. Kikuchi, N. (2019). Nihon no posuto feminizumu: joshi ryoku to neoriberarizumu [Japan’s postfeminism: Woman power and neoliberalism]. Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten. Kobatake, K. (2008). Gender Equality and Women’s Pension Rights in Japan,” (UIN: BLL01016593009) [Doctoral dissertation, The London School of Economics and Political Science]. British Library. Kometani, F. (1985). Sugikoshi no Matsuri [Passover]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. (1987). Trials of a Japanese Ruth Amid the Alien Corn. New York Times April 3, Section A, p. 18. Accessed August 15, 2022. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/trials-japanese-ruth-amid​ -alien-corn​/docview/110794057/se-2. ———. (1989). Passover (F. Kometani, trans.). New York: Carroll and Graf. (Original work published 1985) Kurata, Y. (2015). Hoshi ni negai o: darenimo watashi no kokoro o mechakucha ni suru kenri nanka nainoni [Wish to the stars: even though nobody has the right to mess with my heart]. In Hayashi M. (ed.), Gendai josei sakka dokuhon [Analysis of modern Japanese women writers] (vol. 20.) Tokyo: Kanae Shobo. Macnaughtan, H. (2019). Gender and the Workplace. In J. Coates, L. Fraser & M. Pendleton (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 168–178). Abingdon: Routledge. McRobbie, A. (2009). The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Miura, R. (2013). Posutofeminizumu to daisanpa feminizumu no kanōsei [The possibility of postfeminism and third-wave feminism]. In Miura R. & Hayasaka S. (eds.), Jenda to jiyū: Riron, riberarizumu, kuia [Gender and liberty: Theory, liberalism and queer] (pp. 59–79). Tokyo: Sairyu-sha.

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Nakajima, K. (2016). Onna no jidai to OL ryūgaku [Women’s decade and office ladies studying abroad]. In 1980 nendai [The 1980s]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō. Oda, M. (1985). Kaisetsu: shuraba no iwakuiigatashi o kaku [Interpretation: Writing something hard to articulate at the sight of conflict]. In Sugikoshi no Matsuri [Passover] (pp. 181–91). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Ogawa, K. (2021). Kea no rinri to enpawamento [Ethics of Care and Empowerment]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Saitō, M. (2006). Bundan aidoru ron [Discussion on literary idols]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Sanga, L. M. (2019). Postfeminism and Love in Hayashi Mariko’s Anego. In The new Japanese love novel. (28671297) [Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University]. Proquest. Shimizu, Y. (2006). Hayashi Mariko. In Natsuo I. & Suga S. (eds.), Nihon josei bungaku daijiten [Encyclopedia of Japanese women’s writing] (pp. 244–45). Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center. Sugii, K. (2009). Kometani Foumiko: yudayakyō no “kakutō” to “jiyū” to [Foumiko Kometani: struggle and freedom in Judaism]. Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to Kanshō, tokushū: gendai sakka to shūkyō, Kirisutokyō 74(4): 144–50. Suzuki, N. (2010). Kōdo seichō to joryūsakka: Hayashi Mariko “Onna Bunshi” ni okeru onna no ekurichūru [Japanese economic miracle and women authors: women’s ecriture in Hayashi Mariko’s Onna Bunshi]. Nihon Bungaku 59(11): 48–58. ———. (2010). Tandai no imēji no keisei to 1980 nendai no Hayashi Mariko” [The junior college system and the literature of Mariko Hayashi in the 1980s]. Aoyama gakuin joshi tanki daigaku sōgō bunka kenkyūjo nenpō 17: 35–49. Tronto, J.C. (2015). Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press. Treat, J.W. (1995). Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen, or the Cultural Logic of Japanese Consumerism. In B. Moeran & L. Skov (eds.), Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (pp. 274–99) London: Curzon Press. Uematsu, N. (2017). Could women ever “Shine”? Happiness and its shadow in right-wing discourse since 2011 and Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen Correspondence: Hitotsubashi Journal of Arts and Literature, 2: 37–64. Ueno, C. (1990). Shokuen-Kazoku [Family connected by food.]. In Ueno C., Middonaito Kōru [Midnight call] (pp. 29–32). Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. Yoshimoto, B. (1989). Kitchin [Kitchen]. Okayama, Japan: Fukutake Shoten. Yoshimoto, B. (1994). Kitchen (M. Backus, trans.). New York: Washington Square Press.

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Chapter 10 Risky Business: Overcoming Traumatic Experiences in the Works of Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi David S. Holloway The past can have a lasting impact on the ways in which we experience the present and approach the future. Authors Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi pen stories about women working to overcome their personal histories. Kakuta’s Taigan no kanojo (Woman on the Other Shore) and Kanehara’s Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings)—both published in 2004, in the wake of Japan’s recessionary era—offer sobering portraits of literary characters mired in the wreckage of the past. They are stuck. These two books, however, are ultimately optimistic in outlook, examining the lengths to which the female protagonists go to assuage the traumas of the dark past and secure bright futures. Such endeavors are not without risk, but, as the close readings that follow demonstrate, the risk is well worth it.

Introduction What is trauma? In a word, it is painful history—dislocating and jarring: ever present and ever defining. As Lauren Berlant explains, “Trauma can never be let go of: it holds you. It locates you at the knot that joins the personal and the impersonal, specifying you at the moment you have the least control over your own destiny and meaning” (Berlant 2011, 126–27). If trauma is painful history, history itself contains the seeds of violence and struggle, for as Berlant reminds us, citing theorist Frederick Jameson: “History is what hurts” (Berlant 2011, 126). This chapter is about the painful history of literary characters in two works of Japanese literature, published during a painful moment (2004) in Japanese cultural history: Kakuta Mitsuyo’s novel Taigan no kanojo (2007, Woman on the Other Shore*) and Kanehara Hitomi’s short work Hebi ni piasu (2006, Snakes and Earrings*). In these books, both Kakuta and Kanehara evoke the maxim of painful personal history, crafting stories about lives that are less traumatized, per se, by a singular event but rather “formed in a constant state of traumatic disruption” (Hurley 2011, 86). The historical backdrop to these two works of fiction

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is the painful milieu of the recessionary era of the 1990s and early 2000s, a time of dithering, struggle, and exhaustion for many individuals. “History hurts,” indeed (Berlant 2011, 121). While the “impasse or claustrophobic closure” of the recessionary era did not well up out of nowhere (Cassegard 2010, 42), it was nevertheless a time of sweeping unease punctuated by, among other events, the recession and neoliberalism, the Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995) and the Tokyo subway sarin attack (1995), and the supposed moral decay of Japan’s boys and girls (Hurley 2011, 10; Iida 2002, 229). The amalgamation of these events, particularly the onset of the recession, ruptured the comfortable vision of middle-class affluence and normativity that had been part of the Japanese cultural imaginary since the end of the Asia Pacific War. With the ruination of the “the Japanese model” (Cassegard 2010, 42) came widespread questioning of both the practicality of that vision as well as the three pillars of success (educational pedigree, familial devotion, corporate loyalty) that functioned as the bedrock of postwar life itself. The common narrative of the era suggests that the oppressiveness and pain of post-postwar life was felt acutely by those who came of age during the late 1980s and early 1990s—the so-called “lost generation” of the so-called “lost decade” (Allison 2013, 29). The creative output by those living in “a general environment not of thriving but of disappointment, contempt, and threat” (Berlant 2011, 125) reaches into the realms of literature, music, art, dance, and film, among other expressions—avenues through which creative individuals grapple with the ontological struggle and painful history of contemporary social life, codified in the Japanese terms ikizurasa (angst, or more literally, the pain of living) and ikiba no nasa (placelessness) (Hosogai 2004, 94). As much as history hurts, it might also heal. While the fiction considered in this chapter is predicated on case histories of individual women living with the collective trauma of the present (the above-mentioned ikizurasa), it also offers prospects for change. Not immediately, however. For the women in these books, change is determined by fidelity to a certain regime of experience: desire. Not necessarily romantic desire (though there is that too), this desire is for another, a friend, a companion, someone to trust and rely on. This form of desire rests on compulsion and repetition and the faith that this time everything will work out, that this time things will be different. That is, the agency implicit in the desire for another demands a certain faith that things will be okay. History will not repeat itself. Many observers claim Japan today is a “relationless society” (muen shakai) and bonds between individuals are fraught and frayed. “[B]elonging to some unit beyond the singular self … is critical to the social condition,” contends Anne Allison. “And estrangement from this not only deadens the soul but evacuates everyday life” (2013, 168). She continues: “Japan is in trouble today. … But the reason is not [persistent] economic decline or a sinking birth rate. Rather it’s loneliness. The infrequency with which humans bump up against each other or help one another out” (Allison 2013, 168). Her work Precarious Japan indexes the cost of trenchant loneliness and contextualizes the pain of living in a world that seems depleted of its emotional resources (Allison 2013, 15). Thus, in this chapter I consider the lengths to which literary characters go to secure relationships with others, to put the burdens of the past to rest by communing with another individual whose pain might be familiar. The conceptual lens that works here is that of ibasho, a term that conveys the urgency with which people are compelled to seek out zones of comfort to assuage the trauma of going at life alone. Ibasho can equate to the English “home,” though it is more fluid and dynamic. The term ibasho is a derivative of ba, or place. According to Mary Brinton (2011, 3), ba is a “social location,” a “bounded collectivity to which individuals belong and from which they derive 148

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a sense of identity and security.” To this end, Brinton (2011, xvi) observes that “[t]he very idea of a secure ba has begun to vanish” in present-day Japan. Allison (2013, 14) agrees, arguing that the phrase ibasho ga nai—translated as “no place [to call home]”—is part of a gloomy lexicon of terms in current usage that convey a pervasive sense of precarity that is endemic to contemporary Japan and contemporary senses of self. The home itself has been a significant part of the Japanese cultural imaginary since at least the end of the war, when “My-home-ism” (mai-hōmu-shugi) emerged as a popular ideology that suggested a framing identity for middle-class Japanese whose white-collar ways of living presaged material affluence. “My-home-ism” as a concept was the result of Japan’s period of high economic growth and, according to Allison (2013, 47), offered an “aspirational normativity” for those who could afford a home of one’s own. In the postwar, wealth was seen by many as the reward of working hard and providing for one’s family. In this context, a home symbolized stability, security, togetherness, and, optimism for the future. In other words, a home was a kind of ibasho that reflected the successes of the Japanese nation-state at the level of the individual. By the 1990s this ideology had slipped from the popular consciousness and the very lack of a home stood for the failures of the nation state and amplified the affective vulnerabilities of citizens. The vanishing of ibasho from the conceptual landscape speaks to a creeping pessimism for those without stability, security, or togetherness. “Everyone needs a place, identity, affiliation,” Allison cites the words of activist Amamiya Karin here, who continues: “we need an ibasho that finds us necessary” (Allison 2013, 14). Ibasho, Allison writes, is a human right. For many, life’s trauma is linked to social dislocation. From this context, literary works such as Woman on the Other Shore and Snakes and Earrings give creative representation to the struggles some people face in getting by. As Adrienne Hurley remarks, “Storytelling…is often a critical survival skill” that individuals can use to assuage the anxieties of life (Hurley 2011, 4). In this way, the current chapter is ultimately about how two authors use fiction to respond to the sense of disquiet—fuan—that is central to the experience of lives shaped by loneliness. As a “metric of survival” (Berlant 2011, 4), intimacy with others is of paramount importance. Fiction by Kakuta and Kanehara emerges from this context and showcases the creative ambitions these authors have in demonstrating both the exhaustion of traumatic living and its potential resolutions.

Kakuta Mitsuyo: Ties that bind Kakuta Mitsuyo (1967–) knew she wanted to write from a very young age, writing was one way to avoid the social interactions she found awkward. She made her literary debut in 1990 while still a student at Waseda University with Kōfuku na yūgi (Blissful Pastime), which she won the 9th Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize. Thrice nominated for the Akutagawa Prize but never succeeding to the award, Kakuta changed direction eventually, focusing on more commercial fiction. Her efforts won her the Naoki Prize in 2004 for Woman on the Shore. Many of Kakuta’s works explore the limited options available to women in employment and social encounters. Within these margins she portrays women who seek satisfaction in their limits as well as those who plot their escape. Exhaustion. This is an apt term to describe the state of mind of Tamura Sayoko, the middle-aged protagonist of Kakuta’s Woman on the Other Shore. Mother of three-yearold Akari and wife to ineffectual husband Shuji, Sayoko is tired. She is tired of toiling as a

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stay-at-home mother; she is tired of the sandbox politics of the local playgrounds; she is tired of feeling stuck in life. She yearns to be someone else: “When am I going to stop being the same old me?” (Kakuta 2007, 7). Prospects for change are slim, as Shuji discourages Sayoko from pursuing employment outside the home, and as she battles her own doubts about putting Akari in nursery school. “What kind of mother chooses to work when her child’s at such a precious age?” she wonders (Kakuta 2007, 10). Eventually, however, Sayoko lands a job at a cleaning agency—called Platinum Planet—and befriends the eccentric owner Narahashi Aoi, providing her with the change she sought, the friendship she did not know she desired, and the antidote to her exhaustion. The text is not just about Sayoko’s struggles for happiness and change. Through alternating chapters, the novel examines both Sayoko’s present and Aoi’s past. Kakuta writes of the troubles Aoi faced as an adolescent. Her family moved to the countryside—Gunma Prefecture—from Yokohama because of a bullying incident in school the prior academic year. Regarding Aoi’s troubles in school, the narrator notes: “By the end of eighth grade, she was refusing to go to school most of the time. But, she never felt any ill will or bitterness toward the ringleaders [of the bullies] because she always assumed it was her own fault. What other explanation could there be? She must rub people the wrong way somehow. She must deserve to be blackballed” (Kakuta 2007). Concerned about stories of suicide clubs and violent crimes committed by fellow junior high schoolers (thus reflecting real life concerns regarding the erosion of morality among Japan’s youth), her parents conceded that a move to the countryside would be wise. Her mother comments: “This is a proper girls’ school, and the students all come from good families. They won’t be going around bullying each other. I’m sure they’re too mature for that” (Kakuta 2007, 28). Aoi is doubtful, her reactive teenage mind wondering: “Oh sure. A girl whose father drives a cab and mother [who] has to look for work the minute they move into this poor excuse for a home is gonna get along real well with all those fine princesses from good families” (Kakuta 2007, 28). At her new school in Gunma, the first (and only) friend Aoi makes is Noguchi Nanako, a bubbly albeit troubled girl who lives amidst poverty and neglect. Together, the pair runs away to Yokohama and tries to commit suicide by leaping to their death. The plan fails and Aoi and Nanoko go their separate ways, individually scarred by the event of their botched suicide. Through Kakuta’s restrained prose, both Sayoko and Aoi become objects of historicization. That is, not at any point do they narrate their lives to each other, even as their relationship transitions from one of strict professionalism (Sayoko is initially given to overly distal language) to something more intimate. Rather, Kakuta gives the reader insight into their life stories and context to their individual hard histories. Despite their resistance to disclose their stories to each other (or perhaps because of it), Sayoko and Aoi become fast friends. There is something implicit in the ways they relate, a familiarity, as though their life experiences have conditioned Sayoko and Aoi to intimate sociability. For example, we come to find that, like Aoi, Sayoko, too, was bullied in school, even losing “every friend she had in one fell swoop” (Kakuta 2007, 223). Her teenage experience conditioned her to approach others with caution, like a scared animal. And just as Sayoko struggles to make friends with the neighborhood moms, Aoi suffers silently as her underlings and employees mock and gossip about her behind her back. Aoi’s history looms large in her present in this regard; everyone around her knows something is amiss. Indeed, because the weekly tabloids had picked up the story of her suicide attempt with Nanoko all those years ago, portraying the pair as star-crossed lovers or truant teenagers, the past is especially hard to escape for Aoi. 150

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The past is hard to escape for everyone; it conditions and grasps at you. Yet the dynamics of “contemporary trauma talk” are such that everybody has a story, if not to tell outright (Berlant 2011, 128). In the text, each woman’s usual practice is to circulate ambivalently alone, afraid to let others in because letting others in is always a risk, as history teaches. Sayoko and Aoi socialize with one another, but they resist the therapeutic effects of confessional storytelling. Although, following Hurley’s words above, storytelling can equate to survival and continuity, the refusal to tell can be a survival tactic in its own right, a protective veil shielding the scars from the past. Toward the end of the novel, however, past and present align. Sayoko, over at Aoi’s place, discovers a letter Nanoko wrote Aoi following their suicide attempt (Kakuta 2007, 269–70). Sayoko is reminded of the tabloid articles she read as a teen that offered sordid details of young lesbian lovers trying—but failing—to die together. Aware, now, that Aoi was the girl from the tabloids, Sayoko is struck by Aoi’s measured confidence. She is similarly moved by Aoi’s resolve in overcoming adolescent adversity and trauma; while Sayoko herself had it bad, things never got that bad. Trauma can be comparative, in a sense: who has had it worse? Kakuta does not dwell on this aspect of the traumatic tableau, but the reader does get the sense that of all of the scarred characters in the novel, it is the cheery Nanoko who should most earn our sympathies. Following Nanoko home one day, what Aoi finds can hardly be called a home: It was unlike any other apartment she had ever seen. Not that the rooms were particularly cluttered or badly in need of cleaning. They simply did not look like a place anyone made their home. Immediately inside the door was the kitchen with enough room for a small dining table, beyond which were two four-and-ahalf-mat tatami rooms, side by side. It was the sort of floor plan you might see almost anywhere, and was no doubt repeated in every other unit in the building, yet the space within its four walls lacked the feeling of a home. It felt more like the waiting room in a train station somewhere, or like the deserted play parks she and Nanako had walked by on their way through the complex. Aoi was startled, even frightened a little, by what she saw. Instead of the lived-in coziness of a home, it had a stark, institutional air. Both the sink and drainboard were piled high with instant noodle cups, box-lunch containers, and juice and beer cans—not one dish in sight. A swarm of little flies circled three black trash bags heaped in the corner. Except for a refrigerator, the kitchen had none of the usual appliances or furnishings: no table, no dish cabinet, no sideboard, no microwave, no rice cooker. From the middle of the low ceiling hung a single naked light bulb. (Kakuta 2007, 143) The familial home is meant to be a zone of comfort and sanctuary and protection. It is a demarcation between that which is safe (inside) and that which is dangerous (outside) (Hurley 2011, 153). Home represents ibasho, in other words. Yet for Nanoko, home is more of a way station, a place of itineracy and temporariness. The usual accoutrements of middle-class normality and comfort are missing and instead we find a surfeit of takeout containers and plastics. Her parents are nowhere to be found. In fact, after Aoi and Nanoko run away to Yokohama—effectively missing for over a month—Nanoko’s parents do not bother to file a police report. Late in the novel, after the fanfare from their suicide attempt dies down, Chapter 10: Risky Business

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Nanoko tells Aoi that she will be moving in with relatives and changing schools. Her explanation is simply: “a bunch of … family stuff ” (Kakuta 2007, 211). Allison suggests that those without ibasho are “ordinary refugees”—she writes: “It is not just literal homes that are fading from the landscape…It is also home in the sense ‘to stay somewhere, over time, in a place to which one can return’” (Allison 2013, 47). Nanoko fits the mold, as her home is anything but. Moreover, once she and Aoi run off to Yokohama—staying in love hotels and shaking down Aoi’s former classmates because of a tight budget—she concedes that she does not want to go back home, implying that she does not really have one to return to. Nanoko has been worn down by life. The suicide plot becomes a mode of what Berlant calls “lateral agency” (Berlant 2011, 95)—a way of communicating her sense of displacement against an overwhelming helplessness; it is a way of doing something. Death would mean absconding to “[s]omeplace where they wouldn’t feel so tired. Someplace where they wouldn’t have to find another hotel for the night, or worry about how they were going to get the cash they needed. Someplace where everything would go the way they wanted” (Kakuta 2007, 161). Here we return to the notion of ikizurasa—the pain of life, existential exhaustion, the feeling of wanting the pain to stop. Hand in hand, they jump from the roof of the apartment building where Aoi used to live. They survive, of course, and Aoi’s parents dote on her in the aftermath. For her part, Nanoko is largely left to fend for herself, ever the “ordinary refugee.” Suicide would have made the pain stop for these teenagers (and only for these teenagers). Having survived, however, the hard lesson these disavowed subjects learn is one of adjusting and attenuating, even through the worst of times. This is a lesson for all of the women in the novel. But there is a crucial difference between maintenance and accretion. The former rests on staying the course and not rocking the boat while the latter is an act of agency and an embracing of risk. It is risky for Sayoko to seek employment outside of the home, especially because husband Shuji and her mother-inlaw discourage her from doing so; it is risky for her to befriend Aoi, especially because she has had difficulty maintaining friendships historically. The reader comes to realize that for these characters, personal change requires the optimism that such exercises in agency will be worth the risk. The repetitive compulsion to seek out new ways of being (employment, new friends, a new school) rests on the assumption that this newness “will help you…to become different in just the right way” (Berlant 2011, 2). To be sure, both Sayoko and Aoi do become different at the end. Sayoko finds a vibrant social life and the confidence to stand up to her husband. Aoi reshapes her company and dives headfirst into her friendship with Sayoko. In a milieu predicated on “relationlessness” and isolation, these women are able to establish bonds and lasting relationships. They find an ibasho that is primarily conceptual in nature. What is secure, safe, and warm is the presence of the other. And this is what they were seeking all along.

Kanehara Hitomi: Future proof Although Kanehara Hitomi (1983–) and Kakuto are separated by nearly twenty years, they share similarly gendered concerns with ibasho. Both writers were also celebrated for their youthful debuts, with Kanehara winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize that eluded Kakuta with her debut work, Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings) in 2003 at the age of twenty-one. Like Kakuta, Kanehara’s early works often focus on the limited options women face, and

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in Kanehara’s case, the choices her protagonists make to defy the boundaries these options provide and the way this defiance ostracizes the characters. Our personal histories can be haunting. That is, of course, presuming that we have personal histories in the first place, past-tense narratives that give context to our present. For Lui, the teenage protagonist of Kanehara Hitomi’s Snakes and Earrings, things are different: she has no past. It is Lui who narrates the story, but she resists contextualization and historicization of herself. While the women in Woman on the Other Shore eschew narrating their histories to each other, Lui stands out for her commitment to the present and refusal to narrate herself to anyone. Like those women, however, Lui desires a new present that is less bad than the present in which she circulates. And like the women in the other novel, the antidote to “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011, 10) is the ibasho and comfort of the presence of someone else. Accordingly, she can rewrite the present and even look optimistically to the future. Lui is indeed in crisis, though by “ordinariness” I mean that she knows no different. Hers is a life punctuated by a tableau of crisis events, including suicidal ideation, something approaching alcoholism and anorexia, the murder of a loved one, and sexual violence; however, Lui views these events with detachment and nonchalance (Matsuura 2007, 19). It is not that Lui is familiar with such things; she simply does not care. Kanehara herself has commented on this myopic view. Not only is it typical of those of the post-postwar generation (recall that she was born in 1983), but it is a worldview shaped by neglect and distortion. “[T]here are many people who don’t expect anything from society.” And elsewhere: “Since I was born, I’ve never experienced a time of prosperity” (Onishi 2004). Her words come amidst the fallout from Japan’s long recession and help us understand Lui’s warped relationship to the world around her. Lui does not care because she has no faith that things will change or get better. Optimism requires faith and risk. Lui is all risk from the beginning; faith comes later. At the beginning of the novella, she meets a teenage boy named Ama—enamored by his body modification projects (particularly his forked tongue) and tattoos—and goes home with him. Shortly thereafter, she decides she wants tattoos and forked tongue of her own. Lui accompanies Ama to the tattoo shop owned by his friend Shiba, where she ultimately decides to get her tongue pierced and to trade sex with Shiba for otherwise expensive tattooing sessions. All the while, she decides to move in with Ama, somewhat charmed by his childish demeanor. Shiba’s physical attraction to Lui intensifies and he ends up killing Ama in order to keep Lui as his own. Lui is inexplicably okay with this and settles into a new life with Shiba, even contemplating marriage and looking forward to the unknown future (Kanehara 2007, 120). In other words, we can read the text as having a happy ending. Or, the ways in which Lui navigates the events of her world might suggest maladjustment and a compulsion to return to scenes of trauma. Consider that at one point Ama murders a street tough, even ripping out some of his teeth to give to Lui as a token of affection. Although initially and understandably put off by this behavior, she goes to lengths to protect him from being caught by the police. She does the same thing once she realizes that Shiba killed Ama. To her credit, Lui grieves for Ama. His death triggers her decent into excessive drinking and self-starvation. Yet, once she pulls herself together (with the aid of Shiba’s attentive hand) she turns her attentions to Shiba, making sure his murderous tracks are covered. His murdering of Ama is not a one off either, or a particularly acute symbol of his masculinity vis-à-vis the boyish, even effeminate

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Ama. Early on, he demonstrates a fierce sadistic streak which rises to the surface when he and Lui have sex. The following scene is typical: Shiba-san stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stepped up toward the bed, undoing his belt as he walked. He stopped at the edge of the bed and pushed me down roughly with one hand, then brought his palm up against my neck. His fingers traced my veins and his grip tightened until his fingertips began to dig into my flesh. … The veins on his right arm bulged to the surface. My body was screaming out for air, and I began twitching. My face tightened and my throat felt like it would crack. (Kanehara 2006, 35–36) Lui admits to being turned on by the violence and subjugation. Her impulse throughout the text is to pursue pain. Tattoos and sadomasochistic sex converge where pain and pleasure intersect. It is no coincidence, then, that she should turn to Shiba, whose mastery of body modification and sexual subjugation provides Lui with the sensations she needs. As the text unfolds, the pleasure register falls away: Lui loses interest in her body modification projects, and sex with Shiba ceases to be fulfilling. Spiraling into despair, she comments: “There was nothing for me to believe and nothing for me to feel. In fact, the only feeling with the power to kick me back to life was … acute pain” (Kanehara 2006, 91–92). She thus repeatedly returns to the source of violence and pain: Shiba. The nihilistic, self-destructive edge to the novella throws into sharp relief the failures of normative, middle-class Japanese subjectivity. Because Lui has no history, Snakes and Earrings associates her disavowed way of being with traumatic, post-bubble living. Where Woman on the Other Shore engages the corrosion of erstwhile sacrosanct institutions that have lost their luster, such as the family and the school, Snakes and Earrings ignores such zones entirely. Norimitsu Onishi points this out: [In the text,] the institutions that built postwar Japan—the family, school and companies—are noticeable by their absence. In a nation known for its social cohesion, the characters have no interest in playing a role in society, but only in finding personal satisfaction among themselves. Unlike Japanese in, say, their 30’s [sic], the characters in the novel are not disillusioned at Japanese society, since they had few expectations to begin with. (Onishi 2004) Indeed, although Ama and Lui are teenagers, there is little mention of friends or family, no references to education, and little attention to the economy. As Onishi says, these characters are fiercely self-absorbed, drinking to oblivion, having sex and killing each other, and modifying their bodies almost because there is nothing else to do. They live according to the logic of what pop critic Miyadai Shinji calls “the endless everyday”—owarinaki nichijō—, a kind of existential holding pattern saturated with tedium and boredom in which one day bleeds into the next. These are individuals who have lost faith in their parents’ Japan but who have no Japan of their own. According to Tomiko Yoda, Miyadai has argued that the endless everyday conditioned Japan’s youth to be “morally degenerate, antisocial, and underachieving” (Yoda 2006, 42). In other words, and Kanehara would agree (see her quote above), the presumption is that Japanese society has made them this way. This is not to say that Japanese society turns people into killers and sadists. Instead, the violence and instability depicted in Snakes and 154

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Earrings is a manifestation of the wearing down of the subject. Self-destruction, as well as the destruction of others, is an antidote to the attrition of a life on the fringes. This antidote can only be temporary, however. The boredom and cynicism that initially drive the text eventually become boring. Lui loses interest in her tattoos and tongue piercing—which she had hoped to widen and split so it could be like Ama’s. She decides that changing her body will not change her situation. Moreover, Shiba loses interest in subjugating her. Central to the idea of “the endless everyday” is the erosion of hope (kibō) for the future and a concurrent investment in the present. It is a provocative theory, but unsustainable for people like Lui for whom the present becomes dangerous and suffocating. The present drags her down, holds her down—not unlike Shiba. At her darkest moment, she says: “I wanted to live recklessly and leave nothing but ashes in this dark, dull world” (Kanehara 2006, 43). In concert with her emergent alcoholism and anorectic-like behavior (slimming down to 34 kilograms—75 pounds), her morose outlook proves to be too much and Lui hits bottom. Reconciliation and healing come eventually, suggested in the text when Lui swallows the teeth Ama had given her. This act gives Lui the impetus to let go of the present and focus on the future. Shiba arrives at the same destination, proposing to Lui and even making her an engagement ring. For these characters, the present eventually loses its charm, which encourages them to make an investment in their future. At the end of the novel, Lui “squints” into the “unrelenting brightness of the morning sun,” a blatant and optimistic metaphor for the end of the endless everyday (Kanehara 2006, 120). Her sudden and not entirely believable investment in a new life with Ama’s killer becomes a concurrent investment in an act of life-building. Life-building is the antithesis of the attrition of being. We have seen that Lui loses interest in the latter, turning toward thoughts of marriage and normality instead. This domestic gesture grants her access to a future, which, in light of having no history, is surely attractive. While some modalities of life-building in contemporary Japan have proven faulty—such as the promises of academic pedigree or long-term white-collar employment—and have given way to a sweeping sense of precarity (Allison 2013), Lui’s case is different. She is given to maintenance and coping rather than accretion. In other words, until the novella’s end she is not interested in building a life, faulty modality or no. Her interest in body modification and her relationships with both Ama and Shiba are, as demonstrated, largely superficial—much like body modification practices themselves. Woman on the Other Shore is about the struggles some women face in changing their situations for the better. In contrast, Snakes and Earrings is primarily about self-abeyance: putting a band-aid on a serious wound. But abeyance stops working and Lui runs out of options. The greatest risk she takes is therefore slipping Shiba’s engagement ring on her finger. This act symbolizes an investment in something beyond the present and something that is more than skin deep. In the process, and in spite of herself, Lui discovers ibasho. She starts out as more or less homeless and itinerant, having picked up Ama at a club and quickly moving in with him. And when he is murdered, she just as quickly takes up with Shiba. In each instance, she has no place else to go. Only with the shattering of the love triangle does the permanency of ibasho set in. Not only does she talk tentatively about marriage with Shiba, she also reconnects with her parents, and tells Shiba her family name—Nakazawa. In doing these things, she finds possibility and promise, laying the foundation for a life substantial and emotional health. Ibasho provides safety and security and counteracts the pain—ikizurasa—of going at life alone. Ibasho translates most easily as “home,” but as Allison demonstrates, it is a flexible Chapter 10: Risky Business

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term that extends to zones of “family, work, and friendship groups…to ‘where ever I am’” (Allison 2013, 174). It is a symbol of optimism and a beacon of hope that one no longer has to simply get by. Simply put, by the end of the novella Lui has adopted a way of seeing that is predicated on faith: this time things will be different, which is what she had wanted all along. Body modification provides difference in a different sense, of course. Part of her attraction to tattoos and piercings is that they are indeed markers of distinction (Kanehara 2006, 5), and there is even a moment when she wonders who she would be without the images adorning her back (Kanehara 2006, 69). The decision to pursue body modification, in other words, pivots on Berlant’s notion of “lateral agency,” which, as we have seen, depends not on vertical engagement with one’s world but rather on expressions of maintenance therein. Sidestepping the problems of subjectivity is easier than engaging them head on. It is easier to get tattoos and pierce one’s tongue than it is to make concerted efforts to change one’s situation. The crux of the novella rests on Lui’s creeping realization that she desires change as well as her quiet embracing of the logic of risk taking. While she is accustomed to risk, her decision to put an end to her suffering is a different kind of risk that requires fidelity to a different kind of regime. Initially governed by regimes of boredom and pleasure and trauma, Lui’s moment of reconciliation comes when she adopts strategies that heal rather than destroy. The destruction has to get so bad that it jars her loose and opens her eyes. At the end, she looks to the future, eyes wide open.

Conclusion: A life worth living Theorist Theodore Adorno has written on crooked attachments to bad or “false” lives. A “[w]rong life cannot be lived rightly,” he asserts (quoted in Menke 2004, 309). Adorno is convinced that contemporary lives cannot be lived rightly, or, more idiomatically, cannot be lived well. His interest is in “the good life,” a subject of critical inquiry that has been picked up by other scholars such as Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler (to name a few). Berlant, for example, critiques the concept of the good life, arguing that it is a phenomenon of late capitalism dependent on economic prosperity and exclusionary practices for those who can afford the things that make a good life good (Berlant 2013). Meanwhile, Ahmed’s focus has been on orientation and the ways in which moving toward or away from certain life moments can have a tremendous effect on the quality of one’s phenomenological experience of the world (Ahmed 2010). Perhaps most interesting for our purposes, Butler’s recent archive explores the inverse of the good life—a bad one. More specifically, following Adorno, she is concerned with living a good life in bad contexts. Structural inequalities, economic effacement, precarity, loneliness, and trauma are some manifestations of bad contexts in 21stcentury life. Butler raises the point that “good” is subjective and transient: Berlant’s focus on economic prosperity as the cornerstone of life’s goodness misses the point that the rich can be miserable, and vice-versa. Accordingly, Butler looks past the good in the good life, asking instead: What is living? What is a life? Approaching an answer to these questions in their entirety would lead us far afield. What is important to take away for now is that living as such is a negotiation of systems of power that are economic, social, cultural, racial, historical, and more. It seems that living a good life depends on how we construct worthwhile experiences and attachments from within myriad biopolitical systems. Resistance to the negative effects

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and realities those systems engender is crucial to good living, as the above scholars collectively contend. To return to Adorno: “The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good life today would consist in resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds” (quoted in Butler 2015, 215). By all appearances, given the pervasiveness of biopolitical inequality, individuals today do not desire good lives so much as they covet lives that are less bad. Berlant and her contemporaries focus on the world itself as cruel and inhospitable—ikizurasa. In this chapter, we have seen their words in action: bullies, murderers, and sadists make living hard. We have seen, too, the internal anguish that can be equally debilitating. Taking the form of alcoholism, self-harm, fear, anxiety, and self-destruction—such tendencies are often responses to external events. In addition, these unhealthy coping mechanisms can be detrimental to the pursuit of a life that is good. Some individuals simply want the pain to stop; some individuals simply want a life that is less bad. The Japanese term ikigai is relevant. Translated as “a life worth living” or, more literally, “a purpose in life” (Kumano 2018), ikigai is less of a theoretical mechanism and more of a way to conceptualize interpersonal relationships. Such relationships have been normative in Japanese society for generations, though as Allison (2013) has shown the threads of collectivist culture are quickly fraying. It is no coincidence, therefore, that both texts discussed in this chapter conclude with new ties. Interpersonal relationships are crucial to feelings of belonging, connectedness, understanding, and acceptance. This latter point is important, insofar as ikigai offers the chance for authenticity and self-actualization. Both Sayoko and Lui reach the point where pretending is no longer worth the effort: Sayoko gives up trying to fit in with the other mothers at the park and learns to stand up for herself at home; Lui decides that her tongue piercing and tattoos will not change who she is on the inside. Embracing another—whether romantically or otherwise—affords these women the chance for a life that is less bad. Significantly, Berlant’s contention that “[t]he desire for a less-bad life involves finding resting places” dovetails with my argument for the importance of ibasho (Berlant 2013, 180). In Woman on the Other Shore and Snakes and Earrings, ibasho is less of a concrete space and more of an emotional attachment to another person. In each case, at the end of each narrative, these women let their guards down. Sayoko shows emotional vulnerability toward Aoi as a single tear falls from her eye; Lui shares a bed with the man who not too long ago seemed as though he would kill her. These women learn from their respective histories. Recall that earlier I suggested that Lui has no history. This assertion does not excuse the past from having an impact on the ways in which she navigates the present. The reader is not privy to Lui’s history; this is true. But this does not mean that she does not have one somewhere beyond or before the text. Both women learn from the traumas of the past and overcome their prior resistance to fidelity in life-building processes. Ibasho and ikigai are closely related, for the former is the (physical or emotional) locale in which lives are built—a resting place in the truest sense. Ibasho and ikigai offer reprieve from ikizurasa. Ikizurasa emerged from the spaces vacated by the breakdown of postwar hegemony—the school, the company, the family. In prior eras, these institutions provided the ideological bonds that held people together. Our readings of Woman on the Other Shore and Snakes and Earrings show clearly that hegemony no longer works and that other models of subjectivity are necessary. These models depend on the (re) discovery of ningenkankei—human relationships. Ikizurasa—though widely used to address Chapter 10: Risky Business

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issues of social inequality—is ultimately an issue of humanity and well-being (Amamiya and Kayano 2008: x). How characters make themselves well has been the focus of this chapter. Their traumas and personal stories notwithstanding, the women analyzed here in the works of Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi overcome what is impoverished and discordant to discover the allure of a life worth living and optimism for the future. In the end, it is all worth the risk.

References Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Allison, A. (2013). Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press. Amamiya, K. & Kayano, T. (2008). “Ikizurasa” ni tsuite: hinkon, aidentiti, nashonarizumu [On “Angst”: Poverty, identity, and nationalism]. Tokyo: Kobunshashin. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Brinton, M.C. (2011). Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cassegard, C. (2010). “Japan’s Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries: On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neo-pop and anti-war activism. In N. Cornyetz and J.K. Vincent (eds.), Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture (pp. 39–60). New York: Routledge. Hurley, A. (2011). Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States. Durham: Duke University Press. Hosogai, S. (2004). Intabyū Kanehara Hitomi: ikizurasa o katachi ni [Interviewing Kanehara Hitomi: The shape of angst.]. Subaru, March, 92–95. Iida, Y. (2002). Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Kakuta, M. (2007). Woman on the Other Shore. (W.P. Lammers, trans.). New York: Kodansha America, Inc. Kanehara, H. (2006). Snakes and Earrings. (D.J. Karashima, trans.). New York: Plume. Matsuura, H. (2007). Kuronikuru [Chronicle]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Menke, C. (2004). Geneology and Critique: Two Forms of Ethical Questioning of Morality. In T. Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (pp. 302–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Onishi, N. (2004). The Saturday Profile: Just 20, She Captures Altered Japan in a Debut Novel. The New York Times, 27 March. Accessed January 14, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/world/the-saturday​ -profile-just-20-she-captures-altered-japan-in-a-debut-novel.html?mcubz=0&_r=0 Yoda, T. (2006). A Roadmap to Millennial Japan. In T. Yoda & H.D. Harootunian (eds.), Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (pp. 16–53). Durham: Duke University Press.

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Part 4 Food, Family, and the Feminist Appetite

Chapter 11 Watching the Detectives: Writing as Feminist Praxis in Enchi Fumiko and Kurahashi Yumiko Julia C. Bullock This chapter explores similarities in the underlying feminist messages of a novel by Enchi Fumiko, Onnamen (Masks, 1958), and a short story by Kurahashi Yumiko, “Kyōsei” (Symbiosis, 1966). The author finds that both criticize the early postwar context, whereby discourses of knowledge and power are coded as masculine, and advocate for women’s appropriation of these forms of authority through writing as a form of feminist praxis.

Introduction The early postwar era must have been a heady time to be a Japanese woman. In the late 1940s, at the behest of the Occupation regime, profound changes to the Japanese constitution and legal framework granted women unprecedented rights to vote, run for office, receive the same level and type of education as men, and marry and divorce of their own volition. Once the Occupation ended, conservative politicians began consolidating their power, culminating in the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955. Thus emboldened, they embarked upon a “reverse course” of their own, and began attempting to roll back many of the reforms that had equalized women’s status with men. They questioned the value of higher education for women and attempted to reassert the prewar ideology of “good wife, wise mother” that had underwritten the educational system prior to 1945, which trained women for marriage and motherhood according to a strategically sex-specific set of norms and standards (Koyama 2013). By the early 1960s, the mass media was awash in tales of “coeds ruining the nation” (Bullock 2019). Pervasive discrimination in employment, coupled with more subtle means of indoctrinating women through gender-specific educational guidance and pension and tax systems that underwrote a single-earner male-headed nuclear family structure, made it increasingly difficult for women to leverage higher education in the service of financial independence.

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Simultaneous to these cultural trends, the 1960s witnessed a boom in women’s literary production, with young writers raised under the postwar system of legal (if not de facto) equality between the sexes joining the ranks of more established female literati who began their careers in the earlier half of the 20th century. While not identifying explicitly as feminist, many of these women nevertheless used fiction as a powerful weapon of resistance against the societal forces that attempted to contain their ambitions and freedoms. In this chapter, I will explore two works of fiction by authors not commonly read against one another—Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) and Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005)—in order to highlight the ways that writing served as a means of feminist praxis, both within the world of the text and on a metatextual level. Here I understand feminist writing as that which seeks greater freedom for women from societal restrictions through critique of ideologies and institutions that seek to constrain those freedoms. In identifying a work of fiction as feminist, I am more interested in the discursive effect of the text than whether or not the author personally identified herself as a “feminist,” because many Japanese women writers who did not nevertheless produced fictional texts that eloquently critiqued patriarchal structures. Enchi and Kurahashi were two such writers. While different in many ways, these writers nevertheless demonstrate striking similarities in the way they employ the liberatory potential of writing to combat patriarchal structures. Enchi, a full three decades older than Kurahashi, wrote fiction inspired by the Japanese classical tradition and replete with sensual romanticism—a dramatic contrast with Kurahashi’s cerebral and abstract style of writing that, particularly in the early phase of her career, was more indebted to contemporary European avant-garde novelists than her own forebears. But as we will see, through comparison of Enchi’s novel Onnamen (1958, Woman’s Masks; translated as Masks*) with Kurahashi’s short story “Kyōsei” (1966, Symbiosis), these two deftly employed writing as a tool to subvert patriarchal influence. In both stories, themes of women writing are intriguingly imbricated with tropes of detection—specifically, men spying on women in an attempt to understand and control them—highlighting the ways that knowledge in early postwar Japanese society is coded as masculine and intimately connected to men’s desire to possess women, sexually and otherwise.

Power, gender, and language in Enchi Fumiko’s Masks Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) was one of the most highly regarded and critically acclaimed women writers of the 20th century. The daughter of renowned linguist Ueda Kazutoshi, Enchi grew up immersed in the worlds of classical literature and theater. Her own works demonstrate extensive influence of the Japanese literary tradition, drawing inspiration from Heian-era (794–1185) romantic fiction and memoirs by female aristocrats like Murasaki Shikibu, the Edo-period (1600–1868) supernatural tales of Ueda Akinari, and modern writers such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965). Her education in the classics was largely informal and self-directed—at the age of seventeen, she abandoned the stultifying regimen of domestic science and moral education characteristic of girls’ higher schools at the time in favor of a series of private tutors and independent reading in her father’s extensive scholarly library (Mikals-Adachi 2001, 196). But in spite of this peripatetic educational history, she is known as one of the foremost authorities on Japanese classical literature, producing a highly

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regarded modern-language translation of the Heian-period masterpiece The Tale of Genji, in addition to an extensive oeuvre of fiction, essays, and theatrical scripts. Her works are well-represented in English translation, and there is also a copious body of scholarly criticism of her fiction. Numerous writers have already commented on the feminist potential of her texts. In separate studies, Yoko McClain and S. Yumiko Hulvey have noted the author’s use of eroticism and tropes of female shamanism, respectively, to critique the narrowly defined roles that women are allowed in Japanese culture (McClain 1980; Hulvey 1995). However, critics also note the somewhat conflicted relationship her characters display toward patriarchal structures; though her protagonists challenge male dominance in various ways, they often do so indirectly and fail to liberate themselves completely from systems of gendered oppression. For example, Doris Bargen describes Enchi as challenging “malecentric value system[s]” through “a female protagonist who is not content with a peripheral, negative role” (Bargen 1996, 174). But she also acknowledges that these characters frequently cannot “overcome stereotypes about women’s secondary, subservient function in society” (Bargen 1996, 166). Nina Cornyetz finds Masks, which I will discuss in this chapter, to be a “stinging indictment of female disempowerment” (Cornyetz 1995, 34). However, elsewhere she states: “That Enchi won numerous literary prizes (she remains the most lauded modern female Japanese author to date), awarded by panels of primarily male judges presiding over a phallocentric literary agenda, suggests that the ‘essence’ of femaleness that these judges feted in her narratives reproduced a femaleness collusive with or supportive of notions of the phallic subject as norm. Her dangerous women ultimately bolstered, however unintentionally, the phallic agenda they were designed to undermine” (Cornyetz 1999, 103). Similarly, Eileen B. Mikals-Adachi notes that “Although Enchi did not proclaim herself a feminist, her texts abound in subtle protests against the patriarchal system that is at the root of her protagonists’ woes. At the same time, she insists, however, on maintaining the purity of the father throughout her literature and intentionally avoiding any confrontation with his flaws” (Mikals-Adachi 2001, 198). As we will see below, Enchi’s conflicted relationship with the patriarchy is on full display in Masks as well. Masks was published in 1958, at a high point of Enchi’s career, and bears many of the hallmarks of her signature style. Intertextual references to classical texts, particularly The Tale of Genji, are critical to understanding the motivations of major characters as well as the plot development of the novel. The female characters in particular are illuminated by association with masks from the Noh theater. Furthermore, the dynamics of traditional theatrical guilds, based as they are on a logic of lineage and inheritance that mimics the power structure of the ie seido, or “family system,” 1 are fundamental to the machinations that bring the plot to its horrifying conclusion. The plot itself centers around the relationship between Mieko, a dowager of a prominent provincial family by the name of Toganō, and Yasuko, her daughter-in-law. Both women are widows, and actively involved in running a poetry circle that draws its membership from intellectual and cultural elites in both the Tokyo and Kyoto areas. They are also interested in academic research into spirit possession, a theme that figures prominently in The Tale of Genji and other classical masterpieces. Mieko’s son, Akio, had pursued such research before his death, and as the story opens his widow, Yasuko, is continuing his work. Two male members of the women’s circle, Mikame Toyoki and Ibuki Tsuneo, round out the primary cast of characters. Mikame, a psychologist who dabbles in research on the occult, and Ibuki, a professor of Japanese literature who worked with Akio, both participate in Mieko’s poetry Chapter 11: Watching the Detectives

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circle and related activities, and each has romantic designs on Yasuko while being wary of Mieko’s apparent influence over her. As the story unfolds, both men become increasingly enmeshed in the lives of the two women, evidently fascinated with their unusual bond. Their speculation about the true nature of the women’s relationship drives the plot. As they question whether the women are lovers and if Meiko controls Yasuko, they provide readers invaluable information about the characters’ private lives. It becomes increasingly evident that although Mikame is single, and thus theoretically more available as a potential lover for Yasuko, it is the married Ibuki who is chosen—by Mieko or Yasuko?—for the role. Furthermore, it is gradually revealed that Yasuko’s acceptance of Ibuki’s advances is designed to fulfill an elaborate scheme to impregnate Mieko’s mentally handicapped daughter, Harume, in order to continue the family line. Harume ultimately dies in childbirth, leaving her son in the care of Yasuko and Mieko. The novel ends with Mieko regarding the Fukai Noh mask, which represents an older woman with a heart like “the depths of a bottomless well.” (Enchi 1983, 138) A central mystery of this text that the reader is invited to unravel is Mieko’s motivation for pursuing such a plot, even at the cost of her own daughter’s life. As the men (and thus the reader) learn more about Mieko’s background, these motivations appear to shift. When they learn that Mieko’s husband was unfaithful to her, and that in return she embarked on an extramarital affair that produced the twins Akio and Harume, they assume her to have been motivated by jealousy and a desire for revenge. By bearing the children of her lover, unbeknownst to her husband, and raising them as heirs to the Toganō estate, she has effectively erased her husband’s bloodline and replaced it with that of her lover—a fatal strike against traditional Japanese values that elevate the continuation of the paternal family line over the rights or interests of any individual member. Other critics have previously discussed Mieko’s nefarious scheme as a plot to overturn the patriarchy by infiltrating the ie system and creating her own lineage that disrupts the patriarchal order (Bargen 1991). Some have also discussed Mieko’s role as a writer in this text (Bargen 1991; Cornyetz 1999). However, they do not really explore the way these two lines of inquiry intersect. I would argue that while Mieko does indeed intend to supplant a maledominated order with her own structure of power and influence that mirrors the way men have historically exercised power, the way she does this mimics not so much the ie system per se but the similarly structured guild system by which master artists and writers traditionally established themselves as dominant influences in their respective fields. As master of her own poetry circle, whose members offer her great deference and validation of her artistic and intellectual skills, Mieko thus appropriates a position of authority traditionally reserved for men, and uses this power to create her own matriarchal dynasty. In fact, we learn that Mieko’s plot to supplant her husband’s lineage and her artistic endeavors within this rarefied group of literary practitioners are intimately connected from the start. In inquiring into Mieko’s background, Mikame learns that Mieko’s engagement with her poetry circle had predated her marriage, and that she had risen to a position of leadership within this guild-like environment even while being married to Toganō and bearing “his” children. In fact, she seems to have met her lover, the children’s biological father, through this network of contacts. Much is made of Yasuko taking up Akio’s work on spirit possession and continuing his legacy within the text, but only later in the narrative does it become clear that Mieko had in fact initiated this line of inquiry herself. (Enchi 1983, 58) Thus, Yasuko’s continuation of this work ultimately burnishes Mieko’s, not Akio’s, stature 164

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as a researcher—a fact that the male characters in the story only belatedly acknowledge. By keeping Yasuko close to her even after Akio’s death, she is able to ensure the continuation of her legacy—meaning her mark on the academic fields to which she has devoted her efforts. Viewing Mieko’s intentions through the lens of artistic production, as opposed to bloodlines per se, also helps to explain her callous treatment of Harume. As someone who is mentally incapable of carrying on Mieko’s intellectual legacy herself, her only value to the “guild” lies in her ability to produce an heir who might be relied upon to do so once Mieko and Yasuko are gone. It is of course significant that Harume’s malady itself is the product of patriarchal dominance—her mental capacity was diminished by the force of her own brother’s feet on her head while in utero (Enchi 1983, 71)—and Mieko’s decision to sacrifice her in exchange for her child obviously comes at a terrible price, as she seems to acknowledge and perhaps regret in the final scene. However, it also ensures the continuation of the family enterprise—a consideration that has historically always outweighed the needs of the individual in Japanese society. It is also important to highlight the degree to which power and knowledge are gendered as masculine in this text, toward understanding the feminist subversion of patriarchal authority that Mieko’s scheme represents. Throughout Masks, Enchi features conversations between the two central male characters, Ibuki and Mikame, wherein they actively seek information about the relationship between Mieko and Yasuko. Mikame in particular is portrayed as a sketchy sort of detective intent on ferreting out the secrets of Mieko’s past in an invasive manner. He exploits his relationship with the family doctor that attended Mieko as a young woman in order to learn about Mieko’s marriage to Toganō. Furthermore, he imparts this information to Ibuki in an equally sketchy way—by inviting him to a hotel room where Mikame ostensibly “works,” though he also admits to bringing young women there for amorous trysts. The theme of voyeurism is further emphasized in a sequence where the two men are conversing by the hotel window about the passers-by below, and Mikame tells Ibuki he often uses the window as a vantage point to observe the crowd. He even suggests that he might bring Yasuko there (Enchi 1983, 83), further establishing the connection between erotic desire and mastery through knowledge. However, Enchi also suggests that women are capable of subverting men’s will to power through knowledge, by demonstrating how wrong the men are in their assumptions about the relationship between Mieko and Yasuko. It seems that the men can only understand relationships in terms of hierarchy and dominance—hence their assumption early on that Mieko is somehow controlling Yasuko (Enchi 1983, 13–14). There are also numerous references to male fear or antipathy toward assertive women (Enchi 1983, 87, 118, 128). Notably, when Ibuki’s wife, Sadako, hires an actual detective to investigate the relationship between her husband and the Toganō women, Ibuki is incensed, describing her as an “idiot” in a “cold and mocking” tone, and declaring: “A rational woman is as ridiculous as a flower held together with wire” (Enchi 1983,128). This suggests that Ibuki not only dismisses women’s intellectual capabilities and resents the will to knowledge and power implicit in Sadako’s inquiry into his affair, but also that “rationality” and beauty are mutually exclusive; in exercising the former, Sadako evidently loses her attractiveness as a woman in his estimation. Thus, in appropriating the right to pry into the secrets of others, Sadako has turned the tables on her husband—an unpardonable offense given the fact that this power is coded as masculine within the text. It seems clear that Ibuki is only attracted to women he can dominate

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or objectify, and in asserting herself in this way, Sadako effectively emasculates her husband. Thus, Enchi hints that this sense of male potency is merely an illusion. We see further evidence of this in the following scene when Ibuki reflects upon the night when he roughly pulled Yasuko off a train and spent a night with her in a hotel room: The feel of Yasuko’s agile, fairylike body in his arms that night in the Atami hotel came to him time and again like a shifting beam of light, leaving him restless and unsettled. With a tremor he recalled the pliant smoothness of her waist and the backs of her hands, the way she had withstood positions so contorted that he had feared her wrists or arms might pull apart; and then, abandoning the dry and colorless world of the dusty books and folders spread before him on the desktop, he gave himself over to the fantasy that he was soaring birdlike, through a void of such brilliant intensity that all color had blended into pure light. Only after parting with her did he realize that he knew no more about the goings-on at the Toganō house, or about Yasuko’s own private plans, than what she had told him already on the train. (Enchi 1983, 43) Here we can clearly see the linkage between a woman’s sexual submission to a man and his desire to “know” her in a more literal sense; and while Ibuki seems to believe in his ability to master Yasuko in this way, it is evident that he has learned only what she wishes him to know. In fact, by the end of the story it is clear that the men’s assumption of the women’s relationship as based on power and control is merely a projection of their own psychosexual urges. Rather than Yasuko submitting meekly to the dominance of her mother-in-law, she tells Mieko that she was a willing participant in the scheme to trick Ibuki into fathering Harume’s child: “I’ll admit; I’m as excited as you by the prospect of a baby with Akio’s blood in its veins. That instinctive feeling underlies all the strange things I’ve done. You and I are accomplices, aren’t we, in a dreadful crime—a crime that only women could commit. Having a part to play in this scheme of yours, Mother, means more to me than the love of any man.” (Enchi 1983, 126) Given that the men’s assumptions regarding the women’s relationship and motivations are so obviously wrong, it seems clear that they have thoroughly underestimated their adversaries. Assumptions of male superiority also factor into the men’s tendency to discount or dismiss the Toganō women’s intellectual accomplishments. We see this in their response to the discovery of an early essay by Mieko, “An Account of the Shrine in the Fields,” that sheds light on her inner world through allusion to a powerful female character, Rokujō, in The Tale of Genji. Reflecting on the essay, Ibuki says: “To be honest, until I read [it], I had [Mieko] pegged as just another high society lady, the sort that likes to play at writing poetry; but if that’s her own work, I will admit I’m impressed. In fact, I can’t understand why it went out of print. I wonder if she only lent her name to something somebody else wrote” (Enchi 1983, 89). Interestingly, Mieko’s anonymous lover is described in the same way as underrating her abilities (Enchi 1983, 103), and Mieko herself remarks that she was “out of line” by expressing herself through scholarly activity, noting that perhaps she should have “stuck to her poetry”

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(Enchi 1983, 68). This statement hints at a gendered difference between poetry and prose, whereby women’s appropriation of the latter is coded as a kind of transgression of gender boundaries. This impression is underscored when the reader is granted access to the text of a letter to Mieko from her anonymous lover, who recalls: “You said that you lacked the courage to take action in real life, and therein, you said, lay the explanation for your literary gifts as well as for the darkness of your fate as a woman” (Enchi 1983, 104). Thus, women who wish to exercise their will in patriarchal society must do so covertly, through elaborate schemes that rely on secrecy as opposed to overt expression of their will, as we see in Mieko’s plot to establish her own lineage through subtle manipulation of the men in her orbit. Here literature becomes a source of power for women to express themselves indirectly through metaphor or poetry, thus exploiting the cracks in the patriarchal foundation for their own ends. In this sense, Mieko and Yasuko’s establishment of an alternate site of literary production that mirrors male-dominated artistic guilds of the past then becomes a form of covert resistance against the kind of dominance sought by Ibuki and Mikame. In Masks, writing is thus a path to legitimacy and power in an intellectual field of endeavor that has historically been male-dominated, and from which women have conventionally been excluded as leaders. In establishing a matriarchal guild that relies on blood lineage to sustain itself, Mieko manages to appropriate patriarchal structures of power and influence for her own purposes. Furthermore, she does so by duping the men around her who consistently underestimate her, only to find themselves helpless pawns in her scheme. In this sense, her gesture of turning the tables on the patriarchy might be read as a feminist act; however, it comes at a terrible price, requiring the sacrifice of her own flesh and blood. Thus, on the diegetic level of the text Enchi leaves her reader with a rather ambiguous message about the potential of writing as a method of feminist praxis, whereby some women gain power at the expense of others. But on another level, we might read this outcome as a form of protest: Women in Japanese society cannot assert themselves overtly because of restrictive gender norms, and thus are forced to employ covert methods to assert their agency through the very patriarchal structures that attempt to contain their will to power. In this sense, the conclusion of Masks is indeed, in the words of Nina Cornyetz, a “stinging indictment of female disempowerment” (Cornyetz 1995, 34). One might fault Enchi for failing to envision a form of liberation that does not rely on patriarchal structures in the first place. However, I would argue that Enchi’s text deftly demonstrates that women in Japanese society have little other choice but to work within the structures of power available to them if they wish to control their own destinies. This makes sense when read against the context of attempts by the LDP to reassert the power of the ie system in the late 1950s, when Masks was published. In attacking this system at its core, and redirecting its power toward her own ends, Enchi’s protagonist thus performatively attacks conservative authorities for attempting to reassert patriarchal power and revoke the hardwon rights that postwar Japanese women had just been granted.

Irrational equations: Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Kyōsei” (Symbiosis) Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005) was a cerebral writer who delighted in weaving story lines that follow a logical proposition (or “axiom”) to its most absurdly illogical conclusion. Particularly in the early phase of her career, her characters resembled not so much individuals

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as “variables” in an equation whose calculations drive the plot (Sakaki 1999, 159). Kurahashi’s appropriation of scientific and mathematical concepts to describe her method of writing is perhaps not surprising, given that her father was a dentist, and she was initially supposed to follow in his footsteps. Though she obtained a license as a dental hygienist, she ultimately decided to study French literature, enrolling in the prestigious Meiji University in 1956. Her first short stories were written while still a student there, and in 1960 she rocketed to fame (or perhaps infamy) with her satirical story “Parutai” (1960, The Party, translated as Partei*), which earned her national name recognition and attracted great critical attention, not all of which was positive. Her literary style, which parodied famous works of French and Japanese literature, posed a challenge to many of the leading luminaries of Japanese letters, whose own careers were shaped by the autobiographical tradition of the “I-novel,” 2 and who valued realism and romanticism as opposed to the highly abstract and avant-garde stylistics that defined her fiction. Thus, while Enchi Fumiko seems to have been embraced by the bundan, or Japanese literati, Kurahashi’s work exists in uneasy relationship to it, and she has received relatively less critical appreciation both in Japan and abroad. But as Atsuko Sakaki has deftly argued, the degree of critical neglect (or abuse) to which Kurahashi’s work has been subjected is less a measure of its value than a reflection of the preoccupations of (mostly male) Japanese critics, whose value systems were forged in an earlier era (Sakaki 1999, 155–57). By the 1960s, when Kurahashi made her debut as a writer, these values were increasingly becoming eclipsed by a new generation of writers who adopted avant-garde stylistic techniques and embraced literary theories that would dramatically change the cultural landscape (Sakaki 2001, 299). I would also add that her appropriation of discursive constructs that historically have been coded as masculine—the language of science and mathematics, European philosophies such as existentialism, and (for her time) cutting-edge literary devices and genres such as the nouvelle roman (“new novel”)—likely struck many of these male critics as threatening. As I have discussed elsewhere, Kurahashi was a member of the first generation to take advantage of the new postwar coeducational system that offered young women a chance to compete with men for coveted placements at elite universities that historically had excluded them (Bullock 2010). Kurahashi was in her early teens when this system was first implemented, which put her in an advantageous position to prepare for such competition. However, young women who were successful in this endeavor were subjected to increasing scrutiny and criticism for encroaching on masculine territory. By the early 1960s, when Kurahashi (along with a host of other new and envelope-pushing women writers) made her debut, these resentments had metastasized into a full-blown national media controversy over “coeds ruining the nation” (Bullock 2019). Viewed against this historical backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Kurahashi—a young upstart whose first widely published short story (“Partei”) was read as a satirical take-down of the New Left whose Marxist logic suffused university campuses and dominated academic debates during this decade—was criticized so savagely by many of the leading luminaries of her time. “Symbiosis” was published in 1966, a year that many critics agree was a turning point in Kurahashi’s career (Kleeman 2002, 103). Having spent the early part of the decade in intense battles with the literary establishment, and pursued relentlessly by publishers for manuscripts, Kurahashi took advantage of a Fulbright scholarship to spend a year (1966–1967) at the University of Iowa’s famous writers’ workshop. Her stories up to this point frequently adopted a Kafka-esque logic governed by the kind of equations and variables discussed above, 168

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with characters denoted by letters (K, L, S) as opposed to actual names. After her sojourn in America her style shifted, and she began experimenting with the conventions of Greek and Japanese drama that would serve as hallmarks of the next phase of her career. “Symbiosis” was published as part of Kurahashi’s fourth collection of short stories Yōjo no yō ni (1966, Like a Witch), her last published work before leaving for Iowa. As she notes in the afterword to the sixth volume of her collected works, which includes a republished version of the text, this was her last short story to follow the earlier Kafka-inspired pattern of development (Kurahashi 1975, 277). Therefore, we might read the story as a culmination of this early but important phase of her career. In the case of “Symbiosis,” the primary variables that govern this equation are the female protagonist L, her husband S, and the male antagonist K. The story itself starts with the following proposition: What might happen if the ostensibly ordinary marriage between L and S were disrupted by an interloper (K) determined to know everything there is to know about L? Having presented her reader with this equation, Kurahashi then invites us to solve for K. Hijinks ensue when K arrives on L’s doorstep, announcing himself as a representative of a shadowy investigative organization that has been enlisted by an unknown person to perform a thorough background check on L, preliminary to an offer of marriage. L is of course already married, so the equation is irrational from the start and only grows more so as we learn more about K and his mysterious employer. The interrelationship between power, knowledge, and gender is central to the solution of this equation. In explaining his charge to L, K makes it clear that while his objective is to pry into the most intimate corners of her life, including her marriage to S, she is forbidden to know anything about the organization or the individual who initiated the investigation. K’s tactics become increasingly invasive—he moves into her house, questions L and her mother incessantly about every detail of L’s life, listens in on her phone conversations with S, and even requires her to visit a clinic to undergo a complete physical examination. When the doctor gets to the gynecological portion of the exam, the fundamental problem at the heart of K’s inquiry becomes evident: L is discovered to be “sexless” (musei), neither male nor female. Furthermore, the doctor explains that this problem is not merely anatomical but “metaphysical” in nature. When K learns of L’s “sexlessness” he is thoroughly unsurprised, saying: “That’s because you’re not a sexual person (seiteki ningen). Those kinds of people aren’t that unusual. I’ve known it from the start. It’s quite common in people who write novels” (Kurahashi 1975, 119). It is at this point that the significance of an early conversation between K and L becomes clear. When K first barges into her bedroom he is delighted to find there a magnificent desk, and asks her if she uses it to write. L claims to detest writing—she hasn’t even written a letter in the past few years. The desk belonged to her father, who had served as village headman; he then gave it to L as a wedding gift (Kurahashi 1975, 72). The irony of the logic behind this gift becomes evident a few pages later when we learn that while L had been a writer prior to marriage, she gave it up to become S’s wife. Now that she is married, the desk that was given to her as a wedding gift is only useful as a place to put on makeup, manicure her nails or feed the cat cheese. When K later presses her for a reason why she quit writing, she explains simply: “But I got married. There’s no way I could go on [writing]. One could say that I married him in order to escape from that horrible crime” (Kurahashi 1975, 93). In a subsequent conversation she rephrases this as “I got married in order to quit writing. So I could live without having to use useless words” (Kurahashi 1975, 119). Thus, it seems clear Chapter 11: Watching the Detectives

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that at least in her mind, there is a fundamental contradiction between artistic creation and the conventional demands placed on women in the context of marriage; to choose the latter means giving up the former. It also seems clear that L has internalized this binary logic, given her staunch and caustic refusal of the value of such intellectual pursuits for a woman in the position of wife. However, K persists in pressing her for a reason, suggesting that S might have wanted her to continue writing after all, and even going so far as to suggest that the answer to this question is key to his own inquiry into her life; if they can figure out why she no longer writes, then they can “explain her sexlessness.” He suggests she couldn’t live without words, to which she declares “I’m dead, aren’t I? Why can’t you understand that?” K seems pleased with that theory. “You’re dead. You’re dead, but quasi-alive. Sexless but quasi-female. We’ll have to find a way to express that in the form of a basic equation” (Kurahashi 1975, 119). Kurahashi thus invites her reader to ponder this proposition: How can one render in logical and mathematical terms a situation that is inherently nonsensical, at least when approached from the kind of binary logic that structures gender relations? As the story progresses, K becomes ever more embedded in the life of her family, helping with chores around the house by day and writing his report on L late into the night in a cold attic room. Meanwhile L, who has become frustrated with the slow pace of K’s investigation and determined to learn the identity of his shadowy client, enlists the help of Q, a private detective, to investigate the investigators. The report she ultimately receives from Q is lengthy, running to a hundred pages or so, but is written in impenetrably vague language that does little to answer her questions about K, his employer, or the individual who hired them. While K is out walking the dog, L takes advantage of his absence to track down Q and complain about the quality of his work. She discovers that his “detective agency,” on the rural outskirts of town, doubles as a filthy chicken coop. They argue, and Q defends his work by saying that K’s organization is truly powerful and impenetrable, and possibly dangerous; all he was able to learn was the location of one nearby branch office. To placate her, he offers to take her there, on the condition that she doesn’t reveal him as the source of her information. When she arrives at the branch office and explains her purpose the “employees”—all men— deny knowing anything about K or his agency. However, they seem intimidated and won’t meet her steely gaze; they simply tell her that she should be happy about the possibility of a marriage proposal. As she is leaving she thinks she hears someone say “K’s really made a mess of it,” though she can’t be sure (Kurahashi 1975, 127). In the final scene, L wakes up in the middle of the night thinking she heard a terrible scream, and finds the house incredibly cold (Kurahashi 1975, 127). She calls out to K, like “calling out to a dead person,” but cannot find him. His desk is covered with calculations and unfinished equations, and she muses about the futility of the whole investigation; after all that work he has discovered nothing useful (Kurahashi 1975, 128). Noticing the garden door open, she goes outside to find K dead, slumped under a tree as if he’s died of overwork. They decide to bury him in the garden so they don’t have to report the death to the authorities or bother with a funeral. As L’s mother digs the grave, L cries and imagines crawling into the hole with him. After they bury K, L is exhausted and goes straight to sleep. In the final lines of the story, she imagines: From the area around her stomach she felt a soft warm lump as if she’d become pregnant. L’s body wasn’t female and her belly was as empty as the universe, so 170

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never in her life had she felt the sensation of harboring something within herself. Steeped in dreams, she thought that perhaps K had discovered her secret and burrowed inside her, looking at her from inside with his forever smiling eyes. (Kurahashi 1975, 129) Just then the phone rings. As in the beginning of the story, she is awakened by a call from K’s office. They tell her that K has gone missing, so they plan to send “another K” to continue the investigation (Kurahashi 1975, 129). As in Enchi’s novel, writing in this story is associated with power, as symbolized by the writing desk the protagonist received from her father, a former village headman. It is also strongly associated with the law and with government bureaucracy, epitomized by the “contract” that governs her marriage to her husband, which provides for L to be “kept” by her husband while absolving her of most of the typical duties of a housewife. According to L, the terms of this contract in no way obligate her to cook, clean house, eat or sleep with her husband, or have his children; she is merely required to “support” him. Although what this support entails remains unspecified in the text, we are assured that it involves “a lot of work” (Kurahashi 1975, 93). However, Kurahashi’s protagonist has a more conflicted relationship to writing than Enchi’s does. Mieko’s desire for intellectual production, and the power and authority that comes with it, seems unwavering, in spite of the terrible sacrifice it requires. L’s situation is less clear; the father’s gift of a writing desk suggests some measure of support for her as a writer from the very patriarchal authorities that govern this form of knowledge. That K questions why she might give up writing, even intimating that S might have preferred her not to do so, also suggests that her renouncement of the written word was not merely a response to patriarchal oppression. Rather, it is L, not the men around her, who seem to see a conflict between her gender (anomalous as it might be) and her pursuit of a fiction-writing career. L has cleverly manipulated the law of the father to secure a marital structure that provides her wide latitude to do as she wishes—free of domestic or reproductive service, fully funded by her husband’s salary and evidently with ample time on her hands. This would seem to be the very definition of a writer’s fellowship, which would theoretically best position her to balance marriage to S with a productive career. And yet she chooses to discard this possibility for reasons that are obscure perhaps even to herself, but that seem to have to do with her perception of what is expected of her as a “woman” (even in a qualified sense) embedded in a structure of conventional gender norms. Thus, L seems to have internalized the logic of patriarchy that, as in Enchi’s text above, mandates that a properly gendered female subject renounce intellectual and artistic pursuits in favor of a more conventionally feminine role: being “kept” by a man. But while on a diegetic level the text would seem to be complicit with such patriarchal norms, we have already established that the equation that governs the plot of the story is irrational from the start. Because of this, on a metatextual level we can see that Kurahashi’s story actually undermines the very norms with which L is ostensibly complicit. This technique of undermining the structure of sexual oppression from within is outlined in an essay titled “Watashi no ‘daisan no sei,’” (1970, My Third Sex) where Kurahashi describes women’s appropriation of the language of men as a form of feminist praxis. She begins by deconstructing the logic of the gendered division of labor that confines women to the home through their roles as wife and mother:

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The relationship between a woman who is a wife, mother and housewife and a man who exists in society through his occupation seems exactly like that between a woman who is [defined by] the egg and the womb and a man who is the sperm. In actuality, the woman, brimming with a kind of mucous-like existence inside the egg that is her home creates a place of consumption and reproduction, and the man, swishing his sperm-like tail so as to swim out into the world, contributes financial energy to the egg. This is sometimes explained in terms of different roles for men and women, a division of labor between the sexes, so to speak. However, this is not a division of labor that is based on a rational contractual arrangement. For a woman to marry, bear children, create a home, and dissolve herself within it is nothing other than an arrangement [created] to fit a woman into a man’s world. (Kurahashi 1970, 27–28) Noting these gender norms to be based on an inherently irrational proposition, she then posits a form of resistance that jams the machinery of patriarchy from within, whereby: [A] woman projects herself into the world through literature. This has a special meaning for a woman. … That woman protrudes from the underside of society actually affords … the best view of the comedy of the social relationships that men form [with one another], and so women’s projects do not eliminate the circumstances of women but rather use them to enter into the political and social production of men. In this way women’s social participation recreates them as a third sex… (Kurahashi 1970, 30–31) In a world governed by a phallocentric logic that insists upon gender binaries, the structures of patriarchy can therefore be subverted by hijacking the law of the father and transforming it into a means of liberation for women. The character of L in “Symbiosis” would seem to illustrate Kurahashi’s notion of “third sex” as explained in this essay. From the perspective of conventional gender binaries, she is anomalous both anatomically and in terms of gender norms. In securing a contract that absolves her of the responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and sexual or reproductive service, L has harnessed the language of the law to ensure herself a measure of freedom from conventional expectations of women’s roles. But although S is portrayed as a rather weak and ineffectual character who readily capitulates to L’s conditions, the arrival of K indicates that liberation cannot be attained merely by securing the cooperation of a single man. K is backed by a vast and powerful bureaucratic apparatus that demands to know everything about L, and he is quite open about the fact that L’s unconventional marriage to S is a subject of great concern to the organization he represents. Furthermore, his determination to render his knowledge of L in the form of an “equation” through scientific inquiry—like the law, another form of knowledge that is conventionally coded as masculine—suggests a desire to master her through such knowledge. This would effectively contain the challenge that her contractbound relationship poses to the patriarchal order, which demands compliance of women to serve its needs through precisely the forms of domestic service that L refuses. Even K’s death at the end of the story poses no obstacle to the organization, as it merely sends another to

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continue the investigation in his place. So long as there is an endless number of Ks to continue this work, the freedom L has secured through her contract with S thus promises little in the way of actual liberation. Thus, on the diegetic level of the text, things do seem to have ended badly for L, but this is only because she has disavowed the very tools of language that secured her freedom in the first place. It is significant that the writing desk makes its appearance so early in the narrative, and it takes on greater meaning as conversations between K and L repeatedly return to her refusal of writing. In fact, K seems to interpret this refusal as central to unspooling the enigma that is L, and he repeatedly asks her to explain why she stopped writing. When we recall that the desk once belonged to her father, a village head, it takes on symbolic significance as a representation of power and authority: the law of the father made manifest. L had successfully appropriated this law in negotiating a contract with S that was favorable to her interests, and yet she has abandoned the source of her own power. While she suggests this was inevitable—that marriage and writing are mutually incompatible, and choosing one would therefore force her to renounce the other—she also suggests that this renunciation was something of a relief to her. Though there is clearly something about her that resists easy definition as feminine—in fact, she is found not to be a woman at all in the course of the medical examination—the fact that she has chosen to reject literary creativity and now uses the desk only to put on makeup or manicure her nails suggests a desire to deny her own androgynous proclivities in favor of behavior that upholds conventional gender norms. Her apparent attraction to K—the very agent sent to reassert patriarchal control over her—also suggests a measure of complicity with her own subordination. By the end of the story, when she imagines harboring a “lump” of K inside her that continuously subjects her to a disciplinary gaze from within, it seems that she has fully internalized, rather than subverted, the law of the father. And the suggestion that K’s organization is investigating thousands of other women in precisely the same way raises the possibility that there may be innumerable Ls out there—women for whom conformity feels unnatural, but who nevertheless opt to comply with patriarchal demands. In choosing such a dystopic ending for her protagonist, Kurahashi seems to want readers to question why L, or any woman, would give up the very source of their own power in order to conform to societal expectations of femininity.

Conclusion While Enchi and Kurahashi clearly represent different generations whose education and upbringing shaped their writing styles in divergent ways, there are striking similarities between the two that suggest they were responding to a common set of circumstances that arose from gender politics in Japan of the early postwar decades. Specifically, the conservative turn in the political landscape, whereby male leaders and pundits attempted to overturn, restrict, or criticize rights and privileges that Japanese women had been legally granted during the Occupation, seems to have prompted both women to conceptualize writing as a form of feminist praxis. In each case, knowledge and power are coded as masculine according to the precepts of Japanese society. However, Enchi and Kurahashi both undercut these sources of patriarchal authority by revealing them to be irrational or unfounded, and suggest that these forms of authority can be appropriated by women for their own ends. Furthermore, these narratives each operate according to a dual structure: while the protagonist in each

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case is unsuccessful in overcoming patriarchal dominance, due in part to internalizing its logic, on a metatextual level the authors implicitly critique this submission by demonstrating the devastating cost to the protagonist that it requires. Conventional women’s roles are thus disciplinary structures that must be resisted. Nowhere is this more evident than in the texts’ depiction of pregnancy—whether literal or metaphorical—a quintessentially feminine experience that is rendered as fraught and pyrrhic, suggesting that artistic creation, rather than production of children, offers women the true path to self-actualization.

Notes 1 This system conceptualized members of each family as subordinate to a patriarchal family head who had great power to determine the residence, marriage partner and means of employment of the members of his household. While effectively abolished by the Occupation government in 1947 through revision of the Civil Code, this structure continued to hold sway over family dynamics and political conceptions of family structure well into the postwar era. For more on this point, see Inoue 1991. 2 The shishōsetsu, or “I-novel,” is a literary genre of Japanese invention with roots in European naturalism. It assumes frank confession of the author’s own personal (and often sordid) thoughts and experiences as a path to exploration of the “truth” of the self and the creation of a modern sense of subjectivity. For the broader historical context that shaped the creation of this genre, see Orbaugh 2003.

References Bargen, D.G. (1991). Twin Blossoms on a Single Branch: The Cycle of Retribution in Onnamen. Monumenta Nipponica 46(2): 147–71. ———. (1996). Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumiko’s “A Bond for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings.” In P.G. Schalow and J.A. Walker (eds.), The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing (pp. 165–204). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bullock, J.C. (2010). The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction, 1960–1973. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. (2019). Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cornyetz, N. (1995). Bound by Blood: Female Pollution, Divinity, and Community in Enchi Fumiko’s “Masks.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement 9: 29–58. ———. (1999). Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Enchi, F. (1977). Onnamen. In Enchi Fumiko zenshū 6 [The complete works of Enchi Fumiko, vol. 6] (pp. 124–219). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. (1983). Masks. (J.W. Carpenter, trans.). NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1958) Hulvey, S.Y. (1995). The Intertextual Fabric of Narratives by Enchi Fumiko. In C.W. Fu and S. Heine (eds.), Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives (pp. 169–224). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Inoue, K. (1991). MacArthur’s Japanese Constitution: A Linguistic and Cultural Study of Its Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kleeman, F.Y. (2002). A Defiant Muse: Reading and Situating Kurahashi Yumiko’s Narrative Subjectivity. In T. Kuribayashi and M. Terasawa (eds.), The Outsider Within: Ten Essays on Modern Japanese Women Writers (pp. 91–112). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Koyama, S. (2013). Ryōsai Kenbo and the Educational Ideal of “Good Wife, Wise Mother” in Modern Japan. Boston: Brill. Kurahashi, Y. (1970). Watashi no naka no kare e [To the Him inside of Me]. Tokyo: Kōdansha.

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———. (1975). Kyōsei [Symbiosis]. In Kurahashi Yumiko zensakuhin 6 [The complete works of Kurahashi Yumiko] (pp. 67–129). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. McClain, Y. (1980). Eroticism and the Writings of Enchi Fumiko. The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 15(1): 32–46. Mikals-Adachi, E.B. (2001). Enchi Fumiko: Female Sexuality and the Absent Father. In R.L. Copeland and E. Ramirez-Christensen (eds.), The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (pp. 194–214). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Orbaugh, S. (2003). The Problem of the Modern Subject. In J. Mostow (ed.), The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (pp. 24–35). NY: Columbia University Press. Sakaki, A. (1999). (Re)Canonizing Kurahashi Yumiko: Toward Alternative Perspectives for ‘Modern’ ‘Japanese’ ‘Literature.’ In P. Gabriel (ed.), Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan (pp. 153–76). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. (2001). Kurahashi Yumiko’s Negotiations with the Fathers. In R.L. Copeland and E. RamirezChristensen (eds.), The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (pp. 292–326). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Yamamoto, F. (1984). Kurahashi Yumiko: A Dream of the Present? A Bridge to the Past? Modern Asian Studies 18(1): 137–52.

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Chapter 12 Food as Feminist Critique: Osaki Midori, Kanai Mieko, and Ogawa Yōko Hitomi Yoshio This chapter examines the literary depictions of food as feminist critique in the works of three Japanese women writers: Osaki Midori, Kanai Mieko, and Ogawa Yōko. Their works challenge the archetype of woman as the nurturing maternal body that provides comfort, nourishment, and protection to others, and offer social critique by depicting women who refuse to comply with the domestic, feminine roles that have been prescribed for them by society. As close analysis of their works show, literary depictions of food can be a lens through which we reveal the critique inherent in the works concerning gender roles, family, marriage, and reproductive body.

Introduction Food has been a significant concern for feminist literary criticism, intertwined with representations of women’s experiences and identities relating to issues of body, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. Just as food can be a means to nourish or deprive the body, femininity can be embraced, rejected, or revealed of its social construction. Natalie Jovanovski’s notion of “food femininities,” as “the multiple versions of gender offered to women throughout cultural discourses about food and eating” (Jovanovski 2017, 5), is useful to understand how literary depictions of food can be a lens through which we can tackle larger feminist concerns such as gender roles, family, misogyny, and reproductive control. In all the literary works examined in this chapter, food becomes the central trope through which the reader is invited to look deeper into the psyche of various female characters and explore some of these concerns. Often the characters’ inner dilemmas are unarticulated, and it is through analyzing the depictions of food that we can shed light on their anxieties, struggles, and resistance. This chapter examines three female authors from three different historical periods: Osaki Midori (1896–1971), Kanai Mieko (1947–), and Ogawa Yōko (1962–). Osaki’s work can be read in the context of the rapid expansion of women’s writing and literary modernism in the 1920s, where a vibrant translation culture allowed for transnational connections of shared feminist and modernist concerns. Kanai’s work fits within the context of the 1960s feminist

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movement and the influential philosophical works of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, which challenged women’s prescribed roles within domesticity and revealed the social construction of femininity. Ogawa’s work offers a contemporary critique of the media and overmedicalization of women’s reproductive bodies in the context of Japan’s declining birth rate and aging society. All the works challenge, in various ways, the archetype of woman as the nurturing maternal body that provides comfort, nourishment, and protection to others. Whether humorous or dark in tone, the young heroines that appear in the works refuse to comply with the domestic, feminine roles that have been prescribed for them by society through their relationship with food. This chapter follows the work of scholars such as Tomoko Aoyama (2008), who gives the most comprehensive study of food in modern Japanese literature. Emerald King (2018) focuses on the complex relationship between women and food—and food refusal—via the works of women writers from the 1960s to early 2000s. Saitō Minako (2004) explores how food triggers memory of sexual experience or desire onto the female body in the works of certain male authors. These studies can be placed in a wider scope of feminist literary criticism on Anglo-American women writers and beyond (Lahikainen 2007; Angelella 2011; Andrievskikh 2014). Building on the works of these scholars, this chapter seeks to give an overview of how literary depictions of food function as feminist critique in the works of three Japanese women writers in key moments of the 20th century.

Osaki Midori: Modernist parody of love and domesticity Osaki Midori (1896–1971)1 is a modernist writer of the prewar period, whose parodic literary style offers a critique of established views of gender, genre, and authorship. Living in the newly developed residential area of Kami-Ochiai in Tokyo among a community of avantgarde and proletarian artists and writers in the 1920s, Osaki developed a unique comical style richly embedded with intertextual references to literature, film, and popular culture. Food serves as an important metaphor across Osaki’s works that shows the way her quirky and youthful characters navigate society and social norms. One of her representative works is “Appurupai no gogo” (1929, Apple Pie Afternoon), which is a dramatic play (written for reading, rather than stage production) that centers upon a brother and sister as they debate about “love” and “proper behavior” for young women in a tongue and cheek manner. While this play uses “apple pie” to show the savviness of the sister, who uses the dessert as a prop to pursue her romantic interest, Osaki’s works often depict food to show the relationship between the female protagonists and their quiet resistance toward fitting into society dictated by gender expectations and patriarchal norms. Food femininities—the gendered dynamics at play when relating to food—thus connects Osaki’s modernist aesthetics with her feminist critique of patriarchal culture and society. Osaki presents the detachment of food from material reality as the basis for her modernist aesthetics, one which allows her to play in the realm of parody and irony. This stance can be seen in a short fragment piece titled “Nioi—shikōchō no ni-san pēji” (1928, On Smell: Some Pages from the Preference Notebook). Osaki may have taken inspiration for this poetic idea of “smell” from modernist poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), who wrote in the preface to his book of poetry Tsuki ni hoeru (1917, Howling at the Moon*) that all good poetry has a “smell” (nioi), a feeling of intoxication which is inexplicable by logic or words

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(Hagiwara 1969, 2). While for Sakutarō, this “smell” is the effect of good poetry, Osaki turns this into poetic reality itself. The piece begins with a short passage that stands as a manifesto of her position vis-à-vis reality: This is the smell, not the apple itself. The smell does not bind the nose as an apple would bind the tongue. That’s why I prefer the apple that saunters around my nostrils to the one on my tongue. (Osaki 1998, 219) Here, Osaki privileges “smell” over substantive food that may nourish her body. This focus on permeating airs inspired by, yet detached from, material reality gives Osaki freedom from the concerns of realism. The boundary between the living and the non-living breaks down, resulting in the surrealist image of an apple “saunter[ing] around [the] nostrils.” The opening manifesto lays the groundwork for the fragmented pieces of writing that follow addressed to four literary figures (Goethe, Chekhov, Sternheim, and Schnitzler), with other real or fictional characters freely traversing the text. In Osaki’s fictional work, this modernist stance is coupled with gender concerns, as the female characters are often represented as lacking in corporeality. In “Mokusei” (1929, Osmanthus*), the anti-social narrator describes herself as someone who “might as well be deaf and mute, or a piece of moss, the way I spend my days in a rented garret” (Osaki 1991, 187). Consuming only cigarettes and coffee, she refuses a marriage proposal and chooses to immerse herself in the world of cinema by going to a rundown theater playing the previous month’s rerun of Charlie Chaplin’s Goldrush for the fourth night in a row. Charlie Chaplin, with whom the narrator is “in love” (koi shite iru), in fact steps out of the screen to join her as she walks home, replacing the man she has rejected in reality. Turning away from material concerns, or the “surface of the earth” (chikyū no kawa) as she calls it, the narrator chooses to live in this alternate world of the imagination carried out on the silver screen and in her attic room, which functions as a haven from real life. The story ends with a mock apology to her mother, which also reads as a defiant manifesto as a writer and an artist: “Mother, having a daughter like me has been the worst work of your entire life. … I am the same impoverished person as always; the waste paper I make every night amounts to no money. I am half-dried impoverished moss” (Osaki 1991, 190). This image of “moss” is repeatedly used to describe the author figure, subsisting on air and water. In Osaki’s best-known novella, Dainana kankai hōkō (1931, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense*), food gives us a window into analyzing the female protagonist’s quiet rebellion against family expectations and social norms. In the first-person narrative voice of Ono Machiko, a recurring heroine in several of Osaki’s works, the novella begins with a fairy tale-like opening: “Some time in the distant past” (Osaki 2015, 224). The name Ono Machiko is a recognizable pun on the 9th-century female poet Ono no Komachi. What unfolds, however, is not the classic tale of amorous encounters as expected from the great Heian court poet known for her beauty, but an unconventional story about “a girl with frizzy, terribly reddish hair” (Osaki 2015, 224)—a symbol of resistance against standard notions of female beauty. Hair is never merely an individual trait, but can work as a “vehicle for social control,” a marker of difference, and “a deeply gendered signifier of beauty and gender (non) conformity” (Fahs 2019, 11–12). The story begins as Machiko moves into an old, rundown house with her two older brothers and a male cousin. The older brother Ichisuke is a psychiatrist specializing in 178

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bunretsu shinri (schizo-psychology) and working in a hospital; the second brother Nisuke is a university student writing his thesis in agricultural science; and her cousin Sangorō is an aspiring music student preparing for his university entrance examinations. Machiko herself has literary aspirations, but being a girl, she comes to Tokyo not to take on any formal study, but under the pretense of helping her male family members around the house. While Machiko is expected to perform various types of domestic labor, from cooking to cleaning, her utter failure and inaptitude make a parody of these duties, resulting in a new form of artistic lifestyle where social rules are irrelevant in this youthful and whimsical world absent of parental authority. The four young characters live in a rented house, one that is marked by transience. The old and rundown house makes a humorous contrast with the still unformed and unconventional youths that occupy it. With the absence of parental figures, the youths climb in and out of the window rather than using the front door, and add their own creative touch to the space with makeshift furniture and decorations. Sangorō constructs a desk lamp out of clay for Machiko, for example, while she creates a lamp shade out of wires and strings.2 These objects and furniture are not made to last, and there is a perpetual sense of un-rootedness that pervades the text. We know from the opening line that Machiko only spends “a brief period from autumn to winter as a member of an odd family” (Osaki 2015, 224). Sangorō constantly talks of moving elsewhere, and Ichisuke dreams of going on an aimless journey, just as Nisuke had once done. For these rootless characters, the rooms do not connote a delineation of individual space, but constitute a sense of fluidity throughout the house. Even though Machiko is allocated the maid’s room to use, it is not what could be called “a room of one›s own” (Woolf 1929/1989), a private space to pursue and cultivate one’s artistic vision. The male characters freely go in and out of the room, sometimes driving Machiko to seek refuge in the kitchen. The kitchen is often theorized as a gendered space (Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018, 3), a symbolic, semi-private, domestic space that is often a site of oppression but also of contestation and power in relation to gender roles (Meah and Jackson 2013). Even though we are told that Machiko comes to the house to fulfill the domestic role of cooking for the male occupants, the characters never seem to have proper food in the house, but are always hungry and nibbling on insubstantial foods. Here is a scene where Sangorō comes into the maid’s room and complains to Machiko about the lack of food in the house: “I’m really hungry. Is there anything good to eat?” It dawned on me for the first time—his bad mood earlier this morning was because of hunger. I slid open the screen covering the window of the maid’s room and stretched my arm through the lattice. When my hand finally reached an orange in the hedge, Sangorō said, “I ate my fill of oranges last night. I feel there is too much citrus in my stomach. Nisuke and I are certain to develop food poisoning from oranges. From now on, if Nisuke involves me in his all-night work, I want you, our cook, to stay up, too. Nothing causes more hunger than staying up all night. Is there something good to eat?”

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Remembering that a few boiled tule potatoes were left, I went to the kitchen but did not find their pot. “Isn’t there anything in the kitchen?” Sangorō asked. As a cook, I was at a loss. Even the lidded wooden container that should have held some leftover rice from last night had disappeared. … I searched the cupboard and finally came up with a sugar-cube container and a tea canister. What else could there have been in my kitchen? Inside the tea canister were two sheets of dried seaweed. Sangorō ate sugar and drank salt water. He ate seaweed and drank salt water. He alternated repeatedly, looking as if he found his food unappetizing. (Osaki 2015, 245–46) Although Machiko recognizes her role as the “cook” of the house, she puts in minimal effort to satisfy Sangorō’s hunger and simply looks for food that may be lying around. In fact, it is challenging to find scenes of Machiko cooking anything in the novella; we merely see characters nibbling on basic ingredients with little attempt to combine them to make an actual dish. Her utter failure to fulfill her domestic and culinary duties provides many moments of humor in the novella, and can be read as a parodic resistance of gender expectations. Rather than engaging in domestic work, Machiko is much more interested in thinking and daydreaming about poetry. Her mission, after all, is to find the “Realm of the Seventh Sense” in which her poetry will resonate. Machiko’s attempts to find a quiet place within the house to read and write, however, is constantly interrupted with demands of food, as shown in this scene where her brother Ichisuke complains about the taste of the food that she has prepared. Sitting in the kitchen corner farthest from Ichisuke, I decided to read a new book from my collection that I had just brought from the maid’s room. But I could not focus on reading here, either. This was because one sliding door away, Ichisuke complained about the meal, which was something he had never done. “This food tastes bad. There’s no distinction between wakame and miso in this miso soup. I hate having to drink such a soup when my heart is pounding.” Feeling sad that no sheet of seaweed was left, I opened the cupboard. On the lowest shelf, I found a pack of hamanattō that I had long forgotten. It made a scant sound when I shook it. I slid the paper door just wide enough to extend my arm and stretched fifteen centimeters into the dining room to place the pack of soybeans there. The hamanattō suddenly piqued Ichisuke’s appetite. (Osaki 2015, 252). Ichisuke’s complaint does not have to be directed to Machiko for her to hear it, and the sudden appearance of food is not recognized as a result of her labor. Machiko, on the other hand, is highly attuned to the demands of her house members, and manages to appease her

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brother with minimal effort. Having satisfied his hunger, Ichisuke goes off to work at the hospital, leaving Machiko momentarily in peace while the other family members still sleep. Throughout the novella, images of food appear in and out of the story: sweet bean paste (yōkan), caramel, dried persimmons, fermented soybeans from Hamamatsu (hamanattō), sour mandarin oranges from the yard, sugar cubes, and pieces of dried seaweed (wakame). Yet, the characters are always hungry, and even the radishes that Nisuke cultivates as part of his scientific experiment are left to go to waste. This contributes to the other-worldly atmosphere of the novella, detached from the necessities of material reality. Instead of being a physical need, food even becomes an occasion for aesthetic appreciation. Machiko wears the chestnuts sent from her grandmother as a necklace, turning its nutritional value into an aesthetic object. The transformation of food from nutritious to aesthetic can be read as Machiko’s quiet rebellion against succumbing to domestic work, and shows her desire to turn domestic place into an artistic one. Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense is a modernist collage of quotidian events, which are at once domestic and bizarre. With fragmentation and collage at their core, with little conventional plotline, Osaki’s works are not overtly political but contain subversive elements that destabilize assumptions and norms. The depiction of food, connected with the offbeat depiction of “love” (ren’ai) throughout her works, seems to suggest Osaki’s implicit critique of heterosexual norms and domestic life that make up the foundations of patriarchal society. Her depiction of the female authorial figure as “a piece of moss” shows not only her economic reality, but also a rejection of the well-nourished, wholesome, feminine body that nurtures the family. As Aoyama (2008) points out, “hunger is not simply a physical and socioeconomic issue, but has also a deep connection with gender” (71). While Osaki’s writing style is often humorous and dream-like, resisting a straightforward interpretation, the portrayal of food femininities—the female protagonists and their relation to food—allows us to illuminate the feminist critique underlying in her work.

Kanai Mieko: Starvation and rejection of domesticity Gender roles, or “desirable” models of femininity and masculinity, were broadcast and perpetuated on a nation-wide scale when TV entered family homes in postwar Japan (Yoshimi 2003). Vera Mackie (2003) describes how the 1975 commercial for instant noodles, where a woman states, “I am the one who cooks them” and the man responds, “I am the one who eats them,” became a target for the International Women’s Year Action Group (174). In this context, Julia Bullock (2010) calls the writers of the 1960s the “Other Women’s Lib,” whose subversive heroines posed a challenge to ideals of femininity posited by patriarchy and capitalism. Kanai Mieko’s (1947–) debut work, “Ai no seikatsu” (1967, Love Life) does exactly that. Kanai’s quiet depiction of domestic life reflects the 1960s feminist critique of the nuclear family, which came to be viewed as a microcosm of patriarchal society. In the age of “personal is political,” one’s way of being and actions (or sometimes non-actions) in domestic space could have radical political implications, illuminating the power structures that oppress women. The protagonist of “Love Life” accepts her social role as a wife to an extent, but her anxieties surface in the form of nausea and inability to eat. In this way, the work can be placed alongside and against what Emerald L. King (2018) refers to as a “tradition in Japanese literature of idealized women who, for various reasons, do not or cannot eat” (76). A later

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story by Kanai, “Usagi” (1972, Rabbits*), offers a seemingly opposite depiction of food, that of gluttony.3 With both stories, whether through starvation or gluttony, Kanai breaks down the idealized image of femininity to reveal the darker side of female experience and psyche, critiquing the social institutions of marriage and family. To do this, food becomes the central metaphor to explore the complex relationships women have with their prescribed gender roles, showcasing yet another dimension of food femininities. In Kanai’s novella, “Love Life,” food is described as an object of duty and disgust.4 It is an anchor through which the female protagonist tries to remember, record, and make sense of her life. The protagonist—the unnamed narrator—is a writer, not yet published, who pieces together work by occasionally sending in pieces to a publisher or a design office. Yet, her primary duties at present seem to be those of a housewife. Every day, she must prepare breakfast and dinner for her husband F, who goes to work as a university professor of French. She meticulously tries to record the act that takes up a substantial part of her day, from what she bought, cooked, served, and ate, but the memory escapes her constantly. Her memories that come to her, instead, are of her unmarried days where she and her male friends—including her now husband—seemed to be artistic equals. Her desperate act to remember and record her daily preparation and intake of food seems like her inarticulate desire to attribute meaning and order to her present life, which unfolds in a series of repetitive acts of domestic chores. The story is told as a first-person narrative, spanning an entire day from morning to evening. The actions of the story are simple—the protagonist leaves the house and takes the train to Shinjuku, sits in one café after another until evening. Throughout the day, she makes several phone calls to try to reach her husband F, whom she finds out early in the day had skipped work. With little action, what drives the story are the protagonist’s thoughts that unfold in a stream-of-consciousness style, from her musings on F’s whereabouts and their life together, conversations with male friends and snippets of their letters, to a confessional letter she writes in her notebook. In the last instance, she feels silenced by the lengthy monologues of her male friends who expect no response from her, so that her own confessional letter seems to function as a form of rebellion, but one that is only directed toward her own self. She writes: No response needed. There was, indeed, nothing I could say to him as a response. His words have already begun to live a life of their own. There was no space for my response. The only possible response on my part would be aimed toward myself. (Kanai 1992, 35) Without a recipient, with no hope for a real conversation or correspondence, she looks inwardly to find space for self-reflection. She wanders the city of Tokyo, from café to café, searching for a place to think and reflect and write in her own words, all the while unable to extricate herself from her concerns about F’s whereabouts. As if to fill the emptiness inside, the protagonist smokes constantly but this only exacerbates the nausea that makes her further unable to eat. Every morning, though she knows it will make her feel sick, she smokes a cigarette on an empty stomach—something, she notes, her mother had told her not to do. As she goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth, gagging with nausea and disgust, she thinks about her “peach-colored stomach of the morning, a sack of filth suspended from the mouth” (Kanai 1992, 9). Disgust is a common affect in women’s 182

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vexed relationship with food; it is also a common thread among the selected stories, and is located in our very body: “Probably there is no emotion that rivets attention to the body as dramatically as does disgust, for it is a profoundly visceral emotion. It is closely connected to physical responses, such as gagging and nausea, and it seems to require a trigger from one of the senses” (Korsmeyer 2004, 145). Through the rejection of food that induces a feeling of disgust, it is as if the protagonist is punishing her body to achieve a physical manifestation of the anxieties that she is feeling inside. While the protagonist never articulates her dissatisfaction with her life directly, her relationship to food reveals her ambivalence towards domestic chores and a healthy feminine body that might make her a productive and respected member of society. In a confessional letter addressed to her male friend, which is in fact a monologue to work out her thoughts and emotions in her private notebook, she poses a series of questions concerning whether she really loves her husband F. In the process of working out an answer, her thoughts turn to her perpetual hunger and nausea, which she expresses as follows: The constant feeling of hunger threatens me always. I am always hungry and cannot help thinking that I want to eat something. But once I have a bite or two of food, the hunger that had made me so anxious disappears without a trace. Even just looking at it, all that comes up in my throat is nausea. (Kanai 1992, 34) Here, food does not serve as comfort or nourishment for her body, but something that her body rejects as a source of nausea. Unable to eat, she fills herself with liquids, such as coffee, orange squash, and beer, to keep her going. In fact, the only thing she seems to enjoy is the sensation of the air as gas is released from her stomach through her mouth, with the scent of orange from the squash drink. By her body refusing to partake in the ritual of eating, despite her conscious desire to do so, she seems to be intuitively rejecting the social roles and expectations that are placed upon her and her body. In contrast to the protagonist’s problematic relationship to food, the men that appear in the story seem to have a regular and good appetite. Her husband F is described as eating the same breakfast every morning—one egg, two thin slices of bacon, bed of lettuce, a piece of toast, and two cups of coffee. She watches him as he eats methodically—even the amount and the order in which he takes in the food are regular. Then, afterwards, she becomes annoyed with the way he leaves the dishes all in the washing basin, the milk cup together with the plates covered in oil, making it difficult to clean. She makes no conscious critique of her husband who can methodically eat his breakfast without a wavering mind and go to work every day, leaving behind the dirty dishes for his wife to clean. Before she leaves the house, it is she who must clean the dishes, and even feel a certain peace of mind in the process. The story exposes the irony where the so-called liberal intellectual men, who can appreciate and discuss the beauty and quiet horror of art films—like Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965, Happiness)—can still be oppressors of women in their own lives. Men and women appear to be equal in literary and artistic conversations, but the domestic chores are clearly gendered, making certain life events take on entirely different meanings depending on one’s gender. At one point in the story, the protagonist overhears a conversation between two men and two women dining together in a restaurant. One of the women begins: — Makes me wonder… My friend is getting married… Chapter 12: Food as Feminist Critique

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A man’s voice sitting next to her on the right says, — Let’s say you eat three times a day… three times three hundred and sixtyfive… that makes, uh, one thousand and ninety-five times a year. And if you multiply that by seventy for seventy years of life, you’ll eat seventy-six thousand six hundred and fifty meals. The man on the left replied in a loud voice. — Not much when you think about it. I’ve lived half my life without being aware of that number, that seventy thousand something. But who knows how many meals we actually eat? That’s impossible to know. — What a bother. I’m going to have to make two-thirds of that number… makes me sick… You, you just eat. A woman has to make it, three times a day. — Well, what else would you do to kill the time? (Kanai 1992, 42) This conversation reveals the gender imbalance within the institution of marriage regarding this quotidian act of eating that is necessary to stay alive. While the man expresses surprise at how few the number of meals one consumes in one’s lifetime, the woman expresses annoyance that it is her duty to cook at least two-thirds of that number as a future wife. The man’s dismissive response is said jokingly, yet poignantly shows the reality of how domestic labor is unappreciated as “real” labor that incurs economic capital. Housewives are seen as bored and privileged, and that view is internalized by the women who reluctantly accept their prescribed domestic roles. After hearing this conversation, the protagonist watches in disgust as another man wolfs down a plate of spaghetti, while letting her own beef stew get cold before her. Watching the man, she is reminded of the infirmary room in elementary school full of medical instruments and a human anatomy diagram, which she finds beautiful and revolting at the same time. She also remembers a picture with various types of parasites, and the spaghetti ingested by the man reminds her of intestinal worms. She lets her mind wander until it reaches an old obstetrics and gynecology hospital, where she had visited her aunt who was confined there. In the hospital were jars containing bodies of babies and female reproductive organs preserved in formalin. Stepping into her memory, she observes them one by one—uterus, ovaries, fetus, peach-colored tumor, ear shells, and a baby’s hand with six fingers—with curiosity and aversion.5 All the women at the hospital, young and old, are disgusted and nauseated by the presence of the cadavers that remind them of their own bodies and potential reproductive failures. Remembering these scenes, triggered by the image of the man eating spaghetti before her, she takes a sip of her lukewarm coffee and lights a cigarette. At the end of the story, the protagonist makes another phone call and finally locates F at his friend’s house where they meet for a bimonthly study group. She seems almost disappointed that nothing dramatic has happened to F, like an accidental death or an elopement with a lover, that would release her from the repetitive life—and the cycle of eating—in which she is trapped. She realizes the emptiness of their “love life”—although they are a married couple supposedly tied together by love, they do not understand each other at all. The story ends, not with a confrontation with F, but with her overhearing a conversation on the street between a young girl and a boy, arguing about life and death. Moments later, the girl—not

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the boy—is killed in a car accident, her skull crushed and bloody. The protagonist picks up a book that the girl had held moments before, and hands it over to the police. We never find out the title or author of the book, which may shed light on the dead girl’s mind. Following this act, perhaps seeing herself in the dead girl’s fate, the protagonist runs in the opposite direction, tears streaming down her face.

Ogawa Yōko: Poisoning the reproductive body Food and medical imagery are two pillars of Ogawa Yōko’s (1962–) work, and are featured prominently in her writing. The eponymous novella in her book, Ninshin karendā (1991, Pregnancy Calendar; translated as Pregnancy Diary*),6 which won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1990, brings together these two imageries to create a haunting story about two sisters. Pregnancy Diary is written as a first-person narrative in the form of a diary. On the surface, the protagonist meticulously records the stages of pregnancy that her older sister goes through, and the story is organized by the days and weeks of pregnancy. The original Japanese title, “Pregnancy Calendar,” refers to a calendar that helps expecting mothers track the development of pregnancy. However, the story, with its seemingly ordinary and feminine title, subverts the reader’s expectations as grotesque images of food dominate the page. Rather than any action or confession, it is the meticulous descriptions of food, often tied to medical imagery, that give a glimpse into the psychology of the narrator, building drama and adding a layer of eeriness and horror to the story. The dining table is the central stage prop in this novella where conversations among the characters take place. As the story begins, the narrator records the morning conversation with her older sister as she is preparing to go to M Clinic for the first time to confirm her pregnancy. As the sister contemplates how many sheets of temperature graphs she should show the doctor, the narrator writes: “she churned her spoon in the yogurt. … She studied the yogurt clinging to her spoon. It shimmered, viscous and white, as it dripped back into the container” (Ogawa 2008, 58). Although the narrator does not record the sister’s emotions, her absentminded look as she plays with her food indicates her anxiety over the changes in her body. The narrator takes the yogurt, puts the lid back on, and puts it back in the refrigerator, as if she is the caretaker of the food. These actions speak louder about the characters’ emotional states and relationship to one another than the actual conversations taking place, which betray little emotion. We learn that the sisters have lost their parents, and now the narrator lives with her sister and brother-in-law, who works at a dental clinic. The narrator, a college student, seems to be in charge of preparing meals in the house. Juxtaposed with the mundane conversations, food is described in great detail as grotesque and menacing. Here is an example from the dining table the morning after her sister’s pregnancy is confirmed, where the narrator describes the food not as tasty and nutritious, but as unappetizing and even poisonous. “There’s too much pepper in this,” my sister muttered, sticking her fork into her omelet. Since she always had something to say about the food, I pretended not to hear her. Half-cooked egg dripped from the end of her fork like yellow blood. My brother-in-law was eating slices of kiwi. I can’t stand kiwi—all those seeds make

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me think of little black bugs, and the kiwi this morning was particularly ripe and soft. Beads of sweat had collected on the surface of the butter. (Ogawa 2008, 64) The narrator looks for signs of emotion on the day after her sister’s confirmed pregnancy, but none of the characters betray any sort of emotion. Rather, the grotesque depiction of food in this passage shows a nervous and menacing feeling brooding between the characters. The kiwi “seeds” and the half-cooked “egg” unconsciously come together to conjure the image of fertilization and pregnancy in the narrator’s mind, subjects that are repressed at the breakfast table. The association of the brother-in-law with the fruit she detests, and its “seeds” imagined as live insects, give a hint to her unconscious animosity toward him—and perhaps the male sex—that is never articulated in words. The peculiarity of the sisters’ eating habits are highlighted when adult figures enter the novella. The narrator notes that even though it is the New Year holidays, there is no sign of traditional food or decorations in the house. With their parents no longer living, it seems that the sisters have little interest in keeping up with tradition and customs. It is, in fact, the parents of the brother-in-law who bring over “a box of traditional New Year’s foods” (Ogawa 2008, 65), expensive and labor-intensive delicacies whose preparations often fall upon the female members of the household. In contrast, the narrator makes a series of westernized foods that have entered Japanese cuisine, such as bouillabaisse and macaroni gratin, and the foods stocked in their fridge are frozen pizza, canned potato salad, apple juice, and cream cheese. Although not articulated explicitly, these food choices make a clear statement in their refusal to partake in the normative customs of their parents’ generation. This contrast in food choice also highlights the youthfulness and rootlessness of the characters, who must navigate the major events in life, such as pregnancy, on their own. The sense of disgust toward food becomes echoed and amplified by the older sister as her pregnancy progresses, and morning sickness defamiliarizes the act of eating and sense of smell. The sister expresses her revulsion toward food, which reminds her of internal organs: “Doesn’t the sauce on the macaroni remind you of digestive juices? … The noodles are strange, too,” she added. “The way they squish when I bite into them makes me feel like I’m chewing on intestines, little, slippery tubes full of stomach juices.” (Ogawa 2008, 67) And again, It’s not just the bacon and eggs. It’s the frying pan and the dishes, the soap in the bathroom, the curtains in the bedroom—everything stinks. It’s spreading all over the house, like a giant amoeba eating up all the other odors around it, on and on forever. (Ogawa 2008, 74) The sister expresses the desire to go to a hospital free of germs and smells, and have her body cleaned out from the inside. The narrator tries to help her by exchanging all the house products for non-fragrant ones and sealing all the spices. This seems to prove effective. As Ting (2020) suggests, “Transforming in sync with the kitchen, the narrator’s sister becomes dramatically thin and increasingly beautiful, her body purified and cleansed as she almost stops eating” (564). In deference to her sister’s transforming body, the narrator begins cooking 186

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and taking her meals outside, bringing the rice cooker, microwave, and coffee grinder to the garden. Despite her sacrifice, she seems to feel little sympathy for her sister as she describes the joy and freedom of eating outside. In addition to domestic space, food is depicted in the space of the supermarket. The narrator, who is sent to various supermarkets around town for her part-time job, describes the contrast between the depressing, dimly lit backroom “with boxes and wet sheets of plastic and bits of vegetable littering the floor” (Ogawa 2008, 82), and the bright and spotless front space of the supermarket where she sets up her food sampling stand covered with a floralprint tablecloth, as if to imitate the domestic space of the home. Despite this small performance of domesticity, the narrator describes the supermarket as neatly organized, hygienic, and properly in place: We stood there in the supermarket, surrounded by an infinite variety of food— behind her, stacks of meat in slices, cubes, or ground; behind me, frozen beans and piecrusts and dumplings. The tall shelves were packed tight from one wall to the other, and each shelf was overflowing with food: vegetables, dairy, sweets, spices—it seemed to go on forever. I felt dizzy just looking at it. (Ogawa 2008, 84) In contrast to the earlier depictions of food that seemed to come alive in domestic space, here the food is described as cold and industrial. The food is processed or frozen, existing in mass, looking sterile, with nothing organic or threatening about them. She thinks of the eeriness of people gathering here to buy food day in and day out. When she describes a scene of eating at her food sampling stand, it is registered as obscene; an old woman devours a sample of whipped cream on a cracker with childish glee, showing her bright red tongue. The narrator watches with curiosity and marvel this spectacle that seems so out of place in the sterile environment of the supermarket. When the older sister’s morning sickness suddenly ends, she is overwhelmed with appetite. Developing a sudden craving for loquat sherbet, she describes her appetite as belonging not to herself, but to the pregnancy itself. The narrator looks in disdain at her brother-in-law, as he tries to appease her sister and cater to the demands of her appetite. As the pregnancy progresses, the grotesque depictions of food become replaced with the grotesque transformation of the body. The sister’s pregnant body is described as “swelling before my eyes like a giant tumor” (Ogawa 2008, 97)—a medical abnormality that is violating the body. The narrator’s view seems to reveal the internalization of the cultural understanding of the pregnant or post-natal body as the “grotesque feminine” (Ussher 2005, 80), where the female reproductive body is controlled by patriarchal institutions from religious rituals to medical regulations. Here, Amanda Seaman’s (2016) reading of Ogawa’s work is helpful in thinking about the pathologizing of pregnancy and the cultural representation of pregnancy as a deformity, and how the pregnant sister is only able to comprehend the changes of her body through the language of science (40). At this point, the novella takes a dark psychological turn where the reader begins to suspect that the narrator might have intentions to harm the unborn fetus, while pretending on the surface to be taking care of her pregnant sister. The narrator’s resentment toward the pregnancy is revealed symbolically during a pivotal moment in the story, where she once again goes out to a supermarket for her part-time job. On that day, a stock boy slips on a piece of lettuce and breaks a whole cart full of eggs before her eyes. The eggs can be interpreted as Chapter 12: Food as Feminist Critique

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symbols of fertility, and the act of breaking them as a violation or termination of pregnancy. The manager of the store gives the narrator a bag of grapefruits that were covered in the mess of the broken eggs, which she receives gratefully. Her act of taking home the “ruined” grapefruits to feed her sister hints at her hidden desire to tamper with the pregnancy that she views as invading her sister’s body. It is, after all, not the sister that the narrator feels antagonistic towards, but the pregnancy itself. The narrator decides to make jam using the grapefruits discarded from the supermarket. Shredding the zest, the juice spurts everywhere “as if they were living” (Ogawa 1991, 58), and the grapefruit peel reminds her of “human membrane seen under a microscope” (Ogawa 2008, 95). Cooking down the grapefruit juice and zest with sugar, she remembers a meeting she attended a few months before where she learned about toxic, antifungal PWH that is said to be contained in American grapefruit. When her sister comes home and eats the jam with relish, she wonders what effect the jam would have on the fetus: She ate spoonful after spoonful. Her protruding belly made her look almost arrogant as she stood there by the stove, pouring the sticky globs of fruit down her throat. As I studied the last puddles of jam trembling slightly at the bottom of the pan, I wondered whether PWH would really destroy chromosomes. (Ogawa 2008, 96). In contrast to the thin and beautiful body previously described, her sister’s now expanding body is described with disgust, as the narrator watches the fat move on her face and body as she eats. She imagines the jam poisoning the fetus inside the body. From that day on, the narrator begins making grapefruit jam for her sister every day, always making sure that they are imported from America. Although no longer covered with broken eggs, she imagines the harmful chemicals that are contained in the fruit. There is a sense of horror as she engages in ordinary conversations with her sister, listening to her anxieties and fears of giving birth, while feeding her what she believes to be poisonous food without any display of emotion. The novella ends on an ambiguous note, where the narrator goes to meet her sister’s “ruined child” (Ogawa 2008, 105) at the hospital where she gives birth. Reading the story as feminist critique, we could argue that the narrator’s imagined assault on her sister’s pregnant body and unborn fetus, through feeding the grapefruit jam, shows the darker side of food femininities surrounding pregnancy and motherhood, which are often idealized in cultural narratives and media depictions as key to woman’s self-fulfillment and happiness. The story can also be read as a recognition of pre-natal and postpartum depression, where women suffer from guilt over lack of maternal feelings that they cannot properly articulate. Feminists have shown that these experiences surrounding birth can have complicated effects on women, especially when they feel that their own experience doesn’t coincide with the myths perpetuated in the media. Additionally, the narrator repeatedly shows skepticism toward the male doctors that her sister willingly submits her body and mind to, giving a nod to the women’s health movement of the 1970s, which criticized the medicalization of birth in hospital settings (Basile 2019, 24). In these contexts, Ogawa’s work can be read as a feminist critique of the over-medicalization of the reproductive body that disempowers women, and the cultural discourses surrounding pregnancy and motherhood that normalize and sugarcoat these experiences.

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Conclusion This chapter has shown that representations of food in modern Japanese women’s writing can function as feminist critique in depicting the lives of the female protagonists in their particular cultural or social contexts. One comically fails in her role to maintain domestic order, another meticulously records what she eats as she starves herself, and another imagines that she is poisoning an unborn fetus by feeding grapefruit jam to a pregnant body. The notion of food femininities was used to explore the problematic relationship female protagonists have with what they consume, showing how literary depictions of food are never neutral but always sites of conflict that are underlined with issues of gender and power. As the analyses of the works examined in the chapter have shown, food can also be a site of creative expression to articulate feminist rebellions toward gender norms and patriarchal oppression. Author’s Note: I would like to thank Juliana Buriticá Alzate for her detailed and insightful comments in writing this chapter. I would also like to thank my wonderful students at Florida International University and Waseda University, where I have taught these authors’ works over the years.

Notes 1 Long neglected, Osaki Midori’s works have gained scholarly attention in recent years. For Japanese scholarship, see Katō (1990), Mizuta (2005), Kawasaki (2010), and Eguro (2012). In English, see Monnet (1999), Frederick (2006), Tyler (2008), and Yoshio (2012). The author’s family name is pronounced Osaki, rather than the common reading of Ozaki. 2 This description of the house echoes the contemporaneous artistic movement of the Bloomsbury group and the decorative style of the Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex, U.K., collaboratively created by artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. See Hancock (2012) for a study of the literary and artistic house museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. 3 “Rabbits” unfolds a surrealist world in which a young girl immerses herself in her father’s gluttonous appetite and desire, understanding it as her own. Food is a key motif in the story, which could be read as the daughter’s attempt to take hold of her own desires and sexuality, but, in the end, the internalization of male appetite and desire ends in an extreme form of self-inflicted violence. For an in-depth analysis, see Knighton’s (2011) article which reads the story through Lacanian psychoanalytic feminist theory coupled with shōjo criticism, rendering the relationship between the daughter and father as incest. 4 For an in-depth reading of the novella, see Osborne (2019). Relevant to this chapter are Osborne’s analyses of the food scenes through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “abject.” 5 This scene recalls Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), where the protagonist is taken to a hospital by her boyfriend, a medical student, to see bodies of babies preserved in jars. The novel also has a memorable scene where a group of college-aged young women are invited to a splendid banquet in New York City, only to become victims of food poisoning. There are other parallels with Kanai’s story and The Bell Jar, including the protagonist’s seeming descent into mental illness. 6 For an in-depth feminist analysis of this novella within the context of other major works by Ogawa, see Ting (2020). Relevant to this chapter is Ting’s focus on femininities, food, and domestic spaces in contexts of female homosociality as critical sites of appropriation and transgression of conventional gender norms.

References Andrievskikh, N. (2014). Food Symbolism, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in Fairy Tales and Modern Women’s Bestsellers. Studies in Popular Culture 37(1): 137–53.

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Angelella, L. (2011). The Meat of the Movement: Food and Feminism in Woolf. Woolf Studies Annual 17: 173–95. Aoyama, T. (2008). Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Basile, M. (2019). Radical Doulas, Childbirth Activism, and the Politics of Embodiment. In C. Bobel & S. Kwan (eds.), Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations (pp. 23–37). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bullock, J.C. (2010). The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Eguro, K. (2012). “Shōjo” to “rōjo” no seiiki: Osaki Midori, Nomizo Naoko, Mori Mari o yomu [Sanctuary for “girls” and “old women”: Reading Osaki Midori, Nomizo Naoko, Mori Mari]. Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin. Fahs, B. (2019). Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair. In C. Bobel & S. Kwan (eds.), Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations (pp. 11–22). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Frederick, S. (2006). Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Hagiwara, S. (1969). Tsuki ni hoeru: Shishū [Howling at the moon: Poetry collection]. Tokyo: Nihon Kindai Bungakukan. Hancock, N. (2012). Charleston and Monk’s House: The Intimate House Museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jovanovski, N. (2017). Digesting Femininities: The Feminist Politics of Contemporary Food Culture. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG. Kanai, M. (1992). Kanai Mieko zen tanpenshū [Kanai Mieko: A complete short story collection]. Tokyo: Nihon Bungeisha. ———. (1982). Rabbits. (P. Birnbaum, trans.). In P. Birnbaum (ed.), Rabbits, Crabs, etc.: Stories by Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. (Original work published 1972) Katō, Y. (1990). Osaki Midori no kankaku sekai [Osaki Midori’s sensory world]. Tokyo: Sōjusha. Kawasaki, K. (2010). Osaki Midori: Sakyū no kanata e [Osaki Midori: Beyond the dunes]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. King, E.L. (2018). Women Who Don’t Eat in Modern Japanese Literature. In L. Piatti-Farnell & D.L. Brien, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (pp. 76–83). London: Routledge. Knighton, M.A. (2011). Down the Rabbit Hole: In Pursuit of Shōjo Alices, from Lewis Carroll to Kanai Mieko.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 40: 49–89. Korsmeyer, C. (2004). Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Lahikainen, J. (2007). “You Look Delicious”: Food, Eating, and Hunger in Margaret Atwood’s Novels [Doctoral Dissertation]. Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla. Mackie, V. (2003). Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meah, A. & Jackson, P. (2013). Crowded Kitchens: The “Democratisation” of Domesticity? Gender, Place & Culture, 20(5): 578–96. Mizuta, N. (2005). Osaki Midori: Dainana kankai hōkō no sekai [Osaki Midori: The world of Wanderings in the Realm of the Seventh Sense]. Josei sakka hyōden shirīzu [Women writers biographical criticism series] (vol. 5). Tokyo: Shintensha. Monnet, L. (1999). Montage, Cinematic Subjectivity and Feminism in Ozaki Midori’s Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense. Japan Forum 11(1): 57–82. Osaki, M. (1991). Osmanthus. (M. Silverberg, trans.). Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing 3(2): 187–90. (Original work published 1929) ———. (1998). Teihon Osaki Midori zenshū [Authoritative edition: Complete works of Osaki Midori] (2 vols.). (Inagaki M., ed.). Chikuma Shobō. ———. (2015). Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. (K. Selden and A. Freedman, trans.). Review of Japanese Culture and Society 27: 220–74. (Original work published 1931). Ogawa, Y. (1991). Ninshin karendaa. [Pregnancy Calendar]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. ———. (2008). The Diving Pool: Three Novellas. (Stephen Snyder, trans.). New York: Picador. Osborne, H. (2019). The Ai-Novel: Ai no seikatsu and its Challenge to the Japanese Literary Establishment. Japanese Language and Literature 53(1): 95–122.

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Piatti-Farnell, L. & Brien, D.L. (eds.). (2018). The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food. London: Routledge. Saitō, M. (2004). Bungakuteki shōhingaku [A study of commodities in literature]. Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten. Seaman, A.C. (2016). Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ting, G. (2020). Ogawa Yōko and the Horrific Femininities of Daily Life. Japanese Language and Literature 54(2): 551–82. Tyler, W.J. (2008). Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ussher, J.M. (2005). Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body. London: Routledge. Woolf, V. (1989). A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Yoshimi, S. (2003). Television and Nationalism: Historical Change in the National Domestic TV Formation of Postwar Japan. European Journal of Cultural Studies 6(4): 459–87. Yoshio, H. (2012). Envisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early 20th Century Japan [Doctoral Dissertation]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

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Part 5 Beyond the Patriarchal Family

Chapter 13 “The Mommy Trap”: Childless Women Write Motherhood—Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Murata Sayaka Amanda C. Seaman This chapter looks at three key works by Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Murata Sayaka and explores how these women writers reject motherhood and use vivid and often unsettling depictions of children and reproduction to challenge these conventional depictions. It also explores how the more than fifty years between Kōno’s work and Murata has had an impact on the new options for women who do not wish to become mothers.

Introduction In the 1920s, the feminist-anarchist writer Takamure Itsue (1894–1964) argued that a woman’s sexual desire is oriented towards reproduction, while men are motivated to have sex by selfishness and greed. In keeping with this fundamental difference, Takamure concluded, female culture is based on maternal love, a love at once natural and instinctive (Ryang 1998, 10–11). Takamure’s identification of womanhood with maternity was shared by the pioneering feminist journalist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), who saw Takamure as her “spiritual daughter” (Suzuki 2010, 111) and who also saw motherhood as both central to feminine identity and predicated upon a woman’s positive relationship with her male partner (Tomida 2004, 221–41). Despite her emphasis upon maternity and maternal love, however, Takamure herself did not have any children; although she was long married, and took a number of lovers over the years, her only pregnancy ended in stillbirth (Loftus 1996, 163). Takamure’s situation was far from an isolated one. Indeed, a number of other modern Japanese women writers, including Hayashi Fumiko and Hirabayashi Taiko, equated female identity with motherhood and valorized the maternal condition while themselves remained childless.1 It was not until the 1960s that women writers began to actively challenge the primary role of motherhood as a harbinger of women’s maturity and a central element of their gendered identity. In this chapter, I focus upon three of these postwar authors: Kōno Taeko (1926–2015), Takahashi Takako (1932–2013), and Murata Sayaka (1979–). All are women who became

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known for rejecting their predecessors’ valorization of motherhood, and all use vivid and often disturbing depictions of children and reproduction in their work to challenge prevailing definitions of womanhood. Their careers unfolded during a period of profound demographic crisis. After reaching a high of over four children per woman in the years following World War II, Japan’s birth rate had rapidly fallen to around two children by the mid-1960s, and to under 1.5 by the time Murata started publishing in the 2010s (Seaman 2016, 183). Indeed, despite their distinctive literary voices and perspectives, these three women are united by a deep (if conflicted) fascination with female agency, empowerment, and independence, and by a profound sense of motherhood’s fundamental and even essential incompatibility with those goals. While the characters in the stories examined here— Kōno’s “Toddler Hunting,” Takahashi’s “A Boundless Void,” and Murata’s “A Clean Marriage”—each try to achieve autonomy in different ways, all of them understand children, and even procreative sex itself, to be an impediment to achieving this goal.

Kōno Taeko Kōno Taeko was born in Osaka in 1926. As a high school student during the Pacific War, she was conscripted for factory work to aid the nation’s military efforts. In the years after Japan’s surrender, she earned her university degree and moved to Tokyo in hopes of pursuing a writing career (Bullock 2010, 38). She struggled, however, to find time for her creative work amidst the demands of a full-time job—a struggle exacerbated when she contracted tuberculosis in 1957. As Julia Bullock has observed, this illness had a profound impact upon Kōno’s personal and artistic development; the sterility that resulted from her tuberculosis would become a recurring theme in her fiction, strategically deployed to “serve as an implicit challenge to ideologies of gender that insisted on the ‘naturalness’ of conflating femininity with motherhood” (Bullock 2010, 40). Much of Kōno’s work from the 1960s deals with female protagonists in their mid-thirties involved in monogamous relationships with men. As Darren Huang has noted, children frequently play “large, looming symbolic or metaphorical roles” in stories ... unleashing in the protagonists hidden urges and desires ... [and] illuminat[ing] parts of other characters’ mental landscapes that were kept in the dark” (Huang 2019, paragraph 4). Just as important, however, is the fact that these protagonists are almost always childless themselves. Children in Kōno’s stories thus are not only symbolically or metaphorically significant; they also serve to highlight the control—or the lack of it—that the woman has over her life. This can be seen most clearly in Kōno’s 1961 short story “Yōji-gari” (Toddler Hunting), which received the Shinchosha Award and launched her into the literary world. The story’s central character is Akiko, a former opera singer now working as an Italian translator, whose masochistic sexual relationship with her violent boyfriend Sasaki is counterbalanced by a mixture of revulsion for and sadistic attraction to young children. Diagnosed with tuberculosis when she was an adult, Akiko’s disease not only led her to abandon her singing career, but also provided a medical rationale for her own disinterest in motherhood. Akiko’s “physical and emotional stamina,” writes Kōno, “had been quite worn down” (Kōno 1997, 325), and while her period keeps coming, she knows that parenting is not in her future: “every month, over and over, it made a little bed inside for a baby, unaware that none would ever be born, and then it took it apart again” (Kōno 1997, 324). Far from being a cause for distress

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or sadness, however, this realization fills her with “an emotion close to joy,” since she “had become a woman for whom maternal love was a totally alien emotion—a woman even less able to think of bringing up children” then she had been before her illness (Kōno 1997, 325). Akiko’s rejection of motherhood both stems from and contributes to her deep, visceral feelings about children themselves. As Kōno explains in her opening lines, “Hayashi Akiko couldn’t abide little girls between three and ten years old—she detested them more than any other kind of human being ... she couldn’t picture her own abhorrence ever yielding to maternal love, an emotion she scarcely possessed anyway.” These visceral feelings, described as akin to those felt by some people when confronted with snakes, cats or frogs (Kōno 1997, 313), reveal themselves in unexpected ways; during her singing career, for instance, Akiko became “blatantly repulsed” by a young girl sharing the stage with her mother in a production of Madama Butterfly, a reaction met with confusion and consternation from the rest of the company (Kōno 1997, 320).2 The sense of abjection which girls provoke in Akiko, we learn, is deeply rooted within her psyche and biography. When she was a child, her own body elicited feelings of “something loathsome and repellent ... it was as if she were trapped in a long, narrow tunnel; as if a sticky liquid seeped unseen out of her every pore.” Even as an adult, the mere sight of little girls calls forth memories from a long-ago science class, when her teacher had removed a silkworm pupa from its cocoon—“a filthy dark thing, slowly binding itself up in thread issuing from its own body,” embodying her own feelings of horror and revulsion (Kōno 1997, 314). Akiko’s feelings about little boys, however, are far more complex. Early in the story, we learn that she looks forward to buying items of boy’s clothing and then visiting some acquaintance who has a young son. These gifts clearly are meant to gratify Akiko more than their recipients; when she gives a shirt to a former colleague’s little boy, she insists that he put it on and then take it off in front of her. As he struggles to remove it, Akiko watches with perverse delight: “Just as she’d imagined, the child started to twist and turn about, wiggling his bottom” (Kōno 1997, 319). Akiko’s disappointment when the child’s mother intervenes to end the embarrassing spectacle suggests that such interactions are meant to provide more than simple amusement. Rather, they offer her a way to assert power and control, ideally in circumstances where the young boy is separated from his mother and more amenable to Akiko’s blandishments. Near the story’s end, for example, Akiko notices a three-year-old boy standing alone in front of a greengrocer, struggling to remove the seeds from a large slice of watermelon. After helping him with his task, she persuades him to give her a bite: Akiko took hold of it with her hands over his, pulling the boy up to her. She sank her teeth into the fruit, and the mouthful of watermelon was so pulpy and warm, it was like biting into live flesh. (Kōno 1997, 332) When she finally releases the boy’s hands, he thrusts the fruit towards her and runs off, yelling that she can keep it as she gazes after him. At one level, this might seem to be a creepy but generally harmless obsession, a kind of emotional self-pleasuring predicated on childish performances of vulnerability. Yet while the young boys who cross paths with Akiko all emerge unscathed, there is an erotic and exploitative undertone to Kōno’s description of these encounters, one that echoes the far more sinister and disturbing place of children within Akiko’s imagination. The violent and humiliating nature of her sexual relationship with Sasaki—a relationship that Akiko describes as Chapter 13: “The Mommy Trap”

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at once a source of “wild abandon” and “an act of self-annihilation” (Kōno 1997, 330), and that she cultivates despite the bruises it leaves on her body—is accompanied by a series of fantasies in which young boys play starring roles. Recovering in the bathhouse from one of her masochistic escapades, she longs for a little boy to amuse her and satisfy her “strange attachment ... one that she preferred to keep Sasaki in the dark about.” She imagines getting the boy to come to her, enticing him with one of her “special winks” to which “the child never failed to respond,” and then watching him play with his toys. When his mother called for him, he would refuse to respond, choosing instead to stay with Akiko until the moment when, “one arm gripped by his mother, the other clasping the boat to his chest, the little boy would turn to look back for an instant at Akiko,” filling her with pleasure (Kōno 1997, 330). These erotics of innocence take a much darker form earlier in the story, however, as Akiko’s rough sex with Sasaki is accompanied by the fantasy of a father beating his young son on his buttocks, followed by increasingly violent abuse directed by a woman’s voice that culminates with the boy’s disemboweled body being smashed against a wall. Akiko’s reaction to this horrific scenario is one of complete sexual fulfillment, her “pulse beating faster and faster and her skin all moist” before she finally “reach[ed] ecstasy, losing all self-control” (Kōno 1997, 325). Scholars such as Emerald King (2009) and Gretchen Jones (2000) have read this kind of violence in the context of Kōno’s broader fascination with masochism, seeing it as part of the narrator’s desire to assert ownership over her own sexuality. To be sure, the children who populate these stories can be seen as stand-ins for the submissive role that the female protagonists play in Kōno’s work; as we have seen, Akiko enjoys enticing young boys to flout maternal authority, placing them in compromising and vulnerable situations, and watching them struggle physically to meet her demands. It is striking, however, that Kōno describes those struggles with language appropriate to insects (“wiggle,” “squirm,” etc.), suggesting a point of intersection between the little boys whose company she treasures and the little girls whose bug-like qualities repel her in equal measure. Akiko’s self-centered treatment of children either as reflections of her own damaged ego or objects of her own perverse id is, finally, of a piece with her relationship to Sasaki, a man younger than she is who hopes one day to have children of his own. Both are happy to use the other, engaging in non-traditional, non-procreative sex that fulfills a need without creating an obligation. “For him,” observes the author, “she was a stopgap companion. For her, he filled a superficial role as her partner” (Kōno 1997, 322). In the end, then, Akiko’s freedom and autonomy are only possible because of her inability to have children—an extraordinary extenuating circumstance that liberates her from the ordinary expectations placed by society upon women, expectations that she flouts not only in her adult relationships but in her attitudes towards children, whom she at once fears, loathes, and seeks to control.

Takahashi Takako While children play a subordinate role in much of Kōno’s work, they occupy a central place in the oeuvre of her contemporary, Takahashi Takako, who like Kōno was born in Kansai. One of the first women admitted as a degree student at Kyōto University, she earned her BA in French, married immediately after her graduation, and spent a number of years working to support her husband Kazumi’s literary and academic career while also pursuing a

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master’s degree. Although Takahashi began writing in the late 1950s, she struggled to gain recognition from publishers or critics, who dismissed her as the dilettante wife of a far more distinguished author (Bullock 2010, 52). It was only in 1971, when her husband died after a two-year struggle with colon cancer, that Takahashi was able to emerge from his shadow and establish her own literary reputation. Devoting herself both to her writing and to an intense form of lay Catholic spirituality in the decades that followed, she remained unmarried until her own death in 2013. Takahashi’s protagonists focus on the children around them to the point of obsession, unable to let their seemingly normal activities pass by unnoticed. Indeed, the main characters in Takahashi’s debut story collection, 1971’s Kanata no mizu oto (The Far-off Sound of Water), all are women intimately connected to children—mothers, mothers-to-be, or the victims of a recent miscarriage—whose often-overweening focus upon those children renders them alienated and isolated from other people, including their own families. Yet despite this intimacy, Takahashi’s depictions of children reveal them to be monstrous, destructive, or beyond the protagonist’s control. In the collection’s title story, for example, a mother fantasizes about murdering her young daughter, whom she resents as a “constant and odious reminder of her own female biology, sociology and certain unattractive personality traits” (Mori 2004, xvii). In “Sōjikei” (Congruent Figures*), the protagonist’s daughter is feared and resented as a rival, usurping her place in the house and the family and leeching her very beauty and sexuality away from her, while in “Kodomo-sama” (Honorable Child; translated as Holy Terror*) the mother is quite literally haunted by her daughter, whom she suspects of being a malevolent spirit bent on destroying her unborn baby. There is always a sense, moreover, that the women in Takahashi’s stories are bound to their children largely by duty, obligation, or social pressure, and that being a mother is a fate rather than a choice. As the protagonist in “Congruent Figures” observes, “where can you find maternal love? It is an illusion manufactured by men” (Takahashi 1991, 191). Throughout, Takahashi’s protagonists see children—and the families into which they are born—as inimical to their own autonomy. This theme is explored to its fullest in another story from Kanata no mizu oto, “Byōbo” (A Boundless Void*), where families and even their dwellings are presented as constricting, confining, and claustrophobic impediments to the female protagonist’s development and very existence. When the story opens, a young woman named Kiyoko has just had a miscarriage and is resting in the home that she shares with her husband and his family. The presence of the in-laws, and the size and elegance of their hilltop home, make it clear that Kiyoko is married to the oldest son of a wealthy family, and thus is obligated to provide the family with an heir who can carry on the family name and, we can assume, the family business. While the imperative to have a child clearly is recognized by her husband, who repeats the phrase “what a shame” like a mantra after she returns home from the hospital, it is driven home by the mother-in-law, who coldly informs her that “you are an outsider here” before adding, “you lost your baby,” a bit of parataxis that leaves unclear whether Kiyoko’s precarious place within the household was caused by her miscarriage or rather was a contributor to it (Takahashi 2010, 457). As we quickly come to understand, Kiyoko is far less concerned about the loss of her child. This is suggested at the very beginning of the story, as Kiyoko recalls an unsettling vision that she had while recovering in the hospital. Still groggy from the effects of anesthesia, she imagined that she was on the banks of a murky river, illuminated by shafts of sun. Bobbing in the water was a fetus, “nothing more than a formless lump of flesh, its eyes two deep Chapter 13: “The Mommy Trap”

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creases” (Takahashi 2010, 456). The creature seemed to lift its head and look at her reprovingly, before informing her that they were not related. While the memory of this uncanny encounter remains with Kiyoko after she is discharged from the hospital and returns home, it leaves her feeling neither haunted nor despondent, but rather oddly relieved. Indeed, as Kiyoko reflects upon her experience, she begins to understand it as a harbinger of a very different future than the one she had imagined, or that her husband’s family envisions for her. To her mother-in-law, the failed pregnancy represents a regrettable but temporary detour on the journey towards life as a traditional wife and mother, a journey that she urges her, often quite brusquely, to resume. Seen from her perspective, Kiyoko muses, a miscarriage “really wasn’t a shame. Her supply of eggs was inexhaustible, because a woman’s womb is like the earth.” Indeed, if only she were like her mother-in-law, “she would have so, so many eggs” (Takahashi 2010, 456, 457). This fate, though, is one that Kiyoko now knows that she cannot and will not embrace. She is, as the older woman made clear, an outsider, a mere guest in a place meant for others. Three of the house’s ten rooms “remain reserved for her sister-in-law and her two brothersin-law,” despite the fact that all of her husband’s siblings grew up, married, and moved away years before, and she cannot escape the sense that her husband and his mother are joined together by an intimacy that she will never share: Her mother-in-law winked at Kiyoko’s husband, a wink that conveyed a smug, cozy sense of blood-community—the kind of connectedness that bound together a group of people holding hands with one another, each touching a woman’s womb swelling outward on every side, or a potato plant, freshly pulled from the earth, the tubers dangling from its stem. (Takahashi 2010, 457) In this metaphorical family, with its dangling and organically-connected protuberances, there is no place for Kiyoko simply as a wife, much less simply as a person. This realization, like the one she experienced after her miscarriage, fills her with relief, and emboldens her to leave the house in which her husband’s family is so deeply rooted. “I’m free,” she exclaims: free not just in an immediate physical sense, but also from the existential demands and entanglements of reproduction. As I have argued elsewhere, Kiyoko’s effort to liberate herself from familial and social expectations is itself framed as a journey, one that allows her to “escape from familiar locales, ones shaped by and associated with old relationships” in favor of new spaces unmarked by “social networks and the obligations they engender” (Seaman 2012, 55). In the course of this journey, Kiyoko moves from the streets around her husband’s family home to a nearby forested lot, in the process of being cleared for a construction project; from her neighborhood into the nearby city center; and from the city back to the now-occupied lot. This journey, however, is one not only of physical separation from the site of family obligation, but by emotional and ultimately visceral separation from the implications and outcomes of motherhood. This becomes clear immediately after Kiyoko leaves her house, as she passes by a far more humble dwelling where chickens are kept in the front yard. Suddenly, an elementary school-aged boy darts by, steals an egg from the chicken coop, drops it on the ground, and smashes it with his shoe. As the chickens cackle with alarm, the owners emerge from the house and glare accusingly at Kiyoko.

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At first, Takahashi writes, “Kiyoko’s heart was in her mouth,” and she was “seized with ineffable fear of the boy.” Now, however, [t]he ill-defined fear that had gripped her heart as she watched the boy now focused itself on the old women, and now Kiyoko found herself bound in some strange fashion to the young boy, who was blithely strolling on his way. (Takahashi 2010, 458) After catching up with him at a nearby playground, however, she is unable to get the boy to stop his boisterous playmaking and explain what he had done. Notably, rather than simply dismiss this episode as a case of “boys being boys,” Takahashi instead imbues it with portentous import. The destruction of the egg, the boy’s callousness about doing so, and Kiyoko’s inability to communicate with him all combine to create a dark, cautionary fable about children and the threat they pose, leaving Kiyoko convinced that, “somehow, she must have meant to kill her fetus” (Takahashi 2010, 459). As the rest of the day unfolds, Kiyoko’s initial, latent sense of responsibility for her own child’s demise gradually grows and transforms into a more pronounced antipathy for mothers and children in general—an antipathy that erupts into actual violence during Kiyoko’s foray into the city, while she is riding on the commuter train and quietly working on her embroidery: She suddenly saw a baby’s plump white leg in front of her. The woman in front of her was gabbing with another woman who carried the baby. The arm holding the baby drooped down, allowing one of the baby’s legs to dangle freely. Its soft skin showed between a red knit pant leg and a pink sock. (Takahashi 2010, 474) As the train pulls into the station, and Kiyoko is heading for the door, she suddenly reaches out and plunges her embroidery needle into the baby’s calf, hurrying away down the platform as the child cries out in pain. While Kiyoko’s behavior is undoubtedly cruel and seemingly gratuitous, Takahashi’s account of the episode also highlights her perception of children as profoundly Other, both by focusing upon the baby’s leg as a discrete object of scrutiny and experimentation and by describing it in biological, clinical, and even culinary terms: Under its skin the veins faintly glowed. No pores or downy hairs were visible, making the fat, pale flesh appear as if it belonged to some animal … Kiyoko continued to stare at the leg as it dangled in front of her. It got narrower around the knee, and its thigh was swollen as though the cells were filled with a great deal of water—no, sweet-and-sour juice. (Takahashi 2010, 474) Kiyoko’s objectification of the child, which serves to distance her from the moral or emotional implications of her violent treatment of it, corresponds to her broader rejection of motherhood and family. It is striking that the other main character in the story (an unnamed young woman whose path intersects with Kiyoko’s on a number of occasions) captivates her not only because of her unapproachability, her air of loneliness, and her apparent lack of interest in social niceties, but because she has lost a breast to cancer, making her “a cart with one wheel”—an experience that Kiyoko assumes has cut her off (figuratively and literally) Chapter 13: “The Mommy Trap”

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from the stifling world of maternity and parenthood (Takahashi 2010, 477; cf. Seaman 2012, 58). As she subsequently discovers, however, the woman is not only married to a bland civil servant, and not only expecting a child, but looking forward to having even more children in the future. The new family and many more like it, moreover, will inhabit a new apartment complex in Kiyoko’s own neighborhood, a “soft warm place for families” filled with the kind of “cozy, sweaty dens” that she wants so much to escape (Takahashi 2010, 478, 480). With this unexpected encounter, Kiyoko’s earlier antipathy towards children is redirected in even more intense form towards mothers, exemplified by her erstwhile soulmate: Kiyoko’s mind was filled with thoughts of betrayal. Of all the strangers in the world, this woman was trying to join the club. This woman, the one whom Kiyoko intended to choose. She, of all people—she had decided to be one of the breeders. (Takahashi 2010, 479) To make matters even worse, Kiyoko’s mother-in-law takes an immediate shine to the new neighbors, enthusing that “it’s fine to start a family at any age,” oversharing about Kiyoko’s miscarriage, and blithely remarking that she’ll be pregnant again soon since “a woman’s stomach is like the earth” (Takahashi 2010, 480). Such comments, combined with the husband’s cheerful assertion that “after a miscarriage, it’s easy to get pregnant again,” only exacerbate Kiyoko’s simmering feelings of hostility. As she stands there silently, “trapped in the middle of four people’s conversations,” the sight of her husband’s toolbox gives way to a sinister, gory fantasy: Inside, Kiyoko could see a saw, a rasp, a plane, a metal hammer, a hatchet, nails, an awl. Ah, that’s it ... the drill. The drill would be perfect. Kiyoko put out her hand ... she reached out to the box, five or six meters away. Secretly she grabbed the drill. The woman’s yellow sack dress hung in front of Kiyoko’s eyes. Her belly curved gently. Kiyoko pointed the drill’s tip at the woman’s stomach. With her left hand, she held the grip; with her right hand, she turned the handle, harder and harder. The spiral bit pierced the woman’s belly, and sliced into the uterus ... Kiyoko focused her efforts. The drill bit turned. Her fingers grew tired, but she had to keep drilling. The woman’s uterus, and the fetus inside it, were gouged out by the screw-shaped tool. (Takahashi 2010, 480–81) While this final act of mayhem takes place completely within Kiyoko’s head, its aim clearly is what could be described as “maternicide.” Since “breeding is destruction,” she declares, “I am destroying breeding,” not only through an act of graphic imagination but through a committed rejection of childbearing as the defining aspect of her identity. While Takahashi leaves us unsure of what Kiyoko’s future holds in store for her, moreover, the final lines of the story offer a vision of solitary emancipation, defined against and through the tangled web of kith and, above all, kin. “Today,” Takahashi writes, Kiyoko will go outside again. She will escape the den that is her house, escape from the sight of the apartments with their many, oh so many dens, and walk the city streets, alone ... She will extend her hand into the openness, the somehow boundless void. (Takahashi 2010, 481.) 202

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Murata Sayaka In the almost fifty years since Kōno and Takahashi’s stories appeared, Japanese society changed for women in a number of different ways. The age of first marriage rose and the total fertility rate plummeted, as more women delayed marriage upon entering the workforce or opted not to get married at all. Like the women writers of an earlier generation, those in the 21st century have addressed these changes in their work—most notably, Murata Sayaka (1979–), who has published a steady stream of short stories and novels since her literary debut in 2000. Murata, along with a number of other young artists such as Kawakami Mieko, Matsuda Aoko, and Oyamada Hiroko, has drawn the attention of a new generation of young translators in England and the U.S., and a corresponding fan base among English-language readers. These writers have actively pushed against the masculinist bias of established writers such as Murakami Haruki (see e.g., McNeill 2020), casting a jaundiced eye on the lives of women in 21st-century Japan and chronicling their lives in stories and novels that blend stark realism with elements drawn from fantasy and the supernatural. In particular, Murata has produced the most provocative and innovative exploration of the issues of marriage, sex, and childbearing since Uchida Shungiku’s manga series Watashitachi wa hanshoku shite iru (We are breeding). Nearly all of Murata’s work deals with awkward or uncomfortable relationships between men and women, a discomfort that is especially acute where sexual relations are involved. Her depictions of sex are tinged with feelings of disgust, a disgust often shared by both parties, and her solutions to problems stemming from intimacy, marriage, or childbearing are often satirical and fantastical in nature. In her science fiction novel Shōmetsu sekai (2015, Dwindling World), for example, Murata imagines a world in which sexual intercourse has become obsolete, chronicling the lonely story of the last woman to be conceived naturally. These themes receive perhaps their most pointed and intriguing treatment in the short story “Seiketsu na kekkon” (A Clean Marriage*), included in Murata’s 2014 collection Satsujin shussan (Birth Murder). In “A Clean Marriage,” the description of the union of the protagonist (Mizuki) and her husband (Nobuhiro) reads like something from a not-so-distant future version of a Japanese how-to manual for relationships. Mizuki, we learn, found her husband on a matchmaking website; he was searching for a partner who wanted a “clean marriage”—that is, “an amicable daily routine with someone I get along well with, like brother and sister, without being a slave to sex” (Murata 2014, 10). Intrigued by his profile, Mizuki arranges to meet Nobuhiro, and after considering his idea of marriage-qua-partnership, unburdened by sex, she agrees to give it a try. Three years pass, to the satisfaction of both partners; not only do they share all of the housework, but they also both contribute equally to the household finances, without the complication of joint possessions or assets. Mizuki describes their relationship as akin to “living with an exceedingly clean, smart owl ... a tidy animal around the house” (Murata 2014, 9). Unlike her friend, who married a man for love and then developed “a visceral aversion,” to him and his habits, she is pleased by Nobuhiro’s “orderly table manners” and by the fact that the bathroom never betrays “evidence of his bodily fluids and excretions.” In turn, Nobuhiro likens Mizuki to a rabbit or a squirrel; as he tells her approvingly, “[you’re] quiet, sensitive to noise, and you never jump on me or lose your temper.” (Murata 2014, 9).

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Both agree that their marriage is a success due to its complete lack of conflict: each is free to do as he or she wishes, gliding past one another seamlessly with no muss or fuss. Into this frictionless paradise, however, enters a by-now-familiar source of disruption: children, or rather the question of how to create them. When they first met, Nobuhiro had told Mizuki that he wanted to have children; at the same time, “he felt uncomfortable with the idea of the family as an extension of romantic attachment.” Nobuhiro believes, instead, that families should be the outcome of a “simple partnership” between father and mother, rather than extensions or expressions of any “feelings of love between a man and a woman” (Murata 2014, 10). Notably, Mizuki understands and in fact seems to share this transactional concept of family formation—one that not only harkens back to earlier, Confucian-influenced concepts of marriage and parenting in Japan but also represents an explicit rejection of the reforming ideals of early feminists like Hiratsuka Raichō, who saw childbearing as the natural and necessary product of marital love. Indeed, unlike Kōno and Takahashi’s female protagonists, Murata’s is not categorically opposed to the prospect of having and raising children. What stands in the way, instead, is her and her husband’s conflicted attitude towards sex. As we have seen, the model of “clean marriage” to which both partners committed themselves is one predicated upon the avoidance of carnal entanglements. For Nobuhiro, “sex is an act that you indulge in alone in your own room, or deal with outside,” while Mizuki announces that “I want to be able to turn my sexual desires on and off when I please, and to keep the switch off at home” (Murata 2014, 12). Since neither adoption nor surrogacy is an option for the couple—the latter because it is illegal in Japan, the former because Nobuhiro and Mizuki both desire a genetic rather than simply legal heir—this insistence on a sexless relationship poses a fundamental challenge to their procreative goals. Searching for a resolution to this dilemma, the couple discover the website of a business calling itself the “Clean Breeder Clinic” which caters to “sexual minorities”—a broad category of individuals ranging from homosexuals to infertile couples unable to afford artificial insemination. Intrigued, they schedule a consultation with the clinic’s medical staff, where Nobuhiro presses the doctor for a fuller description of the treatment they’re being encouraged to undergo. As she explains, Not everyone is sexually aroused by the person with whom the usual conditions are right for them to start a family. For starters, the traditional way of thinking that a couple would have to have sex to conceive a child is outdated. It is not at all in tune with the times. Sex for pleasure and sex for pregnancy are two completely different concerns, and it’s absurd to lump them together. It’s out of sync with how people live their lives these days … Nowadays, your partner is not necessarily a sex object—this is a wonderful advancement. It means that you can choose to have a family by rational means, thinking with your head, not with your loins. Couples who come to us can avail themselves of our experts and leave their superior genes to posterity by means of the Clean Breeder, our pure facilitator of reproduction… (Murata 2014, 14) The distinction made here between intercourse as a source of pleasure and as a means of reproduction is, of course, one with a long pedigree in Japan. What is striking, however, is the casting of these otherwise Edo-era sexual mores and practices as cutting edge and modern, while the more recent notion that childbearing should be predicated upon romantic, emotional relationships (marital or otherwise) is dismissed as an outdated relic of 204

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“traditional way(s) of thinking.” This re-setting is made possible by transposing older procreative exigencies—the need to continue a family lineage, to assure the transfer of property and privileges, or to provide sources of aid in one’s old age—into a rather different key, one whose dominant notes are individual convenience, practical efficiency, and what can only be described as “quality control,” i.e., selective cultivation of the healthiest and “best” zygotic outcomes from Clean Breeding. Although he is intrigued by the doctor’s sales pitch, Nobuhiro initially balks at the procedure’s high price tag. As they talk over their options at a nearby coffee shop, Mizuki asks whether they might simply resort to the old-fashioned method of creating a child, a suggestion that despite its financial advantages strikes both of them as utterly distasteful. Recognizing that their “shared revulsion” leaves them little choice, they agree to go ahead with the procedure. As she gazes out the window, watching the young people passing by, Mizuki reflects on the lack of rhyme or reason to how they came into the world: how many of them … were the result of sperm ejaculated during sex between people who loved each other? Had they been conceived spontaneously, without any thought of ovulation days? Or by artificial insemination? Or even rape? Whatever the circumstances of their conception, the sperm had reached the egg, and the fertilized egg swelled into a human form. (Murata 2014, 16) A few days later, Mizuki and her husband arrive at the clinic, where they are taken to separate rooms and asked to change into matching long-sleeved gowns. They then are reunited and seated next to one another for the procedure. While Mizuki lies back in her chair, her legs raised and separated in a fashion reminiscent of her regular gynecological exams, Nobuhiro nervously watches as the nurses lift his gown before beginning to vigorously massage his genitals. Despite his evident embarrassment, however, he soon becomes fully erect. The nurses then turn their attention to Mizuki; now that “the life force has entered your husband’s body,” they tell her, “we shall prepare to connect the life flow with the egg” (Murata 2014, 20). As we discover, this connection is effected through a rather prosaic, physically-distanced mechanical substitute for intercourse: a tube attached to the man’s penis on one end and inserted into the woman’s vagina on the other. As the device is turned on, sending electromagnetic waves coursing into Nobuhiro’s groin, he begins to sweat and moan in a striking inversion of traditional childbirth, with Mizuki taking the role traditionally occupied by the father: “Bewildered, I leaned forward and gripped the hand my husband held out feebly. ‘One last little push, Mr. Takahashi,’ cried the nurse, pumping his penis with the machine. ‘You’re almost there, love!’ I said, adding my voice to the chorus, at which point he raised his left hand shakily” as the sperm flowed through the tube and entered her body. After quickly checking on her, the nurses turn their full attention back to Nobuhiro, “congratulating [him] and wiping the sweat from his forehead. It really was just as if he had given birth, and I had accepted his progeny” (Murata 2014, 21). Despite the clinic’s focus upon Nobuhiro and emphasis upon his role in the childbearing act, however, he emerges from the experience shaken and resentful, upset at having been charged ¥9,500 for such an intrusive and upsetting process. After trying to placate him, saying that they should be happy to have found a method of reproduction that preserved their sex-free relationship, Mizuki hurries to the bathroom and discovers her husband’s sperm Chapter 13: “The Mommy Trap”

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has leaked out onto her sanitary napkin, in ironic mimicry of her monthly periods. This unsettling experience is amplified later that day, as they muse about the possible sex of their baby while watching children playing in the park. When a little girl calls for her mother from the sandbox and runs towards her, Nobuhiro suddenly breaks out into a cold sweat, a panicked expression on his face, and throws up in what Mizuki cannot help but compare to morning sickness. When the girl cries out “mommy” again, and he is racked by another wave of nausea, Mizuki “reached out a hand to comfort him. At that very moment,” she declares, “I felt his semen gush from my vagina” (Murata 2014, 24). At first glance, the attitude towards childbearing in Murata’s story is markedly different than that expressed by either Kōno or Takahashi. While both of the latter’s protagonists reject pregnancy and motherhood, seeing them as impediments or even antithetical to their own autonomy and self-fulfillment, Mizuki is not simply open to the possibility, but an engaged party in its realization. This openness to motherhood, however, is based upon what turns out to be a mistaken premise—namely, that the creation and maintenance of a family can operate on the same terms as the “clean marriage” which she has agreed to share with Nobuhiro. The success of that relationship, however, is defined entirely in terms of absolute “equality” and the elimination of “friction” by assiduously balancing household labor, rigorously and evenhandedly dividing financial obligations, and most importantly avoiding any sexual intimacy. In light of this fact, the Clean Breeder Clinic seems tailor-made for Mizuki and Nobuhiro. Not only does it offer a “socially-distanced” analog to sexual intercourse, it also levels the childbearing playing field by imposing a physically and emotionally demanding performance upon the father-to-be, one whose parallels to giving birth are clearly and amusingly highlighted by Murata. Yet as the aftermath to the procedure makes clear, both Nobuhiro and Mizuki quickly realize that sex is not the only, or even greatest, obstacle standing in the way of the equality, lack of friction, and “cleanliness” that defines their marriage. Instead, pregnancy and childbirth will impose an even more significant series of burdens upon the couple, ones that will pull their relationship out of balance. These burdens, moreover, inevitably will weigh literally and symbolically heavier upon Mizuki as the child’s bodily host, nurse, and caregiver. It is this fact, I would suggest, that explains Nobuhiro’s reaction in the playground. Watching the young girl calling for and clinging to her mother offers a premonition of a future in which Mizuki is that mother: a woman sought out by something that cannot be parsed out between the columns of their marital ledger book, something more essentially hers than his, something carried by her, birthed by her, nursed by her, and bound to her. At this moment, then, it becomes clear to Nobuhiro and to Mizuki that parenthood cannot co-exist with the carefully calibrated life they have chosen to follow, leaving them no option other than to viscerally and symbolically expel it together.

Conclusion As we have seen, each of our authors take a fundamentally negative view of childbearing and family life, presented in every case as incompatible with or antithetical to women’s autonomy and agency. What is particularly striking in each of their stories is the unusual and extreme methods employed by their female characters to avoid, escape, or foreclose parental and/or family obligations. In Kōno’s “Toddler Hunting,” chronic illness is treated as a blessing rather

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than a curse, providing an alibi for the protagonist’s rejection of marriage and motherhood in favor of hedonistic self-fulfillment. In “Boundless Void,” it is the premature end of Kiyoko’s pregnancy that impels her to re-examine her life and the identities imposed upon her, and to seek her emancipation through a life described by Takahashi as radical freedom from conventional bonds. In Murata’s “A Clean Marriage,” on the other hand, motherhood proves to be a bridge too far not only for the female protagonist but for her husband as well, neither of whom is willing to risk the shock that a child would send through their comfortably numb partnership. To be sure, the ends to which Kōno’s and Takahashi’s characters must resort in order to exert control over their lives seem extreme, and indeed unnecessary, in the 21st century. As the falling birth rate, the rise in the age of first marriage, and the increasing divorce rate indicate, women today exercise far more control over when, or whether, to have children, or to even marry at all; unlike Akiko, they do not need to capitalize on a health crisis in order to avoid becoming mothers, while the decision to pursue a life free from a husband and in-laws need not be, as it was for Kiyoko, a traumatic or radical act. What stays the same, however, is the desire for connection with others, and for a meaningful and nurturing sense of partnership in which autonomy does not exclude openness—a balancing act that, as Murata’s cautionary tale of “clean marriage” makes clear, remains maddeningly elusive.

Notes 1 Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–1972) had a daughter who died in infancy from malnutrition because she could not afford to feed her formula and her own milk was contaminated by her beriberi. This was detailed in her story “Seiro shite nite” (In the Charity Ward, 1926; translated as At the Charity Clinic, 2021). Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951) adopted a son later in life. 2 The opera Madama Butterfly ends with the titular character committing suicide which restores her honor but allows her son to be taken to America. While this self-sacrifice is understood as helping her son, it also can be read as a violent exit from motherhood.

References Bullock, J. (2010). The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and the Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Huang, D. (2019). Toddler Hunting and Other Stories—Taeko Kono. Full Stop: Reviews, Interviews, Marginalia. https://www.full-stop.net/2019/01/17/reviews/darren-huang/toddler-hunting-and-other-stories​ -taeko-Kōno/. Accessed 2 December 2020. Jones, G. (2000). Subversive Strategies: Masochism, Gender and Power in Kōno Taeko’s “Toddler Hunting.” East Asia 18(4): 79–107. King, E. (2009). “She’s Got Tears in Her Eyes”: The Language of Masochistic Violence and Power in the Word of Kōno Taeko. Crossroad 3(2): 72–79. Kōno, T. (1997). Toddler Hunting. (Lucy North, trans.). In T.W. Goossen (ed.), The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories (pp. 313–33). New York: Oxford University Press. Loftus, R.P. (1996). Female Self-Writing: Takamure Itsue’s Hi no Kuni no Onna no Nikki. Monumenta Nipponica 51(2): 153–70. McNeill, D. (2020). Mieko Kawakami: “Women Are No Longer Content to Shut Up.” The Guardian Online (UK edition), 18 August 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/18/mieko-kawakami​ -interview-breasts-and-eggs-haruki-murakami. Accessed 20 January 2021. Mori, M.T. (2004). Lonely Woman. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Murata, S. (2014). A Clean Marriage. (G. Tapley Takemori, trans.). Granta: A Magazine of New Writing 127: 7–24. (Original work published 2014) Ryang, S. (1998). Love and Colonialism in Takamure Itsue’s Feminism: A Postcolonial Critique. Feminist Review 60: 1–32. Seaman, A.C. (2012). Oases of Discontent: Suburban Space in Takahashi Takako and Abe Kōbō. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 43: 48–62. ———. (2017). Writing Pregnancy in Low Fertility Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Suzuki, M. (2010). Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Takahashi, T. (1991). Congruent Figures. In N.M. Lippit & K.I. Selden (eds. and trans.), Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction (pp. 168–93). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. ———. (2010). A Boundless Void. (A.C. Seaman, trans.). The Massachusetts Review 51(3): 456-81. Tomida, H. (2004). Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism. Leiden: Brill.

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Chapter 14 Women and Queer Kinships: Matsuura Rieko, Fujino Chiya, and Murata Sayaka Anna Specchio Individuals with physical particularities, gay and transgender people, even a woman with no interest in sexual intercourse or love affairs populate fiction by contemporary Japanese women writers. This chapter focuses on the depiction of these queer subjects in the works of Matsuura Rieko, Fujino Chiya, and Murata Sayaka. As the bubble economy collapsed in the 1990s, so did the myths surrounding the nuclear family and the ideals of “masculine” and “feminine,” yet, the ideology underpinning these ideals, as well as the strict gender-binary system, still permeates contemporary society, where minorities are either not represented or are alienated. In the stories by these contemporary writers, the protagonists’ perceived feelings of being an outsider vanish as they create new kinships (friendship, chosen family, or alliances), showing how being in a relationship can define an individual’s subjectivity, and how these writers envision a more inclusive society.

Introduction The term “queer studies” comes from Teresa de Lauretis’s 1991 work, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction,” which gave name to a field of critical studies that investigates the sexualities, identities, and, more broadly, subjectivities of non-binary individuals who, albeit refusing heterosexuality as the benchmark for sexual orientation, do not feel represented by the labels of “lesbian” or “gay.” These studies challenge current notions of sexuality and criticize “identity categories that are presented as stable, unitary, and ‘authentic’” (McLelland 2005, 2). Annamarie Jagor points out, that “institutionally, queer has been associated most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity, and gendercorrective surgery. Demonstrating the impossibility of any ‘natural’ sexuality, it calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (Jagor 1997, 3). In Japan, “queer studies” began to gain traction in the 1990s, with its meaning initially confused with “lesbian” and “gay.” At the same time, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the collapse of the bubble economy and the myths surrounding the nuclear family system,

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gave rise to a “gay boom” (Wallace 2020; Suganuma 2018). These years also witnessed the emergence of several women writers who depicted new models of femininity which deconstructed the myth of the sengyō shufu (full-time housewives) and the idea that women are fundamentally heterosexual (Chalmers 2002). In this chapter, I use “queer” to refer to all those subjects whose identity does not fit in the binary gender system or who, in general, represent a minority compared to the heteronormative majority. Similarly, I define “women” as any individual who identifies themselves as such despite their sex assigned at birth. Through an analysis of three works written by Matsuura Rieko, Fujino Chiya, and Murata Sayaka over the last three decades, I investigate the way queer, or minority, individuals are depicted, within the socio-cultural framework of those years. In particular, I focus on their ability to create connections. Outsiders in society, the protagonists of these works try to create new relationships to feel accepted, relationships that I call “kinships” to underline their unfixed, hybrid, or queer nature, as the term includes friendship, companionship, familiar closeness, and alliances. Matsuura Rieko depicts a queer companionship composed of individuals united by secrets related to their bodies: a travelling group staging sexual performances whose role is nuclear in the main protagonist’s acceptance of her toe-penis. Fujino Chiya traces the lives of apparently ordinary people who share an unsaid feeling of loneliness, and choose each other’s company to create a sort of urban family. Murata Sayaka presents a female protagonist who questions her identity and challenges the gender-binary system by refusing to “become a woman,” and becoming a “konbini-ningen” (convenience-store human) instead. These works provide insight into how queerness, by destabilizing all life experiences that meet social expectations, produces new desirable modes of existence. As a result, these new existences produce a weave of inclusive, equal, or posthuman relationships that help “outsiders” feel like “subjects.”

Matsuura Rieko: Man? I feel like a (queer) woman! Matsuura Rieko (1958–) graduated Aoyama Gakuin University, where she majored in French literature after having fallen in love with the stories of Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet. Echoes of these writers’ works now reverberate in her own literature via frequent allusion to sadomasochism, same-sex eroticism, as well as fetishisms. Her literary debut coincides with the publication of Sōgi no hi (1978, The Day of the Funeral), a story she wrote while in college, which won the Bungakukai Prize for Emerging Writers in the same year of its publication. Since then, she has published four essay collections and eight novels, the latest published in February 2022 and entitled Hikari bunshū (A Collection of Writing on Hikari). Her works, at least those written before Hikari bunshū, have been examined through a myriad of approaches, from Freudian penis envy and castration anxiety to Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs,” via the lessons of Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Dworkin, or Butler. These perspectives have caused critics to find parallels between her ideas and those of post-structuralist feminist criticism and to categorize her fiction as lesbian or homosexual. Matsuura’s work challenges the concept of sexuality as unique and irreducible, but since the publication of Nachuraru ūman (1987, Natural Woman) she has categorically rejected the label of “lesbian

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or homosexual writer” (Quimby 2019; Innami 2011; Komiya 2015; Egusa 2006; Nagaike 2004; Ichimura 2000; Amann 2000). The publication of Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai (1993, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P: A Novel, hereinafter “Big Toe P”) led to major debates between Matsuura Rieko and Japanese feminist critics. Big Toe P, serialized in the journal Bungei from 1991 to 1993 and published as a volume in the fall of that year, won the Women’s Literature Prize (Joryū bungakushō) in 1994.1 Immediately after its publication, the novel became a bestseller. In her review of the novel in Bungei, feminist psychologist Ogura Chikako defined Big Toe P as the story of a “pseudo-castrated man” and criticized Matsuura’s attitude towards feminism as ideologically “self-contradictory” (Ogura 1993, 96–97). Ogura insisted so vociferously on the lesbian matrix of the novel that in an interview with the novelist published in a subsequent issue of the same journal, Matsuura declared her intention to kill the reviewer (“koroshite yarimasu”) and asked Ogura not to read her novels again, clarifying that “[Big Toe P] is not homosexual literature, but is rather intended to cancel that label.” Matsuura insisted that she was in fact anti-feminist and anti-academic (Matsuura 1995, 35). Additionally, Matsuura Rieko denounced “the feminist conflation of the penis with the phallus … [invoking] wide-ranging feminist and psychoanalytic discourses on ‘the phallus,’ from the distinction, or correspondence, between the penis and the phallus to Lacanian theories of ‘being’ vs. ‘having’ the phallus—and numerous feminist analyses and critiques of both” (Quimby 2019, 94). She also criticized feminist scholars’ vision of what they called “heterosexual male-centrism” (iseiai dansei chūshin shugi), and which Matsuura defines as “genital unionism” (seiki ketsugō shugi) (Gōhara 2020, 104). Matsuura’s unconventional Weltanschauung follows the idea of deconstructing the cultural symbols and meanings which cover the genitals, and she proposes for the first time in her essay “Yasashii kyosei no tame ni” (1987, For a Gentle Castration*), that the genitals “have no particular value, they don’t speak for anything, they aren’t a symbol, and they suggest nothing. Perhaps they don’t even show sexual difference” (Matsuura 2006, 205). Then, why did—and still do—the majority of critics, label Matsuura’s Big Toe P a homosexual, or lesbian novel? The label derives mainly from the Kafkian transformation experienced by the main character, Mano Kazumi. The big toe on her right foot transforms into a penis, and that penis subsequently leads to several adventures, including a sapphic romance—apparently, the idea came to Matsuura as she herself dreamed her own big toe turning into a penis (Lies 2010). But the reason for the label is also to be found in the context of the novel’s publication, which coincided with the explosion in Japan of the above-mentioned “gay boom.” In those years there appeared a large number of novels with gay, lesbian, or transgender protagonists, such as Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchin (1987, Kitchen*), Hiruma Hisao’s Yes-Yes-Yes (1989), Nishino Kōji’s Shinjuku ni-chōme de kimi ni attara (1993, If I meet you in Shinjunku ni-chōme), or Nakayama Kaho’s Sagurada famiria: sei kazoku (1998, La sagrada familia). Of these, Nakayama is also the only self-identified lesbian women writer. These years also witnessed “the golden period” for transgender people in Japan, when “trans individuals started appearing on variety television shows” and new terms categorizing minorities flourished, even though “until the mid-1990s, transgender individuals were mostly recognized as entertainers or sexual workers” (Dale 2020, 61). The media coverage of gay, lesbian, and transsexual people, however, focused on their individual “difference” (their sexuality and sexual orientation) rather than on their relationships Chapter 14: Women and Queer Kinships

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within a community. Far from encouraging a mainstreaming of sexual difference, the coverage only heightened the notion of their otherness Indeed, in Big Toe P, Matsuura Rieko anticipated not only future tendencies in her creation of a story “with such a variety of sexual minorities” (Komiya 2016, 93), but also the narrative trope of the “queer family” which emerged with the growing interest in women, gender, and queer studies from the 2000s. As mentioned above, Big Toe P is the story of Kazumi, a university student, who wakes up to find that the big toe on her right foot has mutated into a penis. Her boyfriend Masao, who embodies the stereotypic homophobic straight man as the Chinese characters which compose his name suggest,2 is horrified by the metamorphosis and tries to castrate Kazumi, who despite her own homophobic prejudices and difficulties in relating to other people, leaves him and tries her best to deal with her new body. She soon meets and becomes engaged to Shunji, a blind bisexual pianist who uses sex as a means to befriend others, and they both join the “Flower Show,” a group of queer individuals who travel around Japan performing sexual acts for elitist audiences. Each component of the Flower Show has a physical particularity related to sex: Masami is a MtoF transgender with a vagina without a clitoris and who has “never once had sex with any love in it” (Matsuura 2009, 408). Aiko has eczema which appears every time her body comes in contact with others’ bodily fluids. Yohei’s eyeballs pop out as he reaches orgasm, and Sachie has teeth in her vagina. There is also an unusual couple: Eiko and Tamotsu. Shin, Tamotsu’s Siamese twin is embedded in Tamotsu, with the exception of a penis, which prevents Tamotsu’s from developing. Even though Kazumi is reluctant to perform on stage with the Flower Show, she follows the group on its tour and gradually becomes closer to the other members, especially Eiko, who is part of the team by virtue of being Tamotsu’s girlfriend. After Shunji temporarily leaves the group to follow an older musician, Kazumi experiences her first, and unique, lesbian relation with Eiko. At the outset Kazumi is shy and unable to accept her toe-penis. Once she is surrounded by other queer people, she slowly gains confidence and eventually shows her toe-penis to Eiko and Tamotsu. When Eiko touches and starts masturbating Kazumi’s penis, it has an erection which makes Kazumi feel an excitement she had never felt before, driving her to think about the possibility of a non-heteronormative relationship. Indeed, this episode becomes the prelude to Kazumi and Eiko’s elopement, following which, having overcome her semi-homophobic prejudices, Kazumi feels grateful to her toe-penis, declaring: “It had played such a significant role in my life, led me to places I could never have imagined before, and I didn’t want my honeymoon to end.” (Matsuura 2009, 443) Certainly, without her big toe’s metamorphosis, Kazumi would not have had the opportunity to change her stance on homoerotic relationships. Most critics agree that the apprenticeship continues until Kazumi accepts herself as she is (that is, as a person who identifies as a woman, with both a vagina and a penis) and understands that sex and pleasure are not bound to the union of different-sex-genitals—the “genital-unionism” which Matsuura criticizes. But I suggest that another factor leads to Kazumi’s attitude towards sexuality: her acceptance of and acceptance in the Flower Show with all its queer members. At the beginning of the novel, Kazumi explains she hardly has friends and is not good in human relationships at all. When the toe-penis shows up, she fears her new condition as 212

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queer will make her feel like even more of an outsider than she already is. At this point, it is fundamental to observe that the term “queer” is not used in the novel. Its absence should not surprise us. The word was only introduced in Japan during the 1990s, and at the time its initial meaning was not much different from terms such as “gay” (gei) or “lesbian” (rezubian). This association may have led Matsuura to refuse to use it. Instead, she selects the word “freak,” whose meaning is not only that of “outsider,” but also “monstrous,” “deformed,” or “frightening.” This explains society’s perception of the members of the Flower Show, not merely as outsiders, but as “abnormal.” In accordance with the gay boom of the period, which saw “queer” people as part of the world of entertainment, the majority takes them into consideration only when they perform their sexual show. All members of the Flower Show are excluded by the mainstream due to their non-adherence to gender and sexual constructions. Hence, to borrow Butler’s words, “the strange, the incoherent, that which falls ‘outside’, gives us a way of understanding the taken-for-granted world of sexual categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might well be constructed differently” (Butler 1990, 110). In Big Toe P, Matsuura uses the Flower Show to unsettle normative perceptions of gender, sexuality, and categorizations related to sex and creates a small community where all members share similar feelings and can relate to each other as a family. Consequently, it can be said that Kazumi grows up, and accepts herself because she is surrounded by individuals who share conditions and emotions similar to hers. As Komiya Chiho states, “in this work, as the distinctive sexuality of each character is revealed, it becomes clear that sexuality is not just a question of one’s own state of being, but also affects the way one views relationships with others” (Komiya 2016, 96). At the same time, Yutaka Ayako notices that the “disturbing nature of the gender performance depicted in the novel can be immediately detected in the girls’ culture of the same period” (Yutaka 2017, 422), and she picks up an example from Takeuchi Naoko’s famous 1990s manga Bishōjo senshi sērā mūn (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon*).3 The three Sailor Starlights, who appear in the last series of the manga, are women who disguise themselves as men in everyday life; in the later anime, they are men becoming women when transforming into Sailor fighters. I suggest that, in addition to the “disturbing” gender performativity of the Flower Show, other aspects of Big Toe P also parallel Sailor Moon, and that is the “family” nature found in both works. Starting from the third series of Sailor Moon, we encounter a same-sex couple who, together with another woman fighter, raise a younger fighter. In so doing they create the same kind of queer family described in Big Toe P. Returning to Matsuura’s work, Yutaka points out that the toe-penis is “a gift to make us forget all the conventions we have sadly been forced to learn” (Yutaka 2017, 417), and it functions as a narrative strategy to lead Kazumi in her journey of self-discovery, which, she eventually achieves thanks to her queer family rather than to her sexual experiences themselves. In fact, at the end of the story, the introvert Kazumi decides to take part in the show to save Shin’s penis which Tamotsu is going to evirate in Sachie’s vagina-with-teeth. Her sign of affection for the Flower Show, her queer companions, is the ultimate goal of her apprenticeship.

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Fujino Chiya: A promise of family Fujino Chiya (1962–) is one of the few acknowledged MtoF transgender authors working in Japan today, and presumably the only to win the Akutagawa Prize, in its 122nd edition in 1999, with the middle-length novel Natsu no yakusoku (2000, A Promise of Summer). Before starting her career as writer, Fujino worked as a manga editor. She was fired after a discussion with her boss who learned she cross-dressed (josō) for her commute to work, since she felt discomfort wearing male clothing. Having experienced discrimination herself, she is very astute in her depictions of the sorrow of sexual minorities, and in a more recent work, Henshū domo atsumare! (2017, Let’s Get Together, Editors!), her first autobiographical novel, she draws the main character’s process in becoming MtoF transgender. Despite winning the most prestigious literary prize in Japan, A Promise of Summer did not receive the same kind of attention other works of the same period enjoyed. Only a few critics paid attention to the value of the work; among these, Atogami Shirō was the first to associate the word “queer” with the novel (Atogami 2001). A Promise of Summer was published at the edge of the new millennium, right after the “golden period” of transgender and the “gay boom” of the 1990s, in a moment when “the understanding of trans individuals as entertainers or object of entertainment changed abruptly … [as] the first penis reconstruction was conducted for a transgender man in Japan” (Dale 2020, 61).4 Yet, the kind of images of gay and trans people that dominated the public imagination in the previous decade was commodified and flamboyant. This depiction meant that anyone who did not fit this image, such as those who were non-glamorous, fat, and from the countryside were erased from the narrative. This set of exclusions paradoxically revealed that even in the portrayal of a queer world, there was a heteronormative evaluative standard that translated in homophobic reactions from the majority. Subsequently, gay, lesbian, transgender and other queer people who did not correspond with mainstream representations had difficulties coming out (Ogawa 2017; Dasgupta 2005; Chalmers 2002). Interestingly, the 1990s and 2000s also saw the emergence of a heteronormative literary genre known as “chick-lit.” Directed primarily towards a young female readership, chick-lit began as an Anglo-American phenomenon. The genre “transports elements of the romance into an urban setting” (Ferris and Young 2006, 39) and privileges women protagonists who find support from each other as if they were a family, where men “are sometimes love objects,” and “a gay male best friend instead functions prominently as the protagonist’s confidante.” (Harzewski 2011, 33). Both chick-lit and works by Fujino are centered on an urban family that is chosen rather than “natural.” In A Promise of Summer, Fujiya gives voice to a gay couple, two non-hegemonic and nondominant representatives of women, and a transgender woman, ordinary people in their daily, unrewarding routines who come to know each other by coincidence. The story does not depict the underground world of the LGBTQ+ community in the 2000s Japan; neither does it give an explicit sense of discomfort towards each individual sexuality or identity, rather it focuses on the protagonist’s hesitancy towards living out in the open. Although the author chooses to focus on some funny moments in the lives of her characters, she also provides examples of bullying and the discrimination the protagonists face, showing how society eventually shortfalls on what it promises.

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Maruo and Hikaru are a gay couple. Maruo, a salaryman, is entering his thirties and when his colleagues discover he is gay, he feels pressured to leave his all-male-dormitory and find his own apartment. Although he is overweight, he has a very “masculine” appearance. Whereas he does not try to hide his sexual orientation, as he frequently walks hand-inhand with Hikaru, he shows little interest in a long-term relationship. It is as if he is still questioning the possibility of a heterosexual future, of marrying and becoming “ichinin mae no shakaijin” (“a fully adult social being”).5 On the contrary, Hikaru is a very open-minded, cheerful guy working as a freelance editor who “has read all kinds of literature on sexuality and has a generally negative view of so-called gender roles, yet becomes a completely oldfashioned effeminate in bed” (Fujino 2019, 38). Kikue is a writer who perpetually needs money as her novels are unpopular, and is tormented by a past episode, when, during a summer camp her intellectually disabled brother asked for help, and she refused him. Her friend Nozomi, an office lady inclined to drinking, frequently visits Kikue’s apartment. People mock Nozomi for her lack of common sense, suggesting that she lost her brain when her mother risked an abortion. Maruo and Hikaru, and Kikue and Nozomi share a friend in common, Tamayo, a MtoF transgender hairdresser who has a very special relation with, or devotion to, her female dog named Apollon. To borrow one of the new terms coined during the 1990s to describe nonbinary individuals, Tamayo is an “okama,” that is, male-assigned but feminine presenting: Her strong chin and nape gave the feeling of masculinity, but overall hers was a feminine face. Inside her orange shirt jiggled her not-so-small breasts. (Fujino 2019, 104–5) Tamayo is the one who, during a picnic under the blossoming flowers in spring, makes the others promise they will go camping together as summer arrives. She seems to be the only one who insists on the promise, trying to persuade her friends to maintain it. She is depicted as a positive character, and her presence frequently leads others to smile and have fun, helped by the sketches with the little Apollon. Tamayo’s relationship with Apollon is crucial to understanding the novel’s intentions, as it functions as a metaphor for her loneliness, and, broadly speaking, the loneliness of all queer people in Japan in the 2000s. In a dialogue with Maruo she reveals that Appolon constitutes eighty percent of her world—the rest being food (Fujino 2019, 102–3). But I argue here that, by affirming the importance of Apollon, what Tamayo actually intends is the opposite, namely that Apollon is eighty percent of her world, her horizon, because her life is monotonous and filled with solitude. “I sleep curled up, and I swear Apollon’s right in that space. It’s like the two of us create a perfect shape!” (Fujino 2019, 69) “I mean, you often think about a lot of unpleasant things, right? People you hate, for example. But when Apollon snuggles up next to me, she loves me unconditionally. Does she even like me like that?” (Fujino 2019, 103) What are the unpleasant things to which Tamayo refers? In Japan of the 2000s, transsexual individuals may have no longer been objects of entertainment, however, from the

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information we have about Tamayo’s life, there is no evidence of social interactions within the rest of the community. Tamayo works in her hair salon attached to her house, she takes Apollon for walks, and tries to share moments with her few friends, but this does not mean society as a whole accepts her. The unpleasant things shall thus be understood as the episodes of marginalization and discrimination she faces, and as a matter of fact, she emphasizes that Apollon loves her for who she is, unconditionally. Also, no data is given about Tamayo’s partners, leaving unanswered the question of whether she has found someone who loves her for who she is. And it is in her loneliness that, arguably, the reason for her insistence in camping together shall be found: Tamayo is desperately trying to keep her friends united, as her chosen family whose members share experiences of solitude and discrimination. In fact, despite the author drawing mainly happy moments as vignettes, indulging in funny jokes on commonplace occurrences regarding non-binary individuals, she also mentions some regrettable episodes of mockery or bullying which the protagonists encounter. An example of a light moment can be found when Hikaru invites Maruo’s neighbor Okano to have a drink at Maruo’s, and Okano asks “Is Hikaru your boyfriend or girlfriend?,” with Maruo promptly answering “My boyfriend!” albeit being immediately contradicted by Hikaru complaining that he’s his girlfriend (Fujino 2019, 79). At the same time, Maruo experiences chauvinism, such as when he is walking together with Hikaru and students passing near them call him “Fat-fag” (“homodebu”, Fujino 2019, 34) or when he finds in the men’s toilet of his company the drawing “Matsui Fag” (Fujino 2019, 58). And, ironically, Tamayo will endure a discriminatory episode, that prevents her from going camping with her friends. One evening, as Maruo and she are walking together, Tamayo is accidentally hit by a pot (nabe), non-intentionally launched by a couple having a discussion. In addition to the humorous contrast of Tamayo being hit by a nabe, which inevitably leads to thoughts about the terminology related to non-binary transsexual individuals, identifying “onabe” the opposite of the “okama,” namely a FtoM transgender, Tamayo is hospitalized in the male wing, in a room with six beds, with another patient calling her a “cutie-trans” (“kama-chan,” Fujino 2019, 116). Moreover, the newspapers reporting the incident, write about a “male hairdresser.” Her hospitalization makes the camping project vanish, but what Tamayo gets is her friends. The promise of camping, which was meant to allude to the assurance that better days would come, is postponed, but Tamayo is still surrounded by her group of friends who visit her and take care of Apollon. In spite of the discrimination that surrounds them, the five protagonists have managed to create a kind of “family,” similar to the model of the “urban families” that appear right around this time in the above-mentioned chick-lit genre. The difference is that whereas in chick-lit works the urban families include at most one or two gay friends of a cisgender female protagonist, in the family presented by Fujino Chiya all the protagonists are, each in their own way, queer.

Murata Sayaka: Making kin with the konbini The works of Murata Sayaka (1979–) are prized for the way she amplifies iwakan, that is, a sense of incongruity. This notion of incongruity is found in a number of the themes that dominate her writing, such as female physicality in relation to identity, sex and sexuality (the former understood as both a sexual act and biological sex, as well as social construct),

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loneliness and marginalization, the inability to adapt, and discomfort with being a woman and the gender roles imposed by society recur (Miyauchi, 2011; Ichikawa, 2011; Kurihara, 2013; Enami, 2013; Yano 2017). The protagonists of her works, all of whom are biologically female, at least up to the time of this writing, are characters who question their own sexuality, and who deviate, even in the case of cisgender women, from gender norms. In this sense, they are all protagonists who show their intolerance of the system of gender binarism and accord more with the concept of gender queer (Iida 2019). In Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Woman*), first published in June 2016 in the magazine Bungakkai and the winner that same year of the 155th Akutagawa Prize, Murata presents a protagonist who, unable to conform to the rules of society, chooses to spend her life as a part-time worker in a convenience store (konbini). If at the time of its publication Japanese critics seem to have paid more attention to the setting of the story, inspired by the personal experience of the author who combined her writing with a part-time job in a convenience store for several years, Convenience Store Woman has subsequently attracted the attention of international critics by virtue of the multiple interpretative approaches to which it lends itself. In particular, Convenience Store Woman, “highlighted to international audiences the intersections of gender and precariousness in Japanese working cultures” (Coates et al 2020, 5). Saitō Minako cites it as an example of new “labor novels” (rōdō shōsetsu) which emerged during the 2010s (Saitō 2018, 226–29), but it is also possible to read it as an emblem of loneliness spread across the world (Nagai 2017), and as a novel that leads to reflection about the concepts of “ordinary” and “anomalous” (Yano 2017), as well as “majority” and “minority” (Hashimoto 2019). As Yano Chiaki (2017, 128) points out, Convenience Store Woman is the first of Murata’s novel set in present-day Japan after several years of works set in future or parallel societies, such as Seimeishiki (2013, Ceremony of Life; translated as Life Ceremony: Stories*), Satsujin shussan (2014, Birth Murder) or Shōmetsu sekai (2015, Dwindling World).6 In these works, female protagonists do not feel uncomfortable with their bodies and identities or feel iwakan—even if they might show some perplexity regarding the social systems they live in—as happens to those who appear in earlier works such as Junyū (2003, Breastfeeding) or Hakobune (2010, The Ark). At the same time, Hashimoto (2019, 57) remarks that within the story there is no occurrence of the term “konbini ningen” (literally “convenience store human”), and people working in the novel, the protagonist included, are referred to as “konbini workers” (kobini tenin); thus, the definition of a “konbini ningen” is up to the readers and to the critics. In this section, I argue that “konibini ningen” should be interpreted as a hybrid or cyborg-like character who refuses the gender binary and the patriarchal system and who liberates itself by refusing to become a “woman” (intended as a culturally constructed adult female human being). This hybridity is the only way Murata can allow her character Furukura Keiko, an “outsider, or queer” as seen via other people’s eyes, to feel “subjecthood” in a society where “human” means “man” (Iida 2019, 51). By creating a new kinship with the konbini, Furukura Keiko thus becomes an example of a post-human and post-anthropocentric subject (Braidotti 2013), and it is in this particular aspect that her queerness lies. Furukura Keiko is thirty-six years old and has been working in the konbini since she was eighteen, from the very first day the Smile Mart opened outside the Hiiromachi Station on May 1, 1998. “The time before I was reborn as a convenience store worker … everyone thought I was a rather strange child” (Murata 2018, 6), Keiko says. When she was in nursery Chapter 14: Women and Queer Kinships

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school, she asked her mother to grill a dead bird, claiming that it would be the most natural thing to do since her father was crazy about yakitori (a kind of chicken shish kabob), while later, in elementary school, she bashed a spade over a classmate’s head in an attempt to stop an ongoing fight. Fed up with not understanding the adult world’s dismay at her behavior and always being judged as abnormal, she finally decides that she would no longer take personal initiative, “and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions” (Murata 2018, 10). This assertion is a clue to how once again Murata projects us in front of an outsider subject who questions the validity of the norms that govern contemporary society. But this is not Keiko’s only diversity. A few pages later, we discover that she is also totally devoid of sexual instincts and has never fallen in love with anyone, nor has she kissed or had sexual intercourse. Her condition creates quite a few problems in her relationships with her friends and other people in society, who are surprised to find that she is eternally single and clinging to her part-time job, that is in a perpetual state of precarity. However, instead of imagining that she may have problems, her friends believe that she just has different tastes, yet another demonstration of Murata Sayaka’s attention to minorities: “You know, I’ve got quite a few gay friends,” Miho intervened, “So I kind of get it. These days you can also be asexual or whatever you like.” “Oh yes, I heard that’s on the increase. Like there are young people who just aren’t interested in it at all.” “I saw a program on TV about it. It’s apparently really hard for them to come out too.” I’d never experienced sex, and I’d never even had any particular awareness of my own sexuality. I was indifferent to the whole thing and had never really given it any thought. And here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn’t. (Murata 2018, 37) In this passage it is relevant to note both how the author has been able to leave room for the possibility of representing non-cisgender subjects, and the way in which, despite the willingness of her friends to accept her gender identity and sexual orientation, she perceives herself to be different from the norm. The concept of asexuality already present in previous works returns here. For an example of an earlier occurrence, in Hakobune Riho comes to define herself as “asexual” (museisha). Unlike Riho, who, until the end of the story seems unable to find a place in the society, Furukura Keiko stumbles upon the possibility of conforming to the norms of Japanese society as she tries to appease her friends and parents when she meets her new male colleague Shiraha. Shiraha is presented as a negative character, convinced that the world has not changed since the Jōmon period (14,500–300 BCE) and that men are still seen as hunters and women as those who take care of the house and kitchen. According to Hashimoto Natsuki, Shiraha, who looks down on his colleagues and who they, in turn, disdain, represents a minority within the minority (Hashimoto 2019, 53), although his way of thinking allows the reader to feel the burden of fulfilling the societal roles ascribed to each gender typical of the majority. Shiraha is also, in his own way, an outsider. He and Keiko agree to stage their cohabitation

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in order to appease their families and convince them, through this relationship, that they too are perfect members of society—in a situation reminiscent, at least in part, of the gisō kekkon (fake marriage) rounds staged by the protagonists of Ekuni Kaori’s Kira kira hikaru (1991, Twinkle, twinkle)7 in which the characters live as husband and wife while secretly maintaining their queer identities. To complete the plan, Shiraha convinces Keiko to quit her part-time job as a clerk at the konbini and seek full-time employment. However, moving away from the konbini and living together with Shiraha, Keiko realizes that she does not want to be a “woman” in the sense society intends, that is, a heterosexual adult female human who is happy with her heteronormative relationship and ready to procreate. Rather, she prefers to be a “neutral” human being, who belongs to the konbini. At this precise moment in the story, her sense of iwakan manifests towards the pressure to be a woman in a society still strongly marked by a gendered division of roles. Her position in the konbini voids this pressure. Here, while she performs her role as a clerk, all she needs to do is to adhere to the written rules of a manual that imposes standard movements and phrases, turning both men and women into genderless work machines. “Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers” (Murata 2018, 51), Keiko declares, and the fact that all part-timers wear the same uniform makes her think of the environment of the konbini as a non-gendered one—even though we know that since she started her career, Keiko has met eight different male store managers and no female ones, while her parttime co-workers were almost always students or older housewives, highlighting the gendered and hierarchal structure of that workplace. In any case, the fact that Keiko feels comfortable only when she is in the artificial and (in her opinion) non-gendered environment of the konbini is the reason she chooses not to pursue a life determined by societal expectations and to instead create a new queer kinship with the konbini. Keiko never thinks of herself as a woman working at a convenience store, but rather, she is a “cog” or an “animal” of the konbini, a clerk whose work is not intertwined with any gender-based role. The hybrid identity she creates via this queer kinship makes her feel like a subject for the first time, she finds the place to stay where she feels she belongs (ibasho). In the context of the ongoing quest to provide an ideal place in contemporary society for minority subjects who “suffer from the difficulty of their lives … unable to find a compromise with reality as well as their surroundings” (Fujita 2013, 283), Murata Sayaka seems to suggest that it can be found in the “neutralization” of gender and sex. Furukura, who has never had sexual impulses, hears the “music” of the konbini, a call of love that leads her to think that she has found a new sexual identity, which could be called “konbini-sexual.” By lending her voice to female representatives of sexual minorities who do not necessarily feel the need to be loved by heterosexual adult men, Murata Sayaka confirms herself as “Matsuura Rieko’s legitimate heir” (Enami 2013, 169),8 from whom Murata Sayaka herself claimed to have received several teachings. In the end, the “konbini ningen” Murata describes is a queer subject, half human and half konbini, with no gender despite being biologically female. And since the konbini itself seems to turn from an aseptic space to a more natural environment, as its mechanical sounds at the beginning of the story—the tinkle of the door, the beeps of the bar code scanner and so on (Murata 2018, 1)—turn into a “voice” (Murata 2018, 161), I argue it is also possible to consider the “konbini ningen” a sort of present-day yamanba, the literary construct who embodied “liberation and freedom from feminine norms, a feminine existence and possibility outside of and surpassing the gender system” (Mizuta 2002, 21) used by modern women writers. In Chapter 14: Women and Queer Kinships

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this construction, the konbini becomes the new mountain—a decentered place where people can live freely. Furukura Keiko chooses to live in, for, and with the konbini, creating a new mimetic ontology, as well as a queer kinship, unbounded to society’s rules and roles.

Conclusion: Queering kinships Patrick Carland summarizes that, within the Japanese context, “the family has been defined as a fundamentally heteronormative and reproductive unit” (Carland 2019, 217), in a model promulgated in the postwar period, which collapsed together with the bubble economy at the beginning of the 1980s, a blast whose echo still reverberates in contemporary society. The apparent death of the nuclear family as an ideal, as well as the myths around “masculinity” and “femininity,” brought the emergences of new non-binary, gay, lesbian, transsexual, and queer subjects who claimed their space to live and be accepted. Yet, without finding it in the majority, most found a place in small groups, or communities, or environments that make them feel comfortable. In other words, they created new kinships to feel supported, without the discomfort of being alienated. The subjects presented in these three novels challenge normative roles, questioning what is considered normal, natural, and accepted. Matsuura Rieko’s backlash against mainstream representations of gender and sexuality is translated into Big Toe P in the use of a toe-penis, which allows the main protagonist Kazumi to experience a feeling of self-acceptance thanks to the extended family she finds within the Flower Show. At the end of the tour, the group eventually separates, each member going their own way. But as Kazumi has learnt, genitals are not decisive in relationships; closeness is. Fujino Chiya depicts the mundane lives of five individuals who seem to be happy with their routine, although a pale sense of loneliness emerges, which embraces them all. Despite recent feminist and LGBTQ+ community calls for inclusivity, the majority in society seems not to accept their diversities, and they find support in each other, mirroring the way a chosen family can prove to be an even stronger relation than a biological one. Murata Sayaka chooses to destabilize gender-binary and societal norms by presenting a queer woman whose identity hardly fits in the society, and who chooses the precarity of her job as a clerk as a metaphor for refusing to become a shakaijin, a married woman within the heteronormative and reproductive family. She eventually feels like a subject as she creates a new kinship with the konbini, paving the way for new queer alliances. All these stories share queer individuals’ desire to find a place, and represent the prelude to a new “queer boom” which is likely to emerge in the next few years, as evidenced by the increasing abundance of gender and queer issues in literature. Some examples can be found in Tawada Yōko’s Kentōshi (2014, The Lantern Messenger; translated as The Emissary* [US] and The Last Children of Tokyo*[UK]), Yamashita Hiroka’s Kurosu (2020, Cross), or Li Kotomi’s Higanbana ga saku shima (2021, The island where the red spider lilies bloom), just to mention a few. More and more women writers are contributing to this new “queer boom,” probably because women, just like queer individuals, represented, and still represent, a minority in Japanese literature and media. The hope is, in the new millennium women and queer subjects will finally find a place in a more inclusive society.

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Notes 1

Prize awarded to women writers from 1962 to 2000, promoted by the publishing house Chūō Kōronsha. Masao is written with the Chinese characters of “straight/right” and “man/husband.” 3 Manga series written and illustrated by Takeuchi Naoko serialized in Japan from 1992 to 1997 by Kōdansha, and released into an anime series by Toei Animation. The success of the story led to a live-action television adaptation and several movie transpositions, as well as to the worldwide translation of the manga and anime. 4 This doesn’t mean that transgenders were fully recognized as such. As Mark McLelland remarks, “it was not until 2004 that, under strict conditions, some transgender individuals were granted the right to change their birth sex on identity documents” (McLelland 2011, 14). 5 See Dale, 2020; and Dasgupta, 2005. 6 See also Specchio (2018; 2020) and Harada and Seaman (in this volume). Seimeishiki was first published in 2013 in the periodical Shinchō and then in 2019 in the collection which brings its title, issued by Kawade Shobō Shinsha. 7 See Iwabuchi Hiroko and Hasegawa Kei (2006), Jendā de yomu ai/sei/kazoku. 8 In particular, Enami emphasizes that in Matsuura Rieko’s Kenshin (A Dog’s Body), the protagonist rejects her “woman” nature and indulges in a sexual deviation which can be called “dogsexual.” See also Fraser’s chapter in this volume. 2

References Amann, K. (2000). Yugamu karada. Gendai josei sakka no henshin tan. Tokyo: Senshū Daigaku Shuppankyoku. Atogami, S. (2001). Kuia—Fujino Chiya Natsu no yakusoku (shōsetsu). Kyokai o koete—Ren’ai no kīwādo shū [Queer—Fujino Chiya A Promise of Summer (Novel). Beyond borders—A Collection of Keywords regarding Romance]. Koku bungaku—kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyō 51(1): 137–39. Carland, P. (2019). Imagining a Home for Us: Representations of Queer Families in Contemporary Japanese Literature. (Masters theses. 761. University of Massachusetts, Amherst). https://doi.org/10.7275/14245729 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/761. Coates, J. (2020). Introduction. In J. Coates, L. Fraser & M. Pendleton (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 1–7). London: Routledge. Chalmers, S. (2002). Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Dale, S.P.F. (2020). Transgenders, non-binary genders, and Intersex in Japan. In J. Coates, L. Fraser & M. Pendleton (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 60–68). London: Routledge. Dasgupta, R. (2015). Salarymen doing straight: Heterosexual Men and the Dynamics of Gender Comformity. In M. McLelland and R. Dasgupta (eds.), Genders, Transgenders, and Sexualities in Japan (pp. 168–72). London: Routledge. De Lauretis, T. (1991). Queer Theory. Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction. Queer Theory. Lesbian and Gay Sexualities—Special Issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3(2): iii–xviii. Egusa, M. (2006). Oyayubi P no shūgyōjidai—Watashi jishin no yōkyū o ikitai [The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P: I want to live it my way]. In Gendai josei sakka tokuhon—Matsuura Rieko (Special Series on Contemporary Women Writers—Matsuura Rieko), edited by Shimizu Yoshinori, Tokyo: Kanae shobō, 5: 76–81. Enami, A. (2013). Mukitekina karada: Murata Sayaka to/no erotishizumu [Inorganic body: Eroticism and/of Murata Sayaka]. Yuriika 45(9): 166–71. Ferris, S. & Young, M. (2006) (eds.). Chick Lit. The new Woman’s Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Fujino, C. (2020). Natsu no yakusoku [A Promise of Summer]. Tokyo: Kōdansha Bunko. (2019) Gōhara, K. (2020). Hiseikiteki senshuariti o yobimodosu tame ni [To call back a non-sexual sensuality]. Gendai shisō—Sōtokushō: Feminizumu no genzai 48(4): 102–13. Hashimoto, N. (2019). Murata Sayaka Konbini ningen ron: “Futsū” to “ijō” no aida de” [On Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman: Between “ordinary” and “anomalous”]. In Tamamo. Ferisu joshi gakuin daigaku kokubungaku kai 53 (March): 46–60. Harzewsky, S. (2011). Chick Lit and Postfeminism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

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Ichikawa, M. (2011). Intabyū. Murata Sayaka: shōsetsu o kaite “kaihō” e mukau [Interview with Murata Sayaka: Writing novels for the “liberation”]. Subaru 33(12): 322–35. Ichimura, T. (2000). Judisu Batorā to Matsuura Rieko. Shisen no kōsa [Judith Butler and Matsuura Rieko: Points of View]. Artes Liberales—Iwate daigaku jinbun shakai kagakubu kiyō 66: 23–37. Iida, Y. (2019). Murata Sayaka to jendā kuia—Konbini ningen, Chikyū seijin, sono ta no sōsaku [Murata Sayaka and gender queer: Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings and other works]. JunCture: Chōikiteki nippon bunka kenkyū 10(48): 63. Innami, F. (2011). The Departing Body: Creation of the Neutral In-between Sensual Bodies. Asian and African Studies, 15(3): 111–30. Iwabuchi, H. & Hasegawa, K. (2006). Jendā de yomu ai/sei/kazoku [Love, sex and family read through gender]. Tokyo: Tōkyōdō Shuppan. Jagor, A. (1997). Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Komiya, C. (2016). Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai ron: sono tayōna sekushuaritei o yomitoku [On the Apprenticeship of Big Toe P: Reading the different sexualities]. Nihon bungaku 112: 91–104. Kurihara, Y. (2016). Murata Sayaka to Murata Sayaka ikō: hatashite “sei” wa henshin sareta ka? [What if sex has changed? Murata Sayaka and beyond]. Yuriika 45(9): 157–65. Lies, E. (2010). Dream of big toe penis inspires author to write bestseller. Reuters https://www.reuters.com​ /article/us-japan-toe-novel-idUSTRE6440ET20100505. Matsuura, R. (1996). Intabyū [Interview]. Tōgingu hezzu. Matsuura Rieko to P sensuna ai no bigaku. Yuragu seisa no monogatari 8: 12–38. ———. (2006). For a Gentle Castration (A.Seaman, trans.). In R.L. Copeland (ed.), Woman Critiqued: Translated essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (pp. 194–205). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. (Original work published 1987). ———. (2009). The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (M. Emmerich, trans.). Tokyo: Kodansha International. (Original work published 1993) McLelland, M. (2011). Japan’s Queer Cultures. Faculty of Arts—Paper (Archive), https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi​ /viewcontent.cgi?article=1277&context=artspapers. ———. (2005). Queer Japan from the Pacific War to Internet Age. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Miyauchi, C. (2011). Tokushū: Murata Sayaka Hakobune intabyū [Special: An interview with Murata Sayaka about Hakobune]. Seishun to dokusho 46/11 (424): 14–19. Mizuta, N. (2002). Introduction. In Mizuta N. & Kitada S. (eds.), Yamanbatachi no monogatari: Josei no genkei to katarinaoshi [Stories of the yamauba: Original moods of women and their retelling]. Tokyo: Gakugei shorin. Murata, S. (2018). Convenience Store Woman. (J.T. Takemori, trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 2016) Nagai, R. (2017). Tokushū: kodoku to bungaku. Murata Sayaka Konbini ningen no kodoku to Masuda Mizuho Shinguru seru no kodoku no kōsatsu [Special: Solitude and literature: A discussion on solitude in Murata Sayaka’s Kombini ningen and Masuda Mizuho’s Single Cell]. Sekai bungaku 125(7): 21–28. Nagaike, K. (2004). Japanese Women Writers Watch a Boy Being Eaten by his Father: Male Homosexual Fantasies, Female Sexuality and Desire. [Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University]. DOI: 10.14288/1.009229. Ogawa, S. (2017). Producing Gayness: The 1990s “Gay Boom” in Japanese Media. [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Kansas]. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/27011. Ogura, C. (1993). Ōtai seijuku no fukushō [The revenge of the neotony]. Bungei 1993(11): 95–98. Quimby, J. (2019). Performative Citation and Allusion in Matsuura Rieko’s Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai. Interrogating Matsuura’s Inheritances. Evidence, Transmission, and Inheritance in Japanese Literature and Media—Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 20: 87–95. Saitō, M. (2018). Nihon no dōjidai shōsetsu [Japanese contemporary novels]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho. Specchio, A. (2018). Eutopizing the Dystopia. Gender Roles, Motherhood and Reproduction in Murata Sayaka’s Satsujin shussan. Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 4(1): 94–108. ———. (2020). No Sex and the Paradise City: A Critical Reading of Murata Sayaka’s Shōmetsu sekai (2015). Kervan. International Journal of African and Asian Studies 24(2): 373–96. Suganuma, K. (2018). Queering Mainstream Media: Matsuko Deluxe as a Modern-Day kuroko. In F. DarlingWolf (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media (pp. 169–79). London: Routledge.

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Yano, C. (2017). Sa no shōmetsu. Murata Sayaka Jyunyū kara Konbini ningen made [Vanishing differences: Murata Sayaka from Breastfeeding to Convenience Store Woman]. Dōshisha joshi daigaku nihongo nihon bungaku 29 (June): 121–37. Yutaka, A. (2017). Henshin. Matsuura Rieko Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai, onna no kotachi no parodei teki karuchā ni tsuite [Metamorphosis: On Matsuura Rieko’s The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, and the parodic culture of young women]. Waseda bungaku. Zōkan. Josei-gō 1026: 415–35. Wallace, J. (2020). Lesbians and Queer Women in Japan. In J. Coates, L. Fraser & M. Pendleton, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 219–28) London: Routledge.

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Part 6 Age is Just a Number

Chapter 15 Beyond Shōjo Fantasy: Women Writers Writing Girlhood—Yoshiya Nobuko, Tanabe Seiko, and Hayashi Mariko Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase This chapter will examine three novels which feature adolescent girls (shōjo): Yoshiya Nobuko’s Yaneura no nishojo (Two Virgins in the Attic), Tanabe Seiko’s Watashi no Osaka hakkei (My Eight Views of Osaka), and Hayashi Mariko’s Budō ga me ni shimiru (Grapes Stinging My Eyes). The young protagonists are deeply influenced by girls’ magazine stories which present an idealized image of female adolescence. They dream about becoming shōjo like the ones depicted in the fantasy stories that captivate them. However, they eventually perceive that their own qualities are not adequately represented in the shōjo world. The protagonists abandon the world of shōjo, which spurs them to seek new aspirations. In these works, we can glimpse the source of the authors’ literary creativity as they filter their girlhood experiences through their imagination. The overarching idea that they present in these works is the power of fantasies beyond those prescribed by others.

Introduction The shōjo, or adolescent girl, represents a transitional moment in a woman’s life course, a moment in between childhood innocence and adult responsibilities. The liminality of this period made it ripe for imagination and manipulation. For magazines targeting shōjo readers, the ambiguity of the age allowed for the creation of richly scripted fantasies largely susceptible to social conditions of the time. The three novels discussed here, written by three popular authors well supported by women readers, will be placed in the context of girls’ magazine culture, which continuously functioned as an apparatus to serve society by constructing girls who would answer the socio-political needs of each era. Regardless of the era in which the stories take place, the girl characters depicted by Yoshiya, Tanabe, and Hayashi are all resilient and search for new identities that are not bound by norms, majority opinions, and authority. Through these works, the authors assert that fantasy is power for

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adolescent girls: fantasy, however, should not be inherited from others, but should be cultivated independently. These three stories are laced with projections of the authors’ girlhood experiences. Examining these works about juveniles, we can trace how the authors arrived at the idealized female characters of their fiction for adults—Yoshiya’s housewives, united by a spirit of sisterhood, Tanabe’s liberated postwar women, and Hayashi’s stylish career women. In these three novels, we can explore the source of the authors’ literary creativity and imagination.

Yoshiya Nobuko Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973) was born in Niigata as the youngest of five siblings. At that time, the Meiji government viewed girls’ education as the key to constructing a modern, strong, and resourceful nation. At the turn of the 20th century, the number of girls’ schools, which upheld the “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) ideology, surged. Despite the general education girls received, the schools’ ultimate goal was to cultivate mothers who would produce children in order to bolster the nation’s prosperity. Schoolgirls were small cogs in the imperial and patriarchal social machine. At home, Yoshiya always felt aggrieved that her parents treated her as if she were unimportant. Girls’ magazines, rapidly proliferating at the time, told a different story. Girls mattered. They offered young Yoshiya a realm where she could chase her dreams, and so she became absorbed in the world of girls’ stories. Many of these stories were sentimental and written with ornate flowery language. Readers were particularly fascinated by stories involving a girl’s attraction to another girl. It is difficult to define the degree of sexuality, if any, suggested by the poetic descriptions in these stories, and perhaps each reader had their own interpretation. Parents and educators regarded “passionate friendship” (Shamoon 2012) as healthy, natural, and undisruptive to girls’ development into women. It was a convention for girls’ magazines to have pages dedicated to readers, where they submitted their letters and works of poetry and prose. Readers imitated the sentimental style of the magazines, and expressed feelings of sadness about growing up, about separation from friends, and about graduating from school. They were intoxicated by the world of sentimental fantasy in which they themselves participated. This reader participation established a girls’ community, in other words, girls’ culture. After entering Tochigi Girls’ High School in 1908, Yoshiya started submitting her prose to magazines such as Shōjokai (Girls’ sphere) and Shōjo sekai (Girls’ world). In 1916, at the age of twenty, she published “Suzuran” (Lily of the Valley) in Shōjo gahō (Girls’ illustrated). Because of the extremely positive reader reaction, she was asked to continue writing similar stories under the title Hana monogatari (Flower Stories). The stories highlighted girls’ romance and friendship in an exaggerated, melancholic tone and usually took place in a school dormitory, which guaranteed characters’ physical distance from harsh social reality. Flower Stories provided young readers with a safe space, where they could focus on themselves and their escapist fantasies. As her initial audience grew, Yoshiya started writing stories for mature audiences as well, and the vast majority of her readers were housewives. In 1920, her Chi no hate made (To the Furthest End of the Land) received the first prize in the Osaka Asahi Newspaper competition, and so she started her career as a writer and a member of the literary community

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(bundan). Women greatly supported her newspaper stories, and sisterhood and women’s emotional connections continued to be the marrow of Yoshiya’s literature. Yoshiya wrote Yaneura no nishojo (1920, Two Virgins in the Attic) when she was twentyfour years old. In this work, Yoshiya drew from her own experiences living in the YWCA dormitory in Tokyo. The story’s central character is an orphan named Takimoto Akiko. After graduating from high school, she is told to go to a Christian school in Tokyo and to study to receive a certificate as a teacher. However, lacking motivation, she fails her exams, quits school, and moves to the YWA (YWCA) dormitory. In this new space she discovers a renewed interest in life. Her heart flutters in excitement over its western architectural features. When she is taken to the tiny room in the attic assigned to her, Akiko becomes ecstatic, and her imagination kicks in: she fantasizes about being a warrior going up the staircase to the top of the building to fight enemies from a foreign kingdom. Akiko likes to daydream and always creates girlish fantasies. Another example of her fantasy is found in a scene in which she pretends to be a renowned pianist and plays a Beethoven sonata: in her imagination, she sees the audience moved to tears by her music. Nevertheless, her illusion is quickly disrupted when she realizes that she is only “a shabby girl who carries an old piano book” (Yoshiya 2003, 130), standing under the dim light of the hallway. Recognizing the demise of her adolescence, she understands that it is time for her to face reality. Akiko feels lonely and finds herself trivial. Akiko has a hard time accepting social reality, which is rife with conventions, obligations, and rules. In the story, Christianity is symbolically presented as the power of authority and a cultural force which subjugates girls like her. When she was at a previous school, for instance, she was bonded by various rules: every Sunday, she had to attend church and to volunteer. Activities other than church services were strictly prohibited on Sundays. Another example is found in an anecdote from her childhood. Akiko used to be afraid of a picture of Jesus placed on the wall of her house. In the picture, Jesus wore a crown of thorns and showed an agonized face. Young Akiko covered Jesus’s face and replaced it with a picture of a western female dancer, innocently concluding that a girl’s cheerful face was more pleasant to see than that of Jesus in pain. Her grandmother and mother, both Christians, furiously scolded her: “How sinful you are! How dare you commit such an outrageous offense. Don’t you understand that a child like you should not touch the picture of Jesus Christ? … The picture you put there is a vulgar western dancer” (Yoshiya 2003, 96). Even so, Akiko could not understand why it was wrong to appreciate beauty. This does not mean that Yoshiya personally had ill feelings toward Christianity, but Christianity is used here to signify the pinnacle of authority that forces its cultural and religious order. Akiko, who cannot comply with regulations and rules, is viewed as strange and peculiar by her teachers and others. Akiko’s encounter with her next-door neighbor at the YWA, Akitsu Tamaki, brightens her life. Tamaki is a beautiful girl with jet black hair and clear eyes. Akiko is quickly captivated by Tamaki’s beauty: “The girl’s face and posture represented a crystal with cold tranquility. … I was stunned and could not take my eyes off her” (Yoshiya 2003, 66). Tamaki is a rebellious girl who refuses to attend church, which is a requirement for all the YWA residents. She has the strength to assert herself and to reject things that she cannot accept, which is different from Akiko who always reproaches herself for failing to meet people’s expectations. Akiko admires Tamaki’s bravery and integrity. They start to become close and eventually become romantically involved with each other. Their romantic feelings are depicted sensuously via the metaphor of raindrops: Chapter 15: Beyond Shōjo Fantasy

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A raindrop falls under the drainpipe of the eaves, saying: …… I am lonely …… Another drop says: …… I am lonely, too …… The two drops soon merge, making themselves into one big drop, as if they embrace each other. (Yoshiya 2003, 191) Fiction writer Takemoto Nobara suggests that the same-sex love depicted here should be examined in the context of the time and Japanese culture and that it should be differentiated from the modern notion of lesbianism. He emphasizes that the romantic relationship between Akiko and Tamaki is an example of girls’ intimate friendship known as the relationship of “S” (“S” stands for sister): he asserts that the basis of the relationship is platonic and spiritual (Takemoto 2003, 321). Literary critic Sarah Frederick warns of the danger of leaning toward “cultural essentialism and the false sense that Japan is or was entirely cut off from the rest of the world” (Frederick 2016). It is important to note that sexuality can never be judged on a clear-cut binary opposition based on the heterosexual/homosexual praxis and that it should be treated with a more flexible understanding. In the story, a group of girls comes to hang out in Akiko and Tamaki’s rooms. They wear black gloves and call themselves the “Black Hand Women’s Society.” The portrayal of one of the members named Kudō Takako recalls Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), the founder of the Seitō women’s activist group, with whom Yoshiya was acquainted. Just like Raichō, Takako supports a struggling young male artist. The Black Hand Women’s Society could be read as the girls’ version of the Seitō feminist group. In the story, the girls stop going to church and, instead, visit movie theaters and entertainment places. They roam around the town, revealing how some men behave badly in society. Society is filtered through the eyes of the girls, and in their eyes, women are belittled and bullied: the girls see a man smoking tobacco without caring about people around him and a man who pushes away women in order to step onto a train before anybody else. The girls’ blunt and straightforward comments on male behavior represent Yoshiya’s sharp social criticism. Nevertheless, the girl characters, except for Takako, do not take any action. Akiko is timid and avoids confronting rude men and Tamaki can do nothing but scornfully look at them. The Black Hand Women’s Society is a part of the girls’ fantasy, through which they feel that they are empowered, but when the girls face reality, they recognize the superficiality and fragility of their world. Eventually, this sisterhood world deteriorates. Takako passes away suddenly due to illness. What devastates Akiko the most is her discovery that Tamaki used to have a lover, now a married woman, and has recently seen her again. Angry and jealous Akiko directs her intense emotion to Tamaki’s doll, a gift sent by her ex-lover: Akiko suddenly threw the doll on the tatami floor. “Stupid! Get out!” She screamed and glared at the doll. The doll flew and rolled over on the tatami and stopped a few feet away. The doll’s bobbed hair became entangled, and the end of its red kimono flipped up.

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“That’s what you get.” Harsh words came from Akiko’s mouth. (Yoshiya 2003, 289) “The two raindrops” now repel each other. The doll symbolically suggests the fictitiousness of the girl’s fantasy to which Akiko has been adhering. Now, she throws it away and confronts reality. Reality unveils the fact that Tamaki is not the girl of Akiko’s dreams but a woman of flesh and blood. When Akiko is evicted from the dormitory, Tamaki chooses to leave with her. The story ends with an empowering statement by Tamaki. She preaches the importance of “selfhood” (jiga), a term which was enthusiastically discussed by the Seitō members at that time. Moved, Akiko experiences a realization: Akiko’s self has been crying and screaming, wanting to have a life with Tamaki— the time has come to acknowledge the fire lit deep inside her heart. … Akiko has always been a girl who possessed overwhelmingly strong and headlong selfhood in her heart. (Yoshiya 2003, 315) Akiko was not a flawed girl but a girl with strong selfhood. Tamaki and Akiko promise to protect their idealism and beliefs and to live with determination in the world outside of the attic. Several interpretations of their departure are possible. Considering the space of the attic, a temporary space, to represent the period of girlhood, their departure can be taken as their development into adulthood. Literary critic Michiko Suzuki interprets the departure as the determination of Akiko and Tamaki, modern women, to live faithfully to their sexuality (Suzuki 2010, 52). Their departure can also be taken as Yoshiya’s career transition from the world of girls’ stories to the mature literary world: the characters’ departure from the attic could appear to be Yoshiya’s abandonment of the world of girls’ fantasy with which she herself was deeply involved via her Flower Stories. Sarah Frederick states that, when she wrote this story, Yoshiya “was beginning to have doubts about the world of shōjo publishing, which increasingly narrowed the possibilities for the meaning of girlhood” (Frederick 2005, 75). Yoshiya, therefore, “transmut[ed] the girls into willful selves rather than good doll-like figures” (Frederick 2005, 76). Reading Yoshiya’s later stories for a mature audience, it is clear that she actually pushed her girls’ fantasy forward, developing it into an idealism catered to married women. Her stories written for adult women always highlight the value of sisterhood. Married characters face predicaments at home, but they are emotionally saved by their female friends. Women’s firm emotional bonds are juxtaposed with flawed marriages. Yoshiya’s criticism of male-centered culture is clearly embedded in her stories. The Black Hand Women’s Society is thus revived as a housewives’ sisterly pact.

Tanabe Seiko Just like young Yoshiya, Tanabe Seiko (1928–2019) grew up immersed in girls’ magazines: she often submitted her own compositions to Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ friend) and dreamed of becoming a fiction writer like Yoshiya Nobuko. Born in Osaka, Tanabe was the oldest of three siblings. Her father owned a photo studio that had dozens of employees. Young Tanabe had

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a comfortable childhood in a modern atmosphere. In the latter half of the 1930s, however, Japan accelerated its political totalitarianism. The social change was unequivocally reflected in girls’ magazines. In 1940, when Tanabe entered girls’ school, her favorite artist, Nakahara Jun’ichi, was removed from Girls’ Friend magazine, and his delicate, doe-eyed shōjo illustrations were replaced by realistic drawings of physically strong girls (Dollase 2019, 70–71). Girls’ magazines reflected the militaristic turn in the nation. Writers were requested to participate in the war effort, their stories delivering patriotic messages. Tanabe transformed into a devoted “girl of the military nation” (gunkoku shōjo). Watashi no Ōsaka hakkei (My Eight Views of Osaka), published as a book in 1965, is Tanabe’s semi-autobiographical novel centering on a girl named Takeda Tokiko. The story traces Tokiko’s everyday life, depicting how she is absorbed in patriotic fantasies even while caught in increasingly difficult wartime conditions. Tokiko’s innocent devotion to the country is depicted with both humor and sarcasm. Just like Akiko in Two Virgins in the Attic, a moment arrives when Tokiko abandons her girlish fantasy: the transformation of the emperor after the war awakens her from her shōjo dreams. At the end of the story, Tokiko determines to search for a new fantasy that is suitable for a mature, liberated postwar woman. Young Tokiko appears as a dreamy, narcissistic schoolgirl. Her goal is to become brave and strong like shōjo characters in the girls’ magazines at the time. She fantasizes about sacrificing her life for the victory of Japan and for the sake of the emperor. For instance, in a scene where she sees her friend’s fiancé, her heart is captured by his handsome face, and she casts herself in a daydream: in a deserted field of somewhere like Mongolia, an injured shōjo spy dressed as a boy walks along the road. Soon, a Japanese military truck stops to rescue her. … “How dare a girl like you behave recklessly. But I take off my helmet and would like to show my respect.” [Answering the officer, Mr. Kaibara, Tokiko says] “This is all for the emperor. All I want to do is to devote my life to my country.” … Suddenly, enemies, … fire their machine guns. … Severely injured, Tokiko pulls out an important document and hands it to Mr. Kaibara. “Please … deliver it to headquarters.” He nods and holds her hands. “Will do. Anything else to say?” “Nothing. Long Live the Empire of Great Japan. Long Live the Emperor.” … Mr. Kaibara salutes Tokiko in tears. (Tanabe 2000, 162–63) Tokiko’s dream is a conglomerate of girls’ fantasy stories and boy’s adventure stories. The author Tanabe, in her autobiographical novel Hoshigarimasen katsu made wa (1977, We Want Nothing till We Win), states that when she was a child, she could not accept the image of a healthy girl presented in girls’ magazines, which directed that girls’ futures were to give birth to children (Tanabe 2009, 145). Tokiko’s dream presented here, therefore, is free from female physicality: she is a heroic shōjo, not a mother to be. The shōjo in her fantasy possesses bravery, physical strength, and adolescent beauty. Playing on the image of a beautiful patriotic shōjo, Tokiko can even enjoy her service at a munition factory, where all the students from her school are mobilized. Tokiko ties on a headband that says kamikaze, and frantically works at a lathe. Her self-absorption in her fantasy is so extreme that she sometimes scares her friends. Tokiko’s patriotism is constituted by performance. Her performative nature is particularly noticeable in an episode in which she submits her poems to Girls’ friend magazine. She 232

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dramatically renders her patriotic fantasy using decorative language. Her work is accepted. When she sees a reviewer’s appraisal, however, she is surprised because the comment unexpectedly states that her poems “show a girls’ sincere heart” (Tanabe 2000, 96). Tokiko is puzzled by the comment as she knew deep down her nationalistic fervor was just a game. She tries to see where the sincerity can be found in her poems. Tokiko, in fact, embraces both military shōjo and sentimental shōjo fantasy. These two phantasms are contiguous dreams into which she can be absorbed. Whether it is patriotic or not, the idea of shōjo is a role which Tokiko can take part in and is the gateway through which she can escape from her thorny war time reality. This episode implies that girls’ magazines bear a performative nature, offering readers a cultural stage where each participant can enjoy playing a chosen role. The superficiality of the shōjo world is further implied in the story. Tokiko sometimes goes to a church. She expects to see a western atmosphere there, but she finds that the pastor is a Korean man who wears shabby clothes. Then, her initial excitement disappears. In a later scene, Tokiko tries to take an elderly woman’s hand and help her across the street. However, the woman, who is Korean and does not understand what she is saying, screams in Korean. Tokiko is shocked and realizes how conceited she was and how ignorant she was about social reality. Through Tokiko’s eyes, the author Tanabe reveals war reality. Tokiko’s simple mindedness and naivete bring to light colonial reality and issues of race and class as well. Tanabe’s most pointed political cynicism is observed in the abrupt change in Tokiko’s view toward the emperor. During the war, Tokiko professed herself to be an ardent admirer of the emperor, but the day when the emperor announces, in his “Jeweled Voice Broadcast,” the surrender of Japan, Tokiko is disillusioned. She understands how fragile and shallow her military shōjo fantasy was. Her family members’ reaction toward the emperor’s broadcasted voice is also interesting to examine, as it contains Tanabe’s sarcasm: “That’s an odd voice.” “Is that really the emperor? It must be fake,” my mother and grandmother said at the same time. “Do you understand what he is saying?” Machiko [Tokiko’s sister] asked Tokiko. “I believe that he is telling us to stop fighting.” Tokiko turned to her father. “Maybe. His voice sounds pitiable.” (Tanabe 2000, 203) The family members candidly react, in Osaka dialect, to the emperor’s speech, which creates a humorous tone. The unintelligibility of the emperor’s language is ridiculed, and the total absence of communication between the emperor and ordinary Japanese people is casually but cynically suggested here. Tokiko’s family and neighbors, who lost their homes in air raids shortly before the end of the war, are all relieved that the war is over and that they can start new lives. On New Year’s Day, Tokiko sees a photo of the emperor, wearing a hat and business suit, smiling at the camera. He no longer looks like the sublime and mythologized emperor. When the emperor later visits Osaka, she watches him from the crowd and suddenly hears voices of spirits who lost their lives for the country: “ Emperor! Emperor! Emperor! Emperor! Don’t

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leave us behind!” (Tanabe 2000, 259). These spirits also lived in their military fantasies just like Tokiko: they, however, died without awakening from their dreams. Tokiko experiences an uneasy feeling toward the transformation of the emperor, who used to be so pivotal to her military shōjo dream. Tokiko becomes vexed by the emperor’s abrupt change and the quick transformation of society and cultural values after the war. She loses her fantasy about the emperor as well as her shōjo dream. As new ideas pervade postwar Japan, Tokiko starts learning about American-oriented notions of democracy, women’s rights, and freedom at school, which, however, do not resonate in her mind. One day, Tokiko sees a stage production of Old Heidelberg (1901), a German romantic play. While watching young Japanese actors and actresses passionately kiss and embrace, Tokiko has an epiphany. During the war, I had no future or a sense of youth. The youth and future that I have forgotten revived and came back. This must be what is meant by youth. I feel somehow excited and am experiencing a feeling that I am fulfilled and revived. This is nothing but the feeling of youth. … There must be something I can do. I am guaranteed to succeed. This feeling made me believe so. (Tanabe 2000, 238) Tokiko’s military shōjo fantasy has vanished, but the story suggests that Tokiko will live in another fantasy which guarantees to release her from traditions, cultural values, and oppressive powers. Tokiko’s growing self-awareness makes her typical of the female characters who appear in Tanabe’s fiction, characters who are always truthful to their own desires and, more importantly, enjoy their own lives. Tanabe calls her stories “dream like stories” (yumemi shōsetsu) (Tanabe 2011, 49), which are centered on charming women in love. For instance, the awardwinning Senchimentaru jānī (Sentimental Journey) written in 1964, portrays a single woman named Yuiko, who works as a scriptwriter for a radio station. The story depicts her turbulent relationship with her boyfriend in a light, humorous tone. Although the relationship does not work out, Yuiko quickly recovers from her broken heart and pursues a new love interest. Tanabe’s romance stories, written in Osaka dialect, always portray single working women. Over thirty and thus beyond the average age for marriage, they are seen by society as “pitiable” (Kan 2006, 151). The characters, however, do not care about societal opinion. Another lively character is an elderly woman named Utako, the heroine in the Uba zakari (Old Woman in Full Bloom) series. After retirement from her family business and becoming a widow, Utako enjoys a comfortable life, taking English conversation classes, traveling overseas, and going to see the Takarazuka revue. When she gets frustrated at people’s treatment of elderly people, she uses a sharp tongue to excoriate society. The postwar Japanese women that Tanabe creates are vigorous regardless of their age and are full of vitality for life. Tanabe is a self-proclaimed fan of Yoshiya Nobuko. When she published My Eight Views of Osaka, she sent a copy of the book to Yoshiya and received a postcard of encouragement in return. Although Tanabe states that she was influenced by Yoshiya, their stories are very distinct. Tanabe does not place particular emphasis on sisterhood, Yoshiya’s hallmark, for example. Tanabe was always interested in creating free spirited, singular women. What connects Yoshiya and Tanabe as writers, however, is that they both present modern heroines

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who neither correspond to male desire nor cater to male cultural imaginations. Although they live in patriarchal realities, they navigate their lives based on their own value standard. Scholars disagree over whether Tanabe’s works should be considered feminist or not, arguing that they do not reject patriarchal structures. Literary critic Luciana Sanga, however, contends that “Tanabe’s literature expands the ‘boundaries’ of Japanese feminism” (Sanga 2021, 53). Tanabe presents feminism more broadly and on a down-to-earth level. Tanabe possesses a “rebellious spirit” (Kan 2006, 151). Her rebelliousness is ascertained when she transfers the deficiency of patriarchal reality into laughter and ridicules it.

Hayashi Mariko After World War II, Japanese school culture changed drastically, most notably through coeducation. Postwar girls’ magazines published articles explaining the importance of the desegregation of genders. Magazines enthusiastically included boy characters in girls’ stories and encouraged their readers to mingle with and exchange opinions with boys. Through girls’ stories, readers learned the new image of a postwar girl—an active, opinionated, and democratic shōjo. Magazine stories about heterosexual romance became common from around 1960 and were categorized as junior fiction (junia shōsetsu). Junior fiction dealt with dating and teenagers’ sexual awakening. Stories were sometimes narrated from the perspective of male characters, but most of the readers were junior high and high school girls. In the stories, teenage characters encounter obstacles (a conservative view toward dating in a rural village, family problems, etc.), but they eventually find ways to establish healthy, cheerful, and positive romantic relationships. Junior fiction taught dating protocol, and was tightly connected to the purity education (junketsu kyōiku) that the government promoted between 1947 and 1972 to prevent teenage sexual delinquency and to direct young people’s sexuality toward marriage and the protection of an orderly society. It is noteworthy that the popularity of junior fiction coincided with the rise of romantic love marriages (ren’ai kekkon), which surpassed arranged marriages (omiai) in the latter half of the 1960s. While stories celebrated the beauty of loving someone, they simultaneously taught the danger of premarital sex and underscored the importance of keeping girls’ physical purity until marriage. The ultimate goal that junior fiction magazines defined for their readers was that of marriage. They taught the idea that love and sex should culminate in marriage. Hayashi Mariko (1954–) was one of many girls who desired to experience romance with boys just like the shōjo characters depicted in junior fiction magazines. She was born in Yamanashi prefecture to a family which owned a bookstore. According to her essays, books were always around her, and she consumed a wide variety of reading material, including literary works, junior fiction magazines, and shōjo manga. After graduating from Nihon University, she had multiple jobs. She eventually landed a copywriter position with an advertising company. Her creative and witty advertising phrases received public attention, and she won the Newcomer’s Prize at the Tokyo Copywriter’s Club competition. Because of her talents, a publisher asked her to write something that “no woman has ever written before” (Hayashi 1990, 230). In response, Hayashi published Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerou (1982, Buy Happiness and Go Home). She was twenty-eight and embarking on a new career. In this collection of essays, she frankly disclosed women’s ambition, desires, and jealousy.

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Many of her literary works are about single women with professional careers. During the bubble economy, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), which went into effect in 1986, opened career opportunities for young women who graduated from universities. Hayashi’s stories rode this wave, portraying fantasies of successful career women living in luxury. But perhaps a story about an insecure young girl can provide some insight into the sources of Hayashi’s creative and literary inspiration—her award-nominated novel Budō ga me ni shimiru (1984, Grapes Stinging My Eyes), the title referencing the protagonist’s painful rural childhood growing up on her parents’ vineyard, which is peppered with episodes from her own girlhood. Like Yoshiya and Tanabe, Hayashi creates a heroine whose shōjo dream world is fractured and reconstructed into something more powerful. Okazaki Noriko, the adolescent protagonist, has a strong desire to date boys and dreams about being like girls who appear in popular magazines such as Shōsetsu junia (Fiction junior) and Jogakusei no tomo (Schoolgirls’ friends). Influenced by Anne Frank, she writes a diary entry every day before going to bed. In her diary, she exhibits her feelings toward the boys she likes. However, Noriko realizes that her self-image as a shōjo and her real self are different. Unlike an ideal shōjo, she is criticized by her mother for being lazy and unmotivated. Her cousin is the direct opposite of Noriko; she is talented, fashionable, slim, and has fair skin. Noriko’s family always compares Noriko with her cousin, praising her beauty and saying that she can find a rich husband in the future. Noriko harbors an inferiority complex, but the world of girls’ stories is a realm into which she escapes from her reality. While she is in the world of imagination, she can pretend to be a pretty shōjo. Noriko chooses to go to a high-ranking coeducational school instead of a girls’ high school, hoping for a fresh new start. However, she soon discovers that there is a pervasive sexism at the school. Emphasis is placed on sports, and the teachers prioritize boys. One of the teachers openly condemns girl students, complaining that they lower the athletic level of the school. The boys evaluate girls based on their looks. Unskilled in swimming, overweight and ridiculed, Noriko finds swimming class particularly hellish. She learns that the reality of coeducation differs dramatically from the cheerful and democratic scenes depicted in junior fiction magazines. At school, she is assigned to join the broadcast committee and is put in charge of a radio program during lunchtime. Noriko becomes absorbed in the role of DJ and gradually starts to recover her self-esteem. Her friends tell her that she has a pretty voice, and she is especially flattered when a smart and athletic boy named Hosaka compliments her. Noriko’s shōjo imagination is re-engaged: she starts to envisage him as the partner of her dreams, believing that he is also in love with her. Her diary comes to be filled with her passionate feelings toward Hosaka. One day she writes a shōjo-like love letter to him, but is rejected. Not only that, she learns that Hosaka has a girlfriend and that he recently impregnated her. Due to the scandal, he is withdrawn from school. Noriko is crushed. Hosaka not only destroyed her shōjo dream but also violated the premise of junior fiction—girls should be kept physically pure until marriage. Although she feels miserable, Noriko continues indulging in fantasy, imagining herself as a heartbroken shōjo: Her heart started to flutter with excitement again because she was like a tragic heroine of a story in Schoolgirls’ Friend magazine. In her imagination, she created a small flower bouquet in sadness. She muttered: “In the fall at the age

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of sixteen, Okazaki Noriko loved a boy for the first time, but ended up heartbroken.” (Hayashi 2002, 135) Inspired by junior fiction and western romance stories, Noriko couches the pain of being a plain girl unwanted by boys in the indulgent, florid drama of her romantic fantasy. However, fantasy also provides Noriko with genuine power and strength, as portrayed in an episode where she is assigned to a new seat next to a boy named Iwanaga Takeo, a star player on the high school rugby team who has already been promised a scholarship to Waseda University. He is spoiled by the teachers’ favorable treatment and by his popularity among girls. When Noriko is seated next to him, he protests: “Do I have to sit next to this homely chick? No way. Hey Ogawa, can you let me draw for a different seat?” (Hayashi 2002, 162). Insulted by what Takeo says, Noriko is enraged. Suddenly, she starts to see herself as Anne, the heroine of Anne of Green Gables. Just like Anne, Noriko firmly asserts herself: “Hey Takeo… You are rude. You and I just became classmates today. I have never done anything bad to you. Why do you say such a thing? Stop talking nonsense.” Takeo was stunned by what Noriko said. Because he was a star at the high school, he had never been criticized by girls nor boys like that. Takeo looked bewildered, which made him look childish. (Hayashi 2002, 162–63) Takeo obediently nods and apologizes to Noriko. But still intoxicated by her fantasy, Noriko pushes it further: “I still cannot forgive you. You said something really horrible.” Noriko remembered a scene like this. That’s right. It was the scene in which Anne and Gilbert fight in Anne of Green Gables. Noriko felt content and came to be absorbed into her fantasy. She said, “I will never forgive you. Never.” (Hayashi 2002, 164) Takeo’s pride is hurt, and he proclaims that he will never speak to Noriko again. Takeo is an embodiment of machismo. As a rugby player, he only needs to display his physical competence and masculine strength. Even though he is a delinquent and an academic washout, he is rewarded and respected because of his macho qualities. In reality, however, he has a complicated family situation: his mother eloped with her lover, and his older sister raised him. Takeo’s outrageous behavior at school is his way of camouflaging his loneliness and emotional weakness. Although Noriko resents the system that rewards him, she also harbors soft feelings for Takeo, as she sees his delicate inner mind. They do not speak to each other, but Noriko does not doubt that Takeo views her as a special girl who understands his true self. She imagines that he will speak to her again at graduation. Noriko’s shōjo dream, however, collapses two days before graduation, when she discovers that Takeo is dating one of her best friends. She sees her friend Yūko and Takeo together on a train. Yūko, a shy and quiet girl, has always supported and defended Noriko. That she would withhold her relationship to Takeo shocks Noriko. When the train stops and Yūko gets off, Noriko glares after her. She puts her face against the train window and says, “Betrayer,” “Liar” and “I hate you so much” (Hayashi 2002, 199). Noriko has experienced a lost love, a fight with a boy, and her best friend’s betrayal at the end of her high school days. The departure of the train symbolically implies her exit from her girlhood and the world of her fantasy. It is Chapter 15: Beyond Shōjo Fantasy

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interesting to see that it is not Takeo who disrupted Noriko’s shōjo world but her close friend Yūko: sisterhood, which has been one of the important values that girls’ stories embodied since Yoshiya’s era, is broken here, which drives Noriko to move out of the shōjo world. Just like the heroines in the stories by Yoshiya and Tanabe, Noriko builds a new dream. Noriko has chosen a path different from the marriage-oriented one laid out in junior fiction magazines. When she was a girl, it was unthinkable for women to stay single and have professional careers. But times changed, and women’s opportunities broadened. The last chapter of the story shows us thirty-something Noriko, a popular figure in the radio industry with an office in a Tokyo skyscraper. In order to pursue further success as a radio personality, she is about to leave her agent and become independent. She has become one of Hayashi’s fantastically successful career women. One day, Noriko meets a sophisticated married woman named Miyako at a party. She looks beautiful in her expensive clothes. But she repeatedly says that she is bored in her married life. She is engaged in multiple relationships with men because only romance enlivens her. Here the author cynically insinuates the future of pretty girls like the ones Noriko encountered in her school days. As they chat, Noriko learns that Miyako used to date Takeo, Noriko’s enemy from high school, who has now established himself as a professional rugby player. He is famous; nevertheless, Miyako did not choose him as her marriage partner, as Takeo was mentally immature. Takeo was devastated after breaking up with Miyako, but he eventually married the daughter of an entrepreneur. Takeo completed his trajectory to success via marriage, whereas Noriko’s success is achieved through work. At Miyako’s suggestion, Noriko reunites with Takeo at a nice restaurant. In a friendly atmosphere, they talk about their school days. Takeo says to Noriko: “You were really annoying… because you always hung out with girls and made fun of me” (Hayashi 2002, 224). It is suggested that Takeo was insecure and harbored an inferiority complex just like Noriko. Noriko senses that Takeo respected her strength and bravery and the way she stood up for herself. Without her knowing, she had combatted the school’s macho culture and proved that she was special, different from ordinary girls. Later, Noriko sees Takeo and Miyako walking shoulder to shoulder. She suddenly remembers the scene at the train station where she saw Takeo and her friend Yūko and the way she became overwhelmed with fury and jealousy. Grown-up Noriko has no similar feelings, rather, she can now simply be happy for Takeo’s success. Noriko has overcome her girlhood, and her shōjo dream is a thing of the past. She is now living as a heroine of a woman’s dream—a trendy career woman in Tokyo. Noriko says to herself: “I am glad for both Takeo and myself ” (Hayashi 2002, 226). Noriko cries because she understands that this is the moment of true closure of her girlhood days. Hayashi Mariko writes many stories that center upon young women living in Tokyo who have professional careers and lead luxurious lives. They are “career women,” a woman’s dream of 1980s Japan during the height of the bubble economy. Women’s fashion magazines presented the image of a career woman as an ideal for which readers should strive. It is, however, important to note that, despite the establishment of the EEOL which created job opportunities for women, there were no laws which protected working mothers. Women, therefore, had to choose between career or marriage. A large number of working women became disillusioned and ended up quitting their jobs. Although the last chapter of Grapes Stinging My Eyes—Noriko’s life as a career woman—is not wholly developed, Noriko belongs to Hayashi’s adult women character type, who 238

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choose career over marriage and navigate a world that is dominated by male logic. In the past, women’s success was believed to be achieved “only through marriage with a son of a wealthy family [tama no koshi]” (Saitō 2002, 190), but Hayashi shows—in exaggerated fashion, perhaps—a new kind of women’s success which is obtained through work in society. These women are beautiful, stylish, and successful, and are constantly in love relationships. They represent diverse fantasies—materialism, career success, romance, etc.—fabricated by features of bubble economy culture. Because Hayashi supports the existing male-oriented social system and corporate culture, her literature is considered questionable from feminist perspectives. Feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko also finds Hayashi’s dismissal and trivialization of women who value marriage problematic, underscoring that, in reality, there are women who cannot rise in social and corporate worlds for many reasons (Hayashi and Ueno 2001, 54). Nevertheless, Ueno acknowledges Hayashi’s influence on women (Hayashi and Ueno 2001, 52). Hayashi Mariko’s literary works and essays appear in women’s fashion magazines. Just like Yoshiya Nobuko, Hayashi’s professional career has been supported by young female readers. Unlike Yoshiya, Hayashi does not depict fantasized sisterhood. Hayashi’s female characters often display negative feelings—rivalry and jealousy—to each other. They compete over love and work, and they even betray other women for their own benefit. But this does not mean that Hayashi is “misogynous” (Hayashi and Ueno 2001, 53), as Ueno contends. Critic Suzuki Naoko, however, states that Hayashi’s “sisterhood is not just about women living harmoniously together. Her sisterhood is found in her making women think about how they should deal with each other” (Suzuki 2010, 57). Hayashi is aware of women’s issues both in the realms of domesticity and society. She probably knows that the worlds of her stories are fantasies. But through her fantasy, she encourages her readers to be truthful to their desires.

Conclusion Hayashi Mariko had a conversation with Tanabe Seiko in Hayashi’s long running Weekly Asahi interview column “Is It Okay to Ask You This?” (Mariko no koko made kiite ii no kana) in 2001. Hayashi: You completed Yoshiya Nobuko’s critical biography, Far Away Dream Yoshiya Nobuko [Yume haruka Yoshiya Nobuko]. I noticed that you usually don’t choose to write about people praised by everybody, but choose the figures that need to receive higher recognition. Tanabe: Yoshiya Nobuko is really a great writer and a charming person. I think that her short story “Crane” [Tsuru] surpasses the level of Hayashi Fumiko’s “Late Chrysanthemum” [Bangiku], but there is no one who points that out. That’s because male critics are bewildered by Yoshiya’s criticism of male culture… Hayashi: The chronology of Japanese literary history is made by men. It completely erases the women writers with which they are not happy. Tanabe: I think that the number of prizes that go to women is way too small. Men dominate the prize committees. Even for the Naoki prize, out of eleven

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selection committee members, only three are women, including you. More women must be included in the selection committees, and also women critics should pay careful attention to this inequality. (Hayashi and Tanabe 2001, 60) Hayashi and Tanabe differ in their portrayal of women and the themes in their literary works. But they both agree on one thing: women’s value standards need to be acknowledged. Although Yoshiya Nobuko’s literature has been increasingly examined thanks to the rise of feminist reading, Hayashi and Tanabe’s works are still understudied. The entertaining nature of their stories and their distance from overt feminist politics might be part of the reason. However, these three writers’ literary works and their professional careers have been supported by female readers. They do not depict women constructed by and catering to existing norms of literary imagination. They reimagine women, who embrace diverse desires and dreams. They persist in their own ideals, believing in their own literary values. The origin of literature by Yoshiya, Tanabe, and Hayashi can be glimpsed in their semiautobiographical stories discussed here. These stories commonly show girls’ trajectories to self-affirmation and empowerment. Their teenage characters are fascinated with girls’ magazines, magazine stories, and shōjo characters. Their shōjo fantasies color their lives and cheer them up. But the girl characters do not follow the exact tracks set out by girls’ magazine stories. They, instead, construct new dreams. The characters are dreamy and narcissistic and are viewed as immature. But they are culturally rebellious. They find ways to convert their immaturity into originality and strength. The overarching idea is the power of fantasies beyond those prescribed by others, which is a salient contribution to women’s literature.

References Dollase, H.T. (2019). Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Frederick, S. (2005). Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Good Girls. In L. Miller & J. Bardsley, (eds.), Bad Girls of Japan, (pp. 65–80). New York: Palgrave McMillan. ———. (2016). Translator’s Introduction. In Yoshiya N., Yellow Rose. Expanded Edition. Amazon Digital Services. Kindle. Hayashi, M. & Tanabe, S. (2001). Mariko no koko made kiite ii no kana [Is it Okay to Ask You This]. Shūkan Asahi 106(29): 56–60. Hayashi, M. & Ueno, C. (2001). Mariko no koko made kiite ii no kana [Is it Okay to Ask You This]. Shūkan Asahi 106(8): 52–56. Hayashi, M. (1990). Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerou [Buy Happiness and Go Home]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. ———. (2002). Budō ga me ni shimiru [Grapes Stinging My Eyes]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Kan, S. (2006). Sensō dokushin josei e no manazashi: “hai misu” mono no haikei ni aru mono [View toward postwar single women: What is behind the “High Miss” genre]. In Kan Satoko (ed.), Tanabe Seiko: Sengo bungaku e no shin shikaku [Tanabe Seiko: New perspectives to postwar literature] (pp. 150–59). Tokyo: Shibundō. Saitō, M. (2002). Bundan aidoru ron [Study of literary idols]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Sanga, L. (2021). Tanabe Seiko, Feminism, and the Making of a Love Novel. Japanese Language and Literature 55(1): 35–63. Shamoon, D. (2012). Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Suzuki, N. (2010). Kōdo seichō to “Joryū sakka”: Hayashi Mariko Onna bunshi ni okeru onna no ekurichūru [High economic development and “women writers”: Female écriture in Hayashi Mariko’s Literary Woman). Nihon bungaku 59(11): 48–58.

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Suzuki, M. (2010). Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Takemoto, N. (2003). Kaisetsu “s” wa sensen fukoku no “s” [Commentary “S” as the declaration of hostilities]. In Yoshiya Nobuko, Yaneura no nishojo [Two Virgins in the Attic] (pp. 319–24). Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai. Tanabe, S. (1964). Senchimentaru jānī [Sentimental Journey]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. ———. (1984). Uba zakari [Old Woman in Full Bloom]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. (2000). Watashi no Ōsaka hakkei [My Eight Views of Osaka]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. (2009). Hoshigarimasen katsu made wa [We Want Nothing till We Win]. Tokyo: Popurasha. ———. (2011). Isshō onna no ko [Forever Girl]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Yoshiya, N. (1975). Hana monogatari [Flower Stories]. In Yoshiya Nobuko zenshū [The Collected Works of Yoshiya Nobuko] (vol. 1), (pp. 4–356). Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. ———. (2003). Yaneura no nishojo [Two Virgins in the Attic]. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai.

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Chapter 16 Writing the Aged Woman: Enchi Fumiko and Tanabe Seiko Sohyun Chun Most first-world countries treat the elderly with disdain, regarding them as a drain on society. Pundits and scholars focus on the troubling nature of this trend and largely overlook the fact that the elderly are also a source of great creativity, in spite of the aging process. Writers Enchi Fumiko and Tanabe Seiko challenge the doom-and-gloom portrayals of aging by offering a counter narrative of vibrant and feisty senior citizens. They illuminate the resilient and selfaware identities of elderly women who, though physically compromised by their aging bodies, unfurl powerfully varied inner worlds that refuse to yield to their everyday socio-cultural trauma.

Introduction Aging is a complex term. It deals with more than biology and personally-lived experiences; one must also consider aging alongside sociocultural contexts that relate individuals to their society as a whole. Thinking about aging in this way illustrates how social-psychological perceptions frame individual bodies and reveals what is created within the dynamic relationship between diverse individuals and their socio-cultural context. Margaret M. Gullette affirms this in her study, Aged by Culture, in which she emphasizes the relation between “age” (“aging”) and dominant cultural narratives that have consistently shaped our conception of “age.” Aging issues tend to compound the systemic biases that inordinately affect women, thus complicating the intersection between gender and age. This unfairness leads to problems for society’s oldest citizens who happen to be women. There are many means to measure and assess the biased social treatment of women and the construction of stereotypes of the aged and their uncomfortable relationships with society. This situation is especially true in Japan, where there are more women over the age of sixty-five than men. Japanese women are often noted for their record longevity, but the main socio-cultural narratives neglect to give voice to their individuality, simply packaging them as an elderly group and a burdensome object of the social care system. It is ironic that there are so many old Japanese women, and yet it is so hard to find diverse stories of their

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individual experiences. Jason Danely’s study Aging and Loss points out that cultural and social narratives about old people resemble traditional literary narratives of aging in presenting depictions of decline and deterioration, such as the yamamba and obasute stories (Danely 2014, 111). A representative and recurring theme from medieval Noh plays to anime: the narratives of obasute (the abandoned granny) and yamamba (the mountain crone) deem the aged women aberrant or no longer a relevant participant in the society. This characterization is especially true of old women who are deeply related to loss and lack of social capital due to their aging bodies. Some literary works provide an alternative outlook toward the elderly, along with a recognition of the inequality tied to their social position and limited representation in society. But even when a narrative does embark on a deep exploration of aged people in general, the literary representations of aged women are particularly limited, further highlighting the dearth of nuanced portrayals centered on women at various stages of their lives. Aged women who do not conform to social expectations and social gender roles are frequently relegated to the periphery, even in the narratives that prominently relate to their positions within society—e.g., familial planning and care, employment and financial management, and lack of political voice. On one hand, old women who do not subscribe to gendered categories seem to be free from expectations, but on the other hand they risk losing their social positions and what little power normally assigned to them, leaving these renegade women as outsiders in their communities. Recognizing these constant unfavorable circumstances for elderly women, women writers confront the dominant male-centered perspective that depicts women as archetypally abjected. Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) and Tanabe Seiko (1928‒2019) contribute their own literary narratives of aging in order to show the distorted outlook on aged people and depict aged individuals more flexibly and subjectively. Rejecting socially ideal roles, these writers bravely expound upon their protagonists’ individual desires and challenge socio-cultural expectations. These authors present a “women’s subjectivity” of inner strength by crafting elderly women not as objects of dependency or bygone sexuality, but as subjects who struggle to find meaning in the new stages of their lives when they just so happen to inhabit an aged body. Both Enchi and Tanabe are prolific and successful postwar writers. Their stories offer rich depictions of elderly women who are trapped and powerless due to varying social, cultural, and psychological circumstances. By investing such women with a more prominent voice in the narratives of old age, they dismantle the misrepresentations that disadvantage the elderly in society. This chapter will first explore Enchi Fumiko’s portrayal of the feistiness of old age in her short story “Hanakui uba” (1974, The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers), focusing on how she represents her aged heroine differently from the stereotypical image of the powerless, useless, and even violent old crone. Rather than railing against an unjust society, Enchi’s aged characters revel in their old age, finding new avenues for appreciating and expressing their subjectivity. Subsequently, we turn to Tanabe Seiko’s novel Uba tokimeki (1984, Old Woman’s Butterfly), and the celebration it provides of an elderly woman’s jouissance for a life well lived.

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Enchi Fumiko and aged heroines Enchi Fumiko, one of the more prominent Japanese writers of her time, is known for her lush narrative style which relies heavily on classical intertextuality. Influenced by her famed father, Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937), a scholar of Japanese linguistics and a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University, Enchi received an elite education in both classical Chinese and Japanese literature. Although Enchi’s earliest works went mostly unrecognized by the literary world, when she won the Women’s Literature Prize with Himojii tsukihi (1953, Days of Hunger), she finally set her career as a writer. Her tenacious effort produced masterpieces such as a full-length translation of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, which earned her the Tanizaki Prize (1969), Onnazaka (1957, The Woman’s Hill; translated The Waiting Years*) the recipient of the Noma literary prize (1957), and Onnamen (1958, Woman’s Masks; translated as Masks*). Many of her works scrutinize middle aged women and the way they suffer deeply and largely silently under the weight of the male dominant society. As her own age advanced, however, Enchi tempered her tone somewhat. Her later works like “Yūkon” (1971, Wandering Souls), “Neko no sōshi” (1974, The Cat Scroll), “Kinuta” (1980, The Fulling Block), and the 1974 story “The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers,” which I discuss below, feature elderly women who turn a more sanguine eye on society. The aged female characters in Enchi’s later works significantly diverge from the resentful, suffering, demonic women she wrote while still middle-aged herself. Her aged characters do not follow the pattern of Enchi’s younger women, who expressed their repressed anger, desire, and passion through subdued violence. While these aged heroines contend with physically weakened states, such as failing eyesight and lapses into senility, they nevertheless present rich inner lives full of imaginative wonder and unbridled desires. The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers While the title of this story might suggest the oddly captivating image of an old woman munching on flowers, the actual story paints a more alarming picture. Before the eyes of the shocked narrator, the titular old woman devours the crimson blossoms of a crab cactus with lip-smacking alacrity. Conjuring a new assortment of repulsive emotions in the reader (and the first-person narrator), as well as a link between aged bodies and consumption, Enchi empowers the old woman in her subversion of oppressive social norms and judgmental views. She allows her to seek her own desires and happiness while embracing senescence. On an autumn day, the first-person narrator, who has quietly settled into old age, relishes the splendid flowers of a crab cactus. As she silently celebrates the revival of the cactus, which had been withering away, another old woman suddenly appears next to her. The first thing the narrator notices about this intruder is how much older she seems than herself, so she dares to call the woman a “rōjo” (“old woman”). Her hair was completely white, but her facial color was radiant and there was a mysterious brightness in her eyes like that of a young girl’s. True to her words, she moved her face so close to the flower that she almost brushed against it. “Lately

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I’ve been troubled by weak eyesight, too, but you seem to be much worse off,” I said, feeling strangely satisfied. (Enchi 1974, 162)1 The narrator’s smug sense of superiority in noting the rōjo’s even greater visual impairment underscores the fact that binary juxtaposition of youth and elderliness does not simply indicate the distinction between ages. In the anti-aging society, where youth is glorified at the expense of the aged, younger age and better health conditions symbolize potential power and superiority. Hence, this scene evinces this type of ageism, presenting an ugly picture where even within older groups, even a slightly better health condition can be seen as a touchstone to superiority. Josephine Mary Dolan and Estella Tincknell explain “aging femininity,” or the relation between women, aging and power as “the power to position the aging female body as abject and in need of cosmetic or surgical intervention when it ‘fails’ to conform to acceptable aesthetic or cultural norms” (Dolan and Estella Tincknell 2012, xi). In other words, not just the young female body but also the aged female body are bound by the social aesthetic and cultural norms by consistently being judged by others’ views. The narrator’s judgmental view on the other old woman reflects an oppressive gaze that is already ingrained within individuals. By placing herself as superior to another older woman, the narrator also simultaneously degrades herself as an aged woman as opposed to a younger woman, subjugating herself to the social power relations and cultural expectations of ageism. The superficial satisfaction the narrator feels, however, is destroyed when, after a brief conversation, the rōjo plucks the red blossoms she had been admiring and stuffs them in her mouth. Astonished by the sight of “a living thing being consumed,” the narrator describes the rōjo’s mouth looking “as if it were stained with blood” (Enchi 1974, 163). The narrator portrays the rōjo’s eating of the crimson flowers as monstrous, as if the rōjo had devoured living flesh, not blossoms. The narrator’s description is provocative. Considering her declining condition, the rōjo’s eating flowers might be seen as either an old woman’s peculiar taste or as simple mischief. However, by not showing sympathy for the older woman’s eccentric expression, the narrator’s attitude toward the flower-eating woman is just as harsh and intolerant as society’s. And beyond simple repulsion, the narrator’s negative view (like eating “a living thing”) evokes the mythical demonic female characters such as the yamamba, inferring that she is not merely eccentric, but actually dangerous. Although the rōjo’s eating the flowers does not actually present any danger to the protagonist, it is important how quickly the association is made between the rōjo’s behavior and the fear and danger of yamamba2-like, spirit-possessed female figures. Rendering the rōjo in the image of a flesh-devouring monster, the story creates a division between the two elderly women; the aged narrator invites this distance from the monstrous rōjo, for she is acutely aware of the censoring gazes of society and is afraid of being associated with the rōjo. Why does the old woman eat flowers? Hardly embarrassed by her peculiar appetite, the rōjo seems intentionally to chew the flowers lustily in front of the narrator. The ideal Japanese woman is supposed to behave with greater reserve in public, especially when eating. Compared to the yamamba’s cannibalistic desire, the rōjo’s desire for flowers is not conspicuously harmful, just visually offensive to those

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who are confined within cultural norms. If anyone is confined by social propriety, it is the narrator. As the story unfolds, we learn that she denied herself a love affair with a married man, sending him naive letters full of pressed flowers. In a way it is this memory of repressed passion, symbolized by these dried flowers, that conjure forth the narrator’s encounter with the rōjo. The rōjo challenges the narrator by directly stating: “Even though you want to eat flowers, your shyness won’t allow you to. You’re constantly in a state of agitation from wanting to eat them” (Enchi 1974, 165). When the narrator denigrates the rōjo’s eating of flowers, she is subconsciously rejecting her buried self. Noticing this severe self-restriction, the narrator feels a complex mixture of envy and repulsion toward the rōjo, who seems to enjoy more autonomy than the narrator. The rōjo defends her tastes with pointed logic: There’s no law that says flowers are just to be seen and not to be eaten, is there? When you think something is beautiful, you want to touch it, you want to pluck it off, and even if you destroy its shape, you want to make it your own. When that desire becomes stronger, then it reaches the point where you want to eat it. Doesn’t it? (Enchi 1974, 163) For the rōjo, consuming flowers is a natural and effectual action to satisfy her desire to possess the beauty of the blossoms. Noting that there is no legal prohibition against flower eating, the rōjo points out that the dismayed reaction of the narrator originates from the deeply inculcated need of the narrator to fulfill social expectations for women. However, by making a reasonable argument, the rōjo clearly indicates that she has not eaten the flower accidentally nor was it because of mental disorder or senility, overtly contradicting the narrator’s assumption that she must be demented. Because the rōjo’s unruly action makes her uncomfortable, the narrator continues to seek a proper explanation for the rōjo’s behavior. Thus, the narrator attempts to contain the rōjo’s action by linking it to a performance found in kabuki, believing that such action must have had symbolic meaning beyond the literal ingestion of flowers: “a woman plucks off a white plum blossom and eats it,” a scene that has been interpreted as representing “a kind of refined eroticism” (Enchi 1974, 163). Relying only on literary analysis, the narrator is able to accept the “refined” expression in art, while simultaneously remaining uncomfortable with and judgmental about the rōjo, whose expression is too frank and instinctive for her. In addition, the narrator cynically comments on the rōjo’s eating of the flowers: “[p]eople who watch you stuff red flowers into your mouth and devour them might think that you have an extraordinary illness, or that you’re crazy, don’t you think?” (Enchi 1974, 164). Borrowing the disapproving voices of other people, the narrator actually reveals her own censorial opinion. Against such criticism, the rōjo presents an articulate argument supporting her expression of desire, her sharp mind belying any attempt to attribute her behavior to senility. First the rōjo points out that the narrator’s interpretation has actually “idealized the concept of lust” (Enchi 1974, 163). Then the rōjo argues that although kabuki and ukiyo-e both contain abundant sexual imagery, instead of candidly capturing the natural human sexual desire, they display idealized images of sexuality, thus compromising with socio-cultural codes and distorting natural expressions of sexuality.

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Rejecting the refined and idealized interpretation of sexuality, the rōjo explains that this literary belief is based on natural human desires: In human beings there is powerful impulse to bring all animals and plants close to oneself—often generating legends and myths. In Greek mythology there are stories in which human beings become flowers, and in Japanese tales the spirits of willow trees and cherry trees become beautiful women who pledge themselves to men. I think such desires are born from the dreams of human beings who cannot look at flowers as just a part of nature. (Enchi 1974, 164) It is notable that the rōjo taps into mythology to bolster her assertion. Compared to refined literary constructions, myth and folklore3—though often unrealistic or supernatural—show more authentic and unfiltered human emotions and desires, derived as they often are from a more primordial impulse prior to the establishment of socio-cultural frames. In this sense, a person literally transforming into a flower, or trees transforming into a woman, are more direct demonstrations of human appreciation and desire for the beauty of nature. The rōjo once again challenges the narrator’s confined, aesthetic perception of expressing desires—as represented in her kabuki reference (and her pressed flowers)—by drawing from the counterexample of stories that center on natural human feelings and that allow free expressions of desire. She repudiates the authority of the literary tradition in an attempt to free the narrator’s mind. Through her act of eating flowers, the rōjo subverts the literary world’s depiction of refined and unobtainable desire. The rōjo becomes the crude and yet real representation of living, natural desire that has been repressed by social regulation, rather than a stylization of desire, as seen in kabuki. Such portrayal of the rōjo presents the reader with a new image of vitality in aging women, creating a voice that challenges the constructed norms and giving voice to an otherwise typecast elderly woman. The rōjo’s “abnormal” behavior becomes exemplary to the narrator as well as the reader. Seeing the rōjo eating the flowers, the narrator quickly conjures the image of the mythical yamamba, the demonic figure constructed to represent abominable womanhood. The narrator’s struggle not to become one shows how much she has internalized social censorship. The rōjo’s peculiar behavior erodes the rigidly molded value system that has become deeply rooted in the narrator’s mind. The rōjo’s witty argument points to the possibility of freedom from strict adherence to normative ways. Although they share similar difficulties of having aged female bodies, failing eyesight, and similar desires (the narrator, too, used to be in the habit of eating flowers when she was young), the narrator’s almost obsessive anxiety and fear of diverging from the social norms prevents her from sympathizing with and understanding the rōjo, regardless of whether or not flower eating is actually an illegal, immoral, or unacceptable activity. In other words, it is the narrator’s view of the rōjo that creates the yamamba-like image, thus revealing more about the narrator’s inner mind than the actual state of the rōjo. By so intensely wanting to separate herself from such a problematic woman, by labeling the rōjo not only as a different type of person but not even as another human being, the narrator betrays her own anxieties at being so labeled. “The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers” presents the well-established conventionalization of feminine sexuality and shows the extent to which society constricts natural human desires and expressions, especially that of aged women, and more specifically, their sexual desire. Chapter 16: Writing the Aged Woman

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As the reader follows the narrator’s long history of repressed sexuality, Enchi shows that this state of repression is hard to overcome on one’s own. The narrator’s ideas about her own desire and sexuality demonstrate a complete internalization of social norms and conventions, which profoundly affected her entire life even without her conscious recognition. Prior to realizing the unresolved feelings that lurked within her mind, and realigning her lingering desire to her suppressed sexuality, the aged narrator only showed contempt and annoyance toward the natural human revelation of inner-desire represented by the rōjo’s eating of flowers. However, displaying the subversive change in the narrator’s own critical view at the moment of enlightenment, Enchi emphasizes the importance of questioning the indoctrination of moral and social codes, because when confronted with true feelings and unrefined desires, these binding restrictions shall be broken in a moment of realization. Moreover, such realizations enable the narrator not only to confront her own sexuality, which she had believed was something to be ashamed of and to be concealed, but to accept others’ desires as well: Only now do I appreciate the fact that the older youth had not regarded me with contempt. … although I had ridiculed and despised them at that time, I now happily recall these incidents as evidence of a young girl coming into the bloom of womanhood. ‘Even a devil looks beautiful when it’s eighteen, as the old proverb goes and even coarse tea is fragrant when it’s steeped for the first time. (Enchi 1974, 165) Presenting the narrator’s reconciliation with her feelings of love which before she had regarded as immature and negligible, Enchi skillfully challenges the deeply rooted social oppression of sexuality, and underscores the importance of challenging and changing the status quo. Enchi offers inspiration to the reader along with new avenues for rewriting femininity and sensuality. She also provides room for a reinterpretation of the aged condition in a manner than can alter the status quo where marginalization and dehumanization of the elderly remains. Over the centuries, older women in particular have proved to be valuable as resisters of established social norms, feared for their disobedience, anger, and outspokenness, even if they have more often been mocked rather than appreciated for this powerful role. The narrator, after her initial critical view toward the rōjo was subverted, is able to look into her inner state not concerned with others’ views, to address her real self and her true feelings. The narrator realizes how she stubbornly and insensitively resisted her own desire based on the social codes of her time, and even though the social conventions had changed over the course of time, she herself could not change to align with these social changes and had stagnated. By using an older woman as the protagonist and employing the flower-eating rōjo and her yamamba avatar, Enchi has found the means to expose the concealed thoughts of aged women and allow them to re-discover the vivid existence of their desires, and listen to their own voices. By doing that, Enchi’s aged protagonist can finally break free from her own imprisoned mindset that is covered under the justification of social codes, and can finally have a positive way of looking at herself without belittling her existence within society.

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Tanabe Seiko and the aged heroine Differing from Enchi Fumiko’s elite familial upbringing in Tokyo, Tanabe Seiko was born into a merchant family in Osaka. Taking advantage of the local merchant culture, with which she was intimately familiar, Tanabe offers an empowered voice that diverges from the stereotypical images assigned to aged people. None of her female protagonists are lonely, shrunken, useless, or dependent. Moreover, Osaka dialect is prominent in many of her works, where young and old women alike accumulate power through their use of language. Differing from Tokyo dialect, which, having been made the national standard, is now considered more sophisticated and proper, Tanabe privileges the Osaka, and specifically Senba, vernacular. The dialect usage contributes to her protagonist’s subversive manner and enhances her robust strength, while at the same time creating distance from the socio-cultural pressure of the mainstream. Tanabe has affirmed that the stories about elderly people that were available when she entered her own advanced years were not what she wanted to read because she could not find satisfaction in the characters’ unhappy voices. Tanabe’s purpose in writing and reading aged people’s stories is to find a more positive and proactive aging that offers dynamic agency for old women. Therefore, it is interesting to see how Tanabe’s aged-women stories both resemble and differ from those of Enchi and others. A prolific writer, Tanabe’s earlier career was acknowledged with the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1964, along with a succession of other literary awards, including the Women’s Literarature Prize (1987), the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize (1993), the Kikuchi Kan Prize (1994), the Yomiuri Literary Prize (1998), the Izumi Kyōka Prize, the Ihara Saikaku Prize (1998) and others more typically assigned to writers of popular literature.4 Tanabe’s works were noted for their light and humorous narrative style and mass appeal and have been characterized as chūkan bungaku (“in-between” literature)—a genre considered to fall between jun (pure) and taishū (popular). Inspired by Enchi’s translation of The Tale of Genji, Tanabe also revived Japanese classical tales with her own interpretations, such as Shin Genji monogatari (1979, New Tale of Genji) and Tanabe Seiko no Kojiki (1986, Tanabe Seiko’s Record of Ancient Matters). While she has published over a hundred books in a variety of genres (fiction, historical fiction, biographies, translations, adaptations, etc.) and has had multiple short stories in popular literary magazines, only a handful of her works have been translated into English, making Tanabe a relatively unknown writer outside Japan. Tanabe published a notable series of stories between 1981 and 1993 where she follows an aged “uba” (old woman) heroine’s exciting and iconoclastic twilight years. Even the name of the protagonist, Yamamoto Utako, could be said to contain a celebratory nuance since uta means “song” (the final “ko” is a common suffix for female names). Every novel in the series focuses on the same main character, Utako, who is seventy-six years old in the first book Uba zakari (1981, Old Woman in Full Bloom), seventy-seven in the second book Uba tokimeki (1984, Old Woman’s Butterfly), seventy-nine in the third Uba ukare (1987, Old Woman in a Frenzy), and finally eighty years old in the last novel, Uba katte (1993, Old Woman Does it Her Way). The stories are episodic in nature; rather than tracing a consistent overarching journey toward some sort of goal or message, each story simply presents a different aspect of Utako’s social and familial relationships. Tanabe’s “uba” stories are significant as correctives against the flattened image of aged women more typically presented in print and visual media; her works flesh out the

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representations of older female characters, allowing them to imbue the aged female voices with greater agency. Tanabe is noted for her criticism of the limited voices of the elderly in popular fiction. Being aged herself when she wrote the uba stories, she was annoyed by the negative voices of decline typical of much literature featuring the elderly. She found that those voices often expressed regrets about and obsessions over lost youth, keeping the characters hopelessly trapped under sociocultural expectations and gazes. In her uba stories, Tanabe effectively creates an energetic image of the old woman by challenging the negative, homogeneously prescribed notion of the uba. Splendor in the uba’s life In the second book of the uba series, Old Woman’s Butterfly, the protagonist Utako barges into the narrative with the proud statement: “I’m a seventy-seven-year-old shrew, that’s why!” (Tanabe 1987, 40). As indicated by the word tokimeki in the title, suggestive of the fluttering pulse of passion, the protagonist refuses to relinquish her desires, despite her advanced age and societal and familial expectations of her proper behavior. She is individuated, opinionated, and outspoken. Old Woman’s Butterfly, more than the other three books, pays the most attention to the topic of women’s passion and romantic feelings. Utako claims, “I am now in my ‘golden age’” (Tanabe 1987, 53). Her strong opinions come from either a place of bright optimism and happiness or from anger and dissent—both atypical of the aged in most literary treatments. How can this elderly woman over seventy argue that this is the best stage of her life? From where does her confidence and pleasant outlook originate? How does Tanabe make sense of her extremely positive view of aging? Despite Utako’s advanced age, Tanabe shapes this protagonist as a remarkably proactive and optimistic character who displays a noticeably contemporary, socially active lifestyle— far from the representative image of a shrunken old woman who is physically, socially, and economically powerless and isolated. Living alone in a luxurious Kobe condominium, the novel depicts Utako’s daily joys as well as hardships as she navigates her life as an aged single.5 Along the way she tangles with her adult children, who resent the fact that their mother does not adhere to codified notions of “old age.” A widow, she journeys in and out of love, encountering frustrations, renewed sexual desire, and loss. Coerced into attending dating events for the elderly, and sincerely hoping to find a romantic partner, she nevertheless struggles to maintain her independence. Utako owns a family-run business in Osaka. Although she has putatively turned the reigns of the business over to her son, she claims to have not quite retired—at least she has not “retired” from life, which is shown by the continuation of her busy social schedule, including teaching calligraphy, learning English, and enjoying coffee outings with her friends. Readers of Tanabe’s romance stories will notice that Utako shares features with the writer’s other younger protagonists,6 who lead liberated, self-focused, and single lives. The fact that Utako, despite her age, actively expresses a desire to engage in romantic relationships adds to the impression that Utako is merely the aged counterpart to Tanabe’s typical female character: in a word, she is a “high miss.” 7 Far from being a picture of idealized, self-sacrificing womanhood, Utako is often frank in revealing her crankiness and annoyance toward whoever disturbs her mood, including her children and grandchildren. Utako’s self-assertive and aggressive voice reminds one of the stereotypical “obatarian,” a stock comic character in Manga Life, a Japanese manga magazine

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published from 1988 through 1998.8 The obatarian is an exaggerated sketch of a middle-aged woman that focuses on her cranky personality and caricatures the mature female body with emphasis on wrinkled skin, sagging breasts, a rotund belly, and unstylish hair and dress. Although the image of the obatarian is derogatory, lampooning old women’s annoying and pushy behavior, the character who elbows her way through the manga, the obatarian, still allows the reader to feel a sense of empathy with this creature who fearlessly raises her voice to fight back against the slights she endures. In fact, it is through her perceived absurdity and ugliness that she can more effectively resist social expectations, regulations, and normalization, expressing her uncomfortable, disagreeable opinions about her social-familial position. Although Tanabe’s self-confident and intimidating old woman may be seen as obatarianlike in the discomfort she causes those around her, there is a significant distinction between her and the manga character. The difference is in the way their creators present “aging” and their characters’ reaction to it. “Aging” is the catalyst to the change in their lives, but it also highlights the key difference between them. In the manga, it is aging that transforms the beautiful wife into a monstrous obatarian. By contrast, in Tanabe’s uba stories, aging frees Utako from her social-familial burdens and cultivates in her an inner strength that she did not have earlier. Aging allows her the perspective to understand that in her youth she lacked the maturity to deal with social pressure. Aging is not a lack or loss of female quality but rather a new avenue into undiscovered depths of female potency and self-assurance. This is a key strategy Tanabe uses to question and challenge the rigidly conceptualized image of old women in Japanese society. “Pristine, Proper, and Pretty”: Empowering the uba “Pristine, Proper, and Pretty” (Kiyoku, Tadashiku, Utsukushiku)— these words form the motto of the Takarazuka Revue, a Japanese stage troupe comprised only of young female performers. A fan of Takarazuka, Utako adopts its motto as her own and continually reasserts her desire to live out her twilight years accordingly. More than simply indicating her cultural taste, this adoption of the motto is likely an attempt to link her identity and aged life with the glamor of the female-centered world. Not simply superficially mimicking Takarazuka’s splendor, Utako actively espouses the central concept of Takarazuka as her new identity in her aged life, and does not allow any compromise with a powerless, depressed perspective. For example, Utako’s outfits reveal her consciousness of what makes eye-catching styles: a light-toned green or brown dress, color-coordinated necklaces, and mid-heeled shoes. Noting the poor fashion sense of her aged peers, who pursue comfort over style, Utako tries to decorate herself with greater appeal as suggested by the Takarazuka ideal. While it may seem as though Utako is modeling herself after fashion-obsessed women, she actually frames her interest in fashion as a way not only to revitalize her aesthetic expression, but also to engage with the prevailing modes of thought typically ascribed only to the youth. Utako suggests that were she to turn her back on fashion trends, “distasteful, disreputable, disgraceful” would be a more suitable motto, and she would become a rigid, inflexible old woman, who would play into the stereotypes that society associates with the elderly (Tanabe 1987, 53). Although Utako’s adoption of Takarazuka fashion may seem merely superficial, she also provides an alternative image of aging that parallels the success and subversive stance toward gender roles attributed to Takarazuka.

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Margaret Gullette calls attention to the ability of people to develop their aged selves by “concentrating on the rich history of their identities” and thus reframe age-related physical decline as “achievements.” Doing so helps the elderly “build up their sense of the overall value of time passing”—in other words, finding value in becoming older (Gullette 2004, 128). In drawing upon the principles of Takarazuka, Utako integrates the cachet of this institution to build a history of her own aged identity. Thus, one must consider how Utako uses the troupe’s slogan to maintain a fresh worldview and to progress beyond the antiquated expectations for aged women, particularly as she strives to make her life “proper” and “pristine.” The protagonist’s interaction with the slogan shows how Tanabe can present an aged character with a powerful elegance that comes from identifying with a notable symbol of regional culture. More than simply mimicking the fancy actresses of the Takarazuka, Utako leverages the popular symbol in order to ally herself with a more culturally-sanctioned, recognizable, and well-defined creative institution. To counteract the patriarchal view of women’s bodies as valuable only insofar as they are useful to society, Tanabe privileges the Takarazuka Revue as a means to inspire Utako in her challenges against the misogynistic sexual advances of her male romances. For example, after the group dates that Utako has been obliged to join, she remarks, “I don’t need to have sexual relationships with men,” which shows her continuing adherence to the “pristine” values espoused in her motto. Here, Utako’s meaning of “pristine” differs from the notion of a “chaste woman” (teijo) as suggested by the Takarazuka’s original connotation of the term. Instead Utako interprets “kiyoku” as way to reinforce her decision to live beyond the maledominated feminine code and thus beyond the patriarchal ideals that clash with her personal goals and wishes. In light of her potential male partners’ absurd quests for women who will provide nursing and caretaking, rather than the mutual emotional support that Utako seeks, Tanabe’s protagonist raises her voice in protest, using a slight reinterpretation of the Takarazuka code. The Takarazuka offers a base upon which Utako can develop a personal philosophy that can protect her convictions from influence at the hands of those men who have predatory intentions toward women—even aged women. Moreover, beyond creating this kind of social identity and image, Utako strives to establish a secure position for herself as a single woman vis-à-vis her family and society, neither abandoned by her family nor pushed to be alone. Unlike the stereotypical mother-in-law figure in Japanese literature, she does not intend to interfere with the lives of her adult children. Her desire is clear not to use her seniority to dominate her sons. It was a social convention at the time, and largely still is, for the first son to take care of his parents. Utako, as a wife, had followed the custom by living with her mother-in-law, with whom she had a troubled relationship. However, instead of mindlessly adhering to this social convention, Utako rejects what is expected of her now that she has herself become a mother-in-law. When the eldest son asks Utako to live with his family, she refuses and insists upon living alone. With her ample financial resources, Utako still maintains enough power to control her sons and daughters-in-law if she so desires, but she separates herself from the younger generation and allows them to live their own lives, while she enjoys the rest of her life as an independent woman. Utako lives a life in contrast to the enforced isolation and ejection from society symbolized by the obasute myth.9 Using her economical and physical capability and emotional independence, Utako’s choice to enjoy her liberated single life shows her strong determination to remain independent even in her old age.

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Utako’s lifestyle conjures up images of Takarazuka’s ostentatious performances, thus exemplifying the power that Gullette attributes to the use of narratives to “tell about one’s self, to self and others, whether informally in conversation or written for archival purposes” (Gullette 2004, 124). The effect of Tanabe’s borrowing from such well-known cultural institutions is that her characters can then reinvent their identities, and in the case of Utako, this practice seemingly confirms the assertion by Gullette that “age identity is an achievement of storytelling” since Tanabe’s protagonists often tell their own stories by adapting the narratives from elsewhere (Gullette 2004, 124). Moreover, this sort of storytelling works for Utako because it points to a type of consumption that differs from that of the yamamba or obasute. In the case of the yamamba consumption means death to social order and male power, while in the case of the obasute, consumption threatens the survival of the remaining community. Participating in Takarazuka fan culture signifies an engagement with a local institution that promotes both the local economy and social expectations for women. Thus, culture and economy are at the center of Utako’s acts of consumption, making her behavior comparatively safe and appropriate. By presenting the aged heroine in this way, Tanabe replaces the negatively constructed image of old women that is so commonly seen in cultural narratives. In contrast to the yamamba and obasute women—figures whose anger is often ignored and whose desire is often unsatisfied—Tanabe presents the old Utako as a woman who is content in her aged identity and who has a voice that is frank in its confrontation of the obstacles that prevent her from living more confidently, properly, and beautifully.

Conclusion Enchi’s and Tanabe’s protests against earlier views of aging can be supported through Gullette’s assertions that touch on decline as “an ideology”—instead of a physiological condition—and therefore, something that can be resisted. Enchi and Tanabe use their work to contest decline ideology while still accepting the reality of aging, albeit with more expanded and considered perspectives toward the positive aspects of aged life. Without narratives such as Enchi’s and Tanabe’s to provide counterarguments, the successful navigation of society entails recognizing that “[aging-related] decline is ‘truth’ and resistance is called … ‘denial’” (Gullette 2004, 134). Hence, Utako is a character who diversifies the landscape that authors have carved out when discussing old age, a task that does for Japanese literature what Gullette has called for in other domains when she notes that “[i]t is dehumanizing to ignore the diverse ways we experience ‘aging’” (Gullette 2004, 124). These assertions by Gullette touch on the distinctions one might draw between Tanabe and Enchi’s narratives in how they have contributed to the discourse on aging as women: while Enchi’s stories still garner sympathy for the rōjo by giving relatively anonymous old women a shared voice to express their sorrow, Tanabe presents a different perspective on aging through a protagonist who sees the end of her life as a “golden age.” As she argues the importance of dissolving the stigmatized view of old age, Ueno Chizuko states that “what the old-age issue is demanding is a re-examination of the whole value system of modern industrialized society, which can only give old age a negative identity” (Ueno 2009, 222). In comparison to Enchi’s portrayals, which touch on a common voice of pain and suffering amongst women, Tanabe presents a special and perhaps uncommon voice that showcases aging as a collection of opportunities for a renewed vitality—a vitality that, during one’s

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youth, is seemingly owed to society and thus never fully explored under the social pressures and expectations at earlier points in life. While these two authors’ methods and objectives may differ greatly, the effect of their literature is still positive for improving the dynamism and range of the narratives used to explore the final stages of life. Both work to dismiss the stigma attached to aging without patently dismissing the basic realities of getting older, such as decreased stamina and changing physiology. Thus, Enchi and Tanabe provide readers with alternate narratives of aging, reinterpreting the more conventional attitudes that link women to positions of infirmity, asexuality, and inaction. Rather than seeing elderly women as a burden on family and society, Enchi and Tanabe create mature women with vibrant inner-lives and vigorous personas powerful enough to break through the restrictive images of the past.

Notes 1 Quotations from the story “The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers” are from Yumiko S. Hulvey’s (1994) English translation of that work. 2 Yumiko S. Hulvey’s study of the yamamaba (in this case yamauba) questions why so many women writers, such as Enchi Fumiko, Ōba Minako, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Tsushima Yūko, invite the negative image of yamamba topos. She argues that “[t]he power of myth is so strong and pervasive that to this day women writers instinctively feel a primordial connection to the image of the yamauba. Women writers may even realize that the yamauba owes her inspiration to the vilified female deities of the Japanese and great mother creation myths, but even if they do not, they seem to sense some mysterious kinship between the female monster and archetypes of threatening, empowered females” (Hulvey 2000, 88). Enchi Fumiko’s works “actually revel in the negative associations of dangerous women, employing images of vampires and femmes fatales who lure men to their doom, perhaps for the same reason that some religions believe that contact with defilement can sometimes empower those who dare it” (88). 3 Davidson notes that, “myth may give expression to a deeper level of the mind than the purely descriptive and rational one, and [Claude Levi-Strauss] has performed a great service in tracing out some of the main archetypal patterns… [he] has put forward his theory that mythology should be seen as a universal language, needing to be decoded by structural analysis. He saw the logic of the primitive mind as identical with that of scientifically trained modern man” (Davison 1976, 139). 4 Tanabe’s extensive publications have shown her broad and various literary themes from modern settings to classical ones. She has also written historical fiction. Major works include: Hanagari (1957, Flower Gathering), Shin Genji Monogatari (1974–1978, New Tale of Genji), Mukashi akebono (1979, Once Upon a Time at Dawn), Sensuji no kurokami (1972, A Thousand Strands of Black Hair) and more (Yamamoto 1994, 398–402). 5 After her husband passes away, her children suggest living together, but Utako insists that she should live alone to enjoy her freedom. (Tanabe 1987, 10) 6 Nathaniel Preston notes: “Common features of Tanabe’s fiction include romance-based plots, the regional dialect of her native Osaka, and humor based on word-play and verbal banter” (Preston 2012, 65). 7 The term “high miss,” not often used today, “appeared in postwar Japan as a corrective to the pejorative ‘Old Miss’ used to describe unmarried female office workers who had passed their mid-twenties, the assumed upper limit of the age of marriageability. Tanabe did not create the term “high miss,” but in the late 1960s and early 1970s she began consciously using it to refashion the image of unmarried working women” (Kan Satoko 2006, 152–58). 8 “Obatarian, a comic character created by Hotta Katsuhiko, a combination of the Japanese word oba (from obasan, which literally means “aunt” but is applied also to all middle-aged women) and “Battalion,” the Japanese title of a well-known horror movie (The Night of the Living Dead). Obatarian, a new entry in the dictionary, means impudent, selfish, shameless and unpleasant behaviors” (Nae 2003, 45). 9 Obasute (Abandoned Granny) refers to legends, purportedly based on past social convention in rural areas, of abandoning the elderly and infirm (men and women) on mountainsides (thus insuring their deaths.)

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Jason Danely’s study points out that “the Obasute stories have numerous variations, but all blend lessons on ethical obligations to family, folk understandings of a spirit filled natural landscape, and understandings of aging and dependence. … Older people in this context are seen as a burden on the family and by extension the village as a whole, since they consume resources and contribute little. The ugliness of the old woman of obasute and the spite of younger generations adds to the decision to abandon the old as well as some degree of implicit or explicit social sanction of the abandonment as a possible solution to the problem” (Danely 2012, 5).

References Danely, J. (2014). Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ———. (2010). Art, Aging and Abandonment in Japan. Journal of Aging Humanities and the Arts 4(1) (2010): 4–17. Davidson, H.R.E. (1976). Folklore and Myth. Folklore 87(2): 131–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1976​ .9716027 Dolan, J.M. & Tincknell, E. (eds.). (2012). Aging femininities: troubling representations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Enchi, F. (1994). The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers. (Y.S. Hulvey, trans.). Manoa 6(2): 162–68. https://www​ .jstor.org/stable/4229106. (Original work published 1974) Gullette, M.M. (2004). Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hulvey, Y.S. (2000). Myths and Monsters: The Female Body as the Site for Political Agendas. In D.W. King (ed.), Body politics and the fictional double. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kan, S. (2006). Tanabe Seiko: sengo bungaku e no shin shikaku. [Tanabe Seiko: A new perspective on postwar literature]. Tokyo: Shibundō. Nae, N. (2003). What They Want: The Transformation of Self and Its Reflection in Japanese Women’s Magazines. NUCB Journal of Language Culture and Communication 5(2): 39–46. Preston, N. (2012). The “High Miss” and Female Identity in the Fiction of Tanabe Seiko. Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12(2): 65–85. KISS. Web DOI:10.21866/esjeas.2012.12.1.004. Tanabe, S. (1987). Uba tokimeki. [Old Woman’s Butterfly]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Ueno, C. (2009). The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Yamamoto, F.Y. (1994). Tanabe Seiko. In C.I. Mulhern (ed.), Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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Chapter 17 Humor and Aging: Ogino Anna, Itō Hiromi, and Kanai Mieko Tomoko Aoyama This chapter discusses examples of contemporary literary humor by Ogino Anna, Itō Hiromi, and Kanai Mieko. Despite their differences, their texts share certain characteristics such as complex intertextuality, blurring and merging of genres and forms, extensive use of word play and parody, and acute social criticism from women’s viewpoints in Japan’s aging society. Parody, with its ambivalent relationship with the texts or genres that it parodies, offers a range of possibilities for these writers to subvert gender discrimination and stereotypes, and revitalize both life and literature.

Introduction Japanese culture, like many others, has long neglected or underestimated women’s contributions to humor, parody, and satire, even though the mythological origin of comic performance is attributed to the woman deity, Ame no Uzume.1 From about the 1970s onwards, women writers such as Kurahashi Yumiko and Tanabe Seiko have gained recognition and popularity through their comic-parodic texts, though women’s humor is still grossly underrepresented in literary criticism and humor studies. This chapter discusses recent works written by three acclaimed writers: Ogino Anna (1956–), Itō Hiromi (1955–), and Kanai Mieko (1947–). Despite differences in their styles, forms, subjects, and methods, the texts selected here share certain characteristics, such as complex intertextuality, extensive use of word play and parody, acute social criticism, and humor that questions or subverts gender and other kinds of discrimination, as well as stereotypes. Among these comic-subversive devices parody deserves special attention. The definitions and uses of parody have changed from ancient to postmodern times (Rose 1993). There are also cultural differences and variations. We can safely say, however, that parody requires a text (hypotext) to mimic or repeat and at the same time transform, often, though not necessarily or always, by adding humor and criticism. The hypotext can be any written, visual, oral, or performative piece of any length, and it can be a specific individual text or a certain genre, sub-genre, mode, or style. The essential ingredients of parody, imitation and

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transformation, make the relationship between the parody and the parodied ambivalent: centrifugal and centripetal, close and distant, for and against—and this very ambivalence is what makes parody interesting. Another important characteristic of recent works of these writers is that they deal with issues surrounding aging and caring for the elderly in connection with gender. The focus on aging itself is not at all new in Japanese literature; numerous works have dealt with “The Poetics of Ageing” (Hirata et al. 2012). Within the broad literary theme of aging, there is a sub-group called kaigo bungaku (aged-care literature). In Ariyoshi Sawako’s pioneering kaigo novel, Kōkotsu no hito (1972, translated as The Twilight Years*), the heroine gives up her job to look after her father-in-law at home. Japan’s rapidly aging population has led to a flourishing of this genre, especially in the last few decades. The situations depicted in kaigo novels include not only a daughter or daughter-in-law looking after her father(-in-law) but also a son, husband, wife, or grandchild caring for their partners or (grand)parents. Reflecting reality, many depict cases of so-called rōrō kaigo (literally, old-old caring, i.e., an elderly person looking after another elderly person). A number of these depictions innovatively employ humor and parody. Mobu Norio’s 2004 Akutagawa Prize winner, Kaigo nyūmon (An Introduction to Aged-Care), for example, is a first-person narrative of a marijuana-smoking rapper who looks after his bedridden grandmother at home. The texts by Ogino and Itō discussed in this chapter, as well as some parts of Kanai’s novels, can be regarded as new types (or parodies) of aged-care novels. Although Ogino, Itō, and Kanai have received prestigious literary prizes and have attracted international scholarly attention, the availability of their works in translation is uneven. In this chapter, I include not only published and forthcoming translations but also untranslated texts, in the hope that they, too, will be made available to English readers. The main works for discussion were all originally published in the 21st century, but I will begin with Ogino Anna’s earlier texts to discuss some key characteristics and issues of her parody, and women’s humor and parody more broadly.

Ogino Anna: Puns, poison, paradise The ambivalence of parody’s position vis-à-vis the text or genre parodied has been the focus of many theoretical studies. Ogino Anna’s “fiction-critique” Watashi no aidokusho (1991, My Love-Hate Affair with Books) shows that the “love” (ai) for a certain text or genre, or for reading in general, also contains “poison” (doku) (Aoyama 1994).2 With puns, incongruous juxtapositions, farcical situations, and many other comic techniques, Ogino presented subversive readings and transformations of canonical texts of modern male authors such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Shiga Naoya, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, and Mishima Yukio. Her parody, which often takes women’s viewpoints or focuses on female characters in canonical texts, clearly concerns gender issues. As Reiko Abe Auestad pointed out, however, “a strategy of subversive confusion can backfire, and deconstitutive instabilities can take some regressive turns,” failing to achieve what Judith Butler termed “gender trouble” (Auestad 1998, 42). Midori McKeon, on the other hand, evaluates Ogino’s early comic-parodic texts, especially Momo monogatari (1994, Tales of Peaches), positively as the subversive work of a trickster who looks like “a respectful and dutiful daughter of Rabelais,” and yet “has

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mined her adoptive father’s works to storm the fortress of defensive self-absorption behind the walls of which the modern novel has sheltered itself ” (McKeon 2001, 354). Ogino has continued her pursuit of “Parody as rhetoric: the paradise on paper” 3 through transformations of modern and classic narratives. From the early 2000s, however, her fiction has tended to employ variations of (auto)biographical mode, with themes such as aging, mental and physical illnesses, work-life (or work-family) balance, aged-care, palliative care, death, and grieving. Puns, parodies, and humor are still there, if somewhat subdued and at times desperate. “Exaggeration is the best policy for any kind of author, even those who specialize in the so-called ‘I-novel’ (shishōsetsu)” (Ogino 2010, 40).4 It is not that she exaggerates her experiences in fiction, but that she combines raw materials from life with “parody as rhetoric” and other devices to create a “paradise on paper.” In the preface of Kashisu-gawa (2017, The River Cassis, 5),5 Ogino (or the narrator) writes, “Having attended my partner’s deathbed, and then my father’s, followed by my mother’s, I narrowly escaped attending my own deathbed, and here I am.” 6 The book consists of seven chapters,7 depicting the mother-daughter relationship in the last stage of the mother’s life and the daughter’s battle with her own “mediocre cancer grown moderately,” (21) which requires a major surgical operation and chemotherapy. To make the scar less conspicuous, the patient suggests to her doctor, “how about a tattoo of a scar on the scar?” (23). Pushing her mother’s wheelchair while also carrying bags filled with necessities for her own hospitalization, the daughter realizes: “You need stamina to be sick” (33). The treatment is hard: “with just enough poison to keep me alive, my body is sandwiched between this world and that” (40). “After each course of treatment, I grow old and die. Then I revive. Death renews life—or let’s believe so” (109). Renewal of life reminds us of Bakhtinian carnival theory (Bakhtin 1984), which is closely connected to Ogino’s work as a Rabelais scholar. In this novel, however, the carnival takes time to develop. As if to show the repeated rebirths of the “I” (and of the I-novel), the narrator changes the pronoun for “I” from watashi (which is gender-neutral) to boku (used by young males) and then in the following chapter to watashi who is a cat in the guise of a male “salaryman.” The “I” of the previous chapters becomes “she” in these two chapters. At the same time, jokes, laughter (of the “she” and her mother), and parodies of folk tunes and fairy stories increase. In the seventh and final chapter, entitled “Nayotake” (lit. pliant bamboo), which refers to Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter*), the narrator changes back to the daughter, who likens her mother to Kaguya-hime (Princess Kaguya). In the classical tale, Princess Kaguya makes impossible demands of her suitors whereas here, the “Kaguya-haha” (Mother Kaguya) has made impossible demands of her daughter’s suitors (Ogino 2017, 183). The daughter regrets that she has remained single and never had a child. However, she also compares herself to Prince Kuramochi, who presents a fake branch of jewels with an elaborate story of adventures, pretending that the branch came from the mythical Mount Hōrai (Penglai). In the tale, several craftsmen rush in and demand payment for the jeweled branch, thus revealing the Prince’s lies. Kaguya-hime banishes the suitor with a poem: “Hearing it was genuine I examined it, but the jewelled branch was as false as your words” (Keene 1956, 10). Regarding this episode, Ogino’s narrator remarks: “I am all for verbal embellishment. If I were asked for a jeweled branch, without hesitation I would mint an imitation.” (Ogino 2017, 185) This is not only a declaration of love for the mother but also a celebration of “lying”

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in fiction in contrast to the worship of honesty and sincerity that has tended to dominate naturalism-I-novel literature. The most moving transformation of the tale of Kaguya-hime in this final chapter is the ascension of the mother: My mother tasted elixir offered by the celestial beings. Having shed all the impurities of this world, she put on the robe of feathers and became eternally liberated from the sorrow of the human world. The old bamboo-cutter must have thought: If I ever found a princess in a radiant bamboo again, I would try harder and beat all those from the Moon. If my mother appeared from a shining bamboo, I would hold her tight and never let her go. I would give up my work and my being a human being, and cherish her like a jewel, feeding her with my withered breasts. (199–200) Mother-daughter conflicts and reconciliations have been the subject of many contemporary women’s novels and essays, some of which, especially those that deal with the mother’s dementia, depict a reversal of the mother-daughter relationship.8 “Feeding [the mother] with [the daughter’s] withered breasts” is a strong image, expressing the aging daughter’s longing for the deceased mother as well as for a baby that she never had. In the prologue of The River Cassis, the daughter, who continues to feel the strong presence of her late mother, writes: “To make my mother understand that mother and daughter are two different persons, it would take at least five million years” (7). In the epilogue, however, she even talks of laying eggs of her mother (205). This, and the idea of giving up work (reminding us of The Twilight Years), and even being a human being in the above quotation, may appear to be what Auestad regarded as subversive confusion backfiring on feminism.9 The transformation of Kaguyahime, however, helps the daughter-narrator to cope with grief and come to terms with her mother’s ideal image of paradise: “with my grandmother, my mother, and me together (while my father is in purgatory on account of all his vices)” (198). It is indeed “parody as rhetoric” in order to build a “paradise on paper.” To deal with issues surrounding aging and family relationships, Ogino rejects conventional realism. With puns and jokes, which some might call oyaji gyagu (dad’s [pathetic] jokes), conscious advocacy of hyperbole and falsehood, her text suggests how to overcome hardship, loss, and grief, and construct a “paradise”—if not in lived life then “on paper.”

Itō Hiromi: Shaman of many voices From the late 1970s onwards, Itō Hiromi has been widely recognized as the “shamaness of poetry” (shi no miko), and even as a “goddess of poetry” (shi no megami).10 Itō is also a prize-winning novelist and prolific essayist as well as a charismatic performer at poetry festivals and other events.11 She has been at the forefront of exploring matters that concern women’s lives, bodies, and sexualities, including eating disorders, menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, breastfeeding, masturbation, illnesses, aging, nursing, and death. From 1997, she lived in Southern California for two decades. Many of her books deal with her experience of crossing the Pacific Ocean to look after her parents in Kumamoto and

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to be with her family in California. Besides geo-cultural and linguistic borders, Itō’s works, including Togenuki (2007, The Thorn Puller,*), freely cross generic borders and annihilate dichotomies such as verse/prose, oral/written, religious/secular, and classic/modern. The Thorn Puller received both the prestigious Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize (awarded to poetry) and the Murasaki Shikibu Award, which is given to a text by a woman regardless of genre. Itō herself calls the work a book-length poem. A key phrase to understand intertextuality in Itō’s writing is “borrowing voices.” At the end of each chapter of The Thorn Puller, she attaches a note indicating the sources she “borrowed,” which vary from ancient mythologies, Buddhist scriptures, and classic oral and dramatic narratives, to the modern poetry and fiction of Miyazawa Kenji, Nakahara Chūya, Dazai Osamu, Ishimure Michiko, and many others. Importantly, Itō uses the term koe (voice) even though most of the sources are in print media. “Borrowing” includes quotations of words, phrases, and sentences with or without modification, as well as allusion to, or association with, names, places, events, and motifs. Since it has both imitation and transformation, it can be regarded as a kind of parody in a broad sense, but the emphasis is placed on the spoken, rhythmic, and often shamanistic “voices.” These “borrowed voices” are juxtaposed with the first-person narrative and the voices of the narrator’s family and friends. The significance of “voice” is closely linked to the medieval storytelling art of sekkyōbushi, “a kind of lay Buddhist preaching about the workings of karma and the miraculous origins of celebrity Buddhist icons” (Kimbrough 2013, 1). Since taking interest in this art in her early thirties, Itō has been producing contemporary versions not only through her modern Japanese translation but also within her own creative writing in works such as The Thorn Puller.12 To Itō, one of the fascinations of the sekkyō-bushi is that many stories depict strongwilled and resourceful women. Another is that it has rhythmical and memorable phrases, some of which are recycled across stories in this genre with new characters and contexts. The theme of michiyuki traveling is another source of inspiration for the poet. While the michiyuki in puppet and kabuki theaters illustrates a journey to death, most typically in the form of a double suicide by lovers, Itō points out that the journey in sekkyō-bushi is for life rather than death—that is, for living with hardships (Furukawa et al. 2019, 156). The traditional sekkyō-bushi consists of set phrases and components for making the audience cry, or in Itō’s words “Lego blocks for tears” (Furukawa et al. 2019, 157). Tears bring a cathartic relief. In Itō’s narrative, the physical, mental, and psychological hardships endured by the narrator, her parents, her husband, and her daughters are depicted; yet by adding comic and playful elements through many voices, she makes the reader smile and even laugh. When describing her parents’ weakening cognitive abilities, for example, she uses her youngest daughter, Aiko’s voice, explaining to her mother the conversation she had with her grandmother in a hospital in Kumamoto. Then, a minute later, she asked me, When is your older sister Yokiko coming back to Kumamoto? I told her August, Grandma. Then she asked me what month it was right now, and I told her July, Grandma. She said, oh goodness, I didn’t realize, so what month is it now? I thought uh-oh, but said, July, Grandma. Oh, really? Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you, Aiko darling, what month is it now? Uh-oh, I thought, but I told her, it’s July, Grandma, then five minutes later, when’s Yoki-chan coming back home again? August, Grandma. Oh, really? Then, what month is it? Uh-oh, I thought, here we go again. I said July, Grandma, but 260

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then she asked where you were. I said, she’s outside talking to the doctor, Grandma. Oh, really? I wonder what they’re talking about. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, here we go again. (Itō 2022, 148; 2011, 162)13 Aiko’s Japanese is influenced by her first language, English, which creates comical tone and rhythm, while at the same time showing interesting and realistic examples of translanguaging. Many readers would instantly recognize and empathize with the situation of having to repeat the same questions and answers again and again with their aging family members or acquaintances. The tedium, pain, and worry that are normally associated with such repetition are transformed into something sad yet comical. “But Grandpa is even worse,” Aiko continues: When I called him, he said, oh, is this Chunsuke [his pet dog] calling? I don’t think he was joking. Chunsuke was barking in the background. Aiko burst out laughing. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, she repeated, laughing. Then she imitated my mother, Oh, really? Then rolled her eyes. I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing too, and as we laughed, we sang, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh! For our conversations, uh-oh. When things didn’t work out, uh-oh. And here we go again, uh-oh. (Itō 2022, 148–49; 2011, 163) Thus the “Uh-oh” episode describes the difficulties of communication and at the same time creates an inclusive and tension-relieving laughter, which the mother-daughter pair shares not only with each other, but also with readers and audiences.14 As mentioned earlier, Itō is often described as a shaman. Given her revitalizing humor and powerful and humorous storytelling art that cuts through various barriers, it seems appropriate to liken her to the shamanistic Ame no Uzume. Uzume’s fearless, bold, and open-minded approach, her physicality, her vitality, her ability to communicate with foreign strangers such as Sarutahiko, and many other characteristics as outlined by Tsurumi Shunsuke (see Aoyama 2018, 43–45) all perfectly fit Itō’s persona, writings, and performances. Like the mythological trickster whose comic striptease dance brought the Sun goddess Amaterasu out of the cave, Itō’s humor brings light and warmth into dark and desperate situations. The laughter may not be as loud and roaring as that aroused by Uzume, but it has healing and revitalizing effects, even if the fundamental problems associated with aging such as physical and mental deterioration, loneliness, and death cannot disappear. One example of this can be found in the chapter “Oh, Ears! Listen to the Sound of Sadness Splashing in the Urinal,” in which Itō introduces a funny little fairy tale that her father made up and told her numerous times when she was very young. It begins: “Long, long ago, when I wanted a wife, I put an ad in the paper.” (Itō 2022, 176; 2011, 195) Three thousand women responded. When he interviewed the two thousand and five hundredth applicant, he knew that there was no need for further interviewing. The story delighted the young daughter. Now in real life the mother is completely bedridden in hospital, and the father lives

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by himself with Chunsuke, the dog. Although his daughter visits him once every month or two, when she is not there, he is lonely and unhappy, or in his words during their frequent international telephone conversations, “Hard. Sad. Painful. Dark.” (Itō 2022, 182; 2011, 202) As he, too, is hospitalized, the daughter flies from California yet again. At the hospital she assists him in using a urinal. Dad couldn’t see his penis from above, but I could, so I grabbed it. It was smaller and droopier than any cock I’d ever handled. I feel bad even calling it a cock—it was a sex organ, yes, but it felt like a kid’s word might be more appropriate, weewee perhaps. (Itō 2022, 159; 2011, 210) The daughter then adds new lines in her mind to her father’s fairy tale: “Now, the wee-wee, who had selected the unhappy beauty out of three thousand beautiful women, was old, / Drooping, / Hissing, gurgling, splashing / Into the urinal” (Itō 2022, 190; slightly modified, 2011, 212). The father’s love for his wife and their young daughter, expressed in the tale with a warm, childlike humor, becomes something sad and pathetic. However, the episode has a subtle kind of humor that is strangely soothing even though the sadness and pain are still there. The humor also has a subversive aspect as it depicts parents as (once) sexual beings. As a contemporary Ame no Uzume, Itō is free of sexual repression. After visiting her father, the daughter goes to another hospital to see her mother. The daughter is constantly on the move, just as the protagonists of sekkyō-bushi. While on the plane, the daughter reads The Heart Sutra and is deeply moved by the “Hymn to Jizō.” Jizō is the protector of children. In order to share the outpouring love and sadness evoked by the text with her bedridden mother, the daughter translates the “Hymn to Jizō” impromptu into modern Japanese. Hearing the daughter (whose name the mother, originally from Tokyo, pronounces with the Edo accent as Shiromi) retelling the Hymn, the mother, too, is deeply moved: Oh, oh, she said, as if wringing out the words. Anyone who has been a mother Remembers deep in their bones A thing or two about children— The children they gave birth to The children they didn’t give birth to The children they raised The children they didn’t raise The children they lost Shiromi too, me too, my mother too… (Itō 2022, 193–94; 2011, 215) This is another “paradise on paper,” to use Ogino’s term, encompassing generations of mother-daughter relationships. In Itō’s text there are many other examples of generations of women sharing the emotions and wisdom of life. In a chapter titled “Driven by despair, female followers of the Thorn Puller attack my husband,” the narrator visits the Thorn-Puller Jizō in Sugamo, Tokyo, with her husband. This Jizō is believed to have healing powers, and the area, nicknamed “Grandmas’ Harajuku,” is particularly crowded on the fourth, fourteenth, and twenty-fourth of each month. Itō combines this popular religion, which her mother is 262

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familiar with, with a sekkyō-bushi tale of “Oguri Hangan” as well as Euripides’s The Bacchae. Since the day she and her husband went to Sugamo was the twenty-fourth of December, the whole area was packed with old women, who suddenly noticed the “Santa-san,” that is, the tall, white-bearded husband of Shiromi, and are about to attack him violently, presumably as they thought Santa was invading the Thorn-Puller site. The scene has a touch of magic realism mixed with comic-horror. Just then, Shiromi finds her high school senpai (senior to her), who rescues the couple from the mob and takes them to her nearby home where she lives with her elderly mother. The mother-daughter pair speaks exactly like Shiromi’s mother and grandmother. She urges her husband, who is on the verge of collapse from the shock of the Bacchae-like mob: Listen, this is the language of my senpai, of her mother, of my aunt, of my grandmother, of my mother. This is our language. When I grow to be an old lady, this is how I want to speak, I want to use my language as our language. (Itō 2022, 252, slightly modified; 2011, 286) This also brings to mind a celebration of women’s work, including literature and cooking, and their solidarity. On many occasions, Itō has praised and “borrowed voices” of women poets of older generations such as Ishigaki Rin (1920–2004) and Ishimure Michiko (1927–2018). As for men, Shiromi realizes that “men are all gakiami,” in reference to Oguri Hangan in sekkyō-bushi.15 The dashing hero, Oguri, is murdered and brought back to life as a deformed, disabled zombie-like figure called gakiami. Thanks to his brave, resilient, and resourceful wife, Terute, Oguri eventually regains his health, appearance, abilities, and status. Parodying the beginning of Arthur Rimbaud’s “L’Éternité,” Shiromi, the narrator, says: “I’ve found it” “What?” “My gakiami”: The young, sexy man in the photos [i.e., her husband in his late thirties] would have been lots of fun, but maybe my worn-out, old husband was what I’d needed all along in a man—even if he was just a scentless shadow of his former self, unable to walk or bend easily or get it up. I had wanted to be with him, I went to such lengths just for us to be together, and now, I had him. (Itō 2022, 252; 2011, 285). The joyous discovery is neither of “eternity” nor hope for regaining youth and power; it is the discovery that the gakiami is the partner she was looking for all the time to share the michiyuki journey of life/living. This frank, poetic, and life-affirming sekkyō-bushi, The Thorn Puller concludes, most becomingly and cheerfully, with the youthful voices of the daughters playing on a sled, shouting, and screaming, which to the poet’s ears sounds like: “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive! I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive!” (Itō 2022, 296; 2011, 339). Itō’s narrative encompasses multiple voices taken from a wide range of texts as well as from life. As a contemporary Ame no Uzume, she has no compunction in using what may seem vulgar to construct her poetic narrative, and like Uzume, her words (including “borrowed voices”) and performance create laughter. The laughter, which is situated in some difficult, even devastating, circumstances, revitalizes not only people within the text, but also readers with their own respective hardships.

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Kanai Mieko: The pleasure of perpetual reading and writing Unlike The River Cassis and The Thorn Puller, Kanai Mieko’s Kasutoro no shiri (2017, The Ass of Castro) has no overt autobiographical elements. Kanai marked the fiftieth anniversary of her literary debut in 2017, and the blurb for her novel reads: “the greatest masterpiece compiling her fifty-year literary career.” It is indeed an elaborate compilation of her favorite motifs and themes, and at the same time a parodic tribute to the pleasure of reading and writing fiction. The title is a play on Stendhal’s L’Abbesse de Castro (The Abbess of Castro), or to be more precise, its Japanese translation by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kasutoro no ama.16 In Kanai’s novel, one of the protagonists believes the reading of the last Chinese character in the translated title (ama, meaning abbess) is shiri, bottom. This pathetic, middle-aged man abandons his job as a clothing wholesaler and leaves his wife and children in order to pursue his passionate love for a striptease dancer. Neither of the lovers is a Stendhalian hero or heroine. Although the abbess/ass error may seem a puerile joke, it is a part of Kanai’s affectionate and critical tribute to Tanizaki and his pathetically infatuated male protagonists such as Jōji of Chijin no ai (1924, Naomi*) and Shōzō of Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna (1936, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women*). However, the novel is not a simple parody of one or two specific texts; rather, it is a meta-fiction and a parody of the shōsetsu genre, including classic and modern romance novels. As such, it engulfs, teases, criticizes, and celebrates numerous texts, not only novels, essays, and letters but also films and visual arts. Kanai, who is also a prolific film and literary critic and essayist, often inserts essays into her fiction.17 It is one of many ways in which she highlights the omnivorous nature (and possibilities) of the novel as a genre. The Ass of Castro begins with one essay and ends with another, and in between there are ten linked short stories. The linking thread in this volume—and, as a matter of fact, many other works by this author—is the theme of the never-ending pleasure of reading and writing, or, to borrow Mario Vargas Llosa’s title of his book on Flaubert, The Perpetual Orgy. The first essay begins with a statement that when she (or the first-person narrator/persona) received a request for an essay on the topic of the “‘Happiness’ of a novelist,” she happened to be reading Tanizaki in order to check if her memory of what she wanted to use in her novel from Fūten rōjin nikki (1961, Diary of a Mad Old Man*) was accurate. By sheer coincidence she discovers an old bookmark with her handwritten note: “happiness of a novelist!!” This refers to Tanizaki’s comment in his essay written in the early 1960s: “From time to time I feel like writing an essay on ‘The Happiness of Being a Novelist’” (Kanai 2017, 10, quoting Tanizaki 1974, v. 19, 421). This happiness, according to Tanizaki, signifies the freedom of shutting himself up in his solitary world, away from his family or any external interference, and indulging himself in the pleasure of rearranging his imaginary dolls—just as children do with their favorite dolls. Then he declares: “I would never step out of this solitary world again.” Quoting this, Kanai (2017, 13) remarks: this passage may well seem uncivilized, elegant, thickheaded, childish, and senile; yet whenever I read this conclusion—admittedly I am reading it with the hindsight that two years after writing this, Tanizaki died—I cannot help bursting into laughter, and then feel awestricken.

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In a sense, it is an affectionate and yet critical commentary on “the fortress of defensive self-absorption behind the walls of which the modern novel has sheltered itself,” to use McKeon’s comment quoted above. Kanai’s (meta-)essay within the novel amplifies and complicates the pleasure of reading and writing by meandering through a multi-layered labyrinth of texts and commentaries by Tanizaki and other writers such as Gotō Meisei, Ōoka Shōhei, Nakamura Mitsuo, Gustav Flaubert, and Roland Barthes. There are numerous examples of text within text within text and so on, with each repetition adding new meaning. To illustrate the “Happiness of being a novelist,” Kanai also quotes Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet dated December 23, 1853, in which he tells his lover (after twelve hours spent intensively writing Madame Bovary) the ecstatic pleasure of writing, of total immersion in the world of his own imagination: “For instance, today I was a man and a woman, a lover and his mistress, walking through the forest on autumn afternoon, underneath yellowing leaves. Moreover, I was a horse, foliage, wind, the words the lovers exchanged, and the vermillion sun that made them half close their love-drenched eyes.” (Kanai 2017, 29) By quoting this letter, Kanai builds on the premise of the joy of imagining and writing, highlighting the endless possibilities of the “I” becoming all manner of animate and inanimate things. Thus the world of fiction becomes limitless, with new openings, both inwardly within the writer’s mind, and outwardly towards the reader. This letter also presents an example of lovers within a narrative (Madame Bovary) within a letter (from Flaubert to Colet), the motif that is repeated with almost infinite variations in the following chapters of The Ass of Castro. Immediately after the above quotation, Kanai (2017, 30) notes: “since books present worlds consisting of nothing but words, Madame Bovary, too, is I” (Bovarī-fujin mo watashi da). It is not “I, too, am Madame Bovary,” but “I” can be anything, including Madame Bovary, through reading and writing. To illustrate all these elements—parody, allusions, queering, and use of letter form, and the perpetual pleasure of reading/writing, let us look at the last two fictional chapters (before the final essay), which are narrated by a male dancer specializing in an erotic show involving gold body painting.18 His performing partner is the girlfriend of the middle-aged semiilliterate man who keeps making all sorts of linguistic errors such as the ama/shiri confusion. In letters to his friend/lover, the male dancer relates the unthinkably silly mistakes that the pathetic man makes. Although no name or detail of the letter’s recipient is mentioned, towards the end of the fictional part of the novel, the reader discovers, in a dazzling moment, the unexpected—if still vague and anonymous—identity of the second-person recipient of the letters (Kanai 2017, 274–75). I refrain from explaining the detail here and spoiling the reader’s pleasure. Such epiphanic moments are effectively situated in Kanai’s texts, often at or towards the end of the novel, inviting the reader to go back to the first page and read through the book with this new insight, which is another example of the “perpetual orgy” of reading. The errors of the semi-illiterate man as reported in the letters written by the male dancer create nonsensically hilarious moments. Sometimes the letter writer has no idea of the meaning of the mistakes that he relates. The reader of his letters and this novel can guess at least some of them before the letter-writer realizes what they are supposed to mean, thus enjoying the dramatic irony. No matter how silly and absurd these mistakes may be, there are surprisingly profound and poetic moments regarding this man’s words and deeds. Kanai Chapter 17: Humor and Aging

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skillfully convinces readers that, like Madame Bovary, this man of errors is not only Kanai but also her narrator-dancer as well as us, readers. Although The Ass of Castro depicts the passage of time using various novelistic devices, and the theme of aging is subtly presented, it is in Kaiteki seikatsu kenkyū (2006, A Study of Comfortable Life, bunko edition 2010) and its sequel Okatte taiheiki (2014, The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen)19 that issues surrounding old age are extensively explored with wicked humor and irony. The central character in these novels is an eccentric and egocentric woman in her sixties. This woman, Akiko-san, is an obsessive letter writer. While in A Study of Comfortable Life two of the seven chapters take the form of her letters, The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen consists of fifty letters written by Akiko-san and addressed to ten different friends and acquaintances. It is a witty and elaborate parody of the epistolary novel20 as well as a satire on contemporary Japanese society. In contrast to The Ass of Castro, which is mostly set in a pre-internet/email period, Akiko-san’s letter writing is certainly a revolt against contemporary communication technology. As Kanai herself commented in an interview, Akiko-san provides a critique of middle-class smugness.21 Even when her judgment is based on an error or misunderstanding, she “plays the role of a trickster.” Furthermore, Akiko-san’s letters “can be read as a parody of [Kanai’s] own novels, as they consist of descriptions that go astray without a theme,” and, as we may have guessed, “I am Akiko-san” (Kanai 2010, 286), needless to say, not in an autobiographical sense but in the Flaubertian sense. Intertextuality (or wider transtextuality, using Gérard Genette’s term to indicate all sorts of relationships between texts) in these Akiko-san texts is complex and elaborate, with references to Flaubert, Tanizaki, Gotō Meisei, and numerous others. The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen has an eight-page appendix listing films mentioned in Akiko-san’s letters. There are also references to Kanai’s own novels in the form of sequels and cameo appearances of some familiar characters from her Mejiro series.22 The heroine of Bunshō kyōshitsu (1985, Creative Writing Class), suitably named Ema, reminding us of Emma Bovary, was in this earlier text a naïve housewife writing about her affair with a married man for an adult creative writing class she attended. In the Akiko-san narratives, Ema turns out to be the beautiful senior girl student that Akiko-san used to admire at school several decades earlier. Ema’s son-in-law, Nakano, who was also featured in earlier Mejiro novels, appears in A Study of Comfortable Life as well as in The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen. Even the piece titled “In lieu of an afterword” takes the form of Akiko-san’s letter to “Mieko-sama.” Dear Mieko, It was such a great surprise and honor to spend a pleasant afternoon with you. I understand that you go to the same exercise class as Satō Ema and that you used to live near the art studio of Ema’s father, Mr. Satō.23 I was so happy when Ema introduced me to you at the Italian restaurant in Mejiro that—though I admit that I am not one of your loyal readers—I couldn’t help re-reading some of your novels out of nostalgia. (Kanai 2014, 302) Thus, the author of the novel is transformed into a character by her creation, and moreover, becomes the victim of Akiko-san’s unsolicited letter. Akiko-san happily tells Mieko-san how “both books and people live by expanding their experiences, connecting to one another 266

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by sharing something in common.” (305) This, in contrast to Tanizaki’s “happiness” in his closed world, is an open and “shared” happiness. The fearless Akiko-san writes on, saying that among Mieko-san’s novels, her favorite is Indian Summer* (1988) and that she is particularly fond of the essay entitled “Dear Letters” within the novel (Kanai; Aoyama & Hartley, trans., 2012, 109–10). While Indian Summer is an affectionate parody/pastiche of girls’ fiction, with the prominent motif of reading girls, Akiko-san’s letters can be regarded as fiction about aging girls in letter form. Many of the unfortunate recipients of her letters are friends from her school days. Since most of the main characters in The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen are in their sixties or older, they have various sorts of family, health, and financial issues. In A Study of Comfortable Life, Akiko-san herself is depicted as “an old miss” living with her elderly mother with dementia, and suffering from alcohol dependence. After her mother’s death, Akiko-san marries a solicitor, while some of her friends experience a series of health and family issues. Although the situations mentioned in the letters are quite serious, Akiko-san often includes wicked jokes and parody—as in the example of a letter to the newspaper editor. Having heard from a friend about someone else’s experience of looking after an incontinent father, Akiko-san concocts an essay titled “A urinal and a lamp” in the name of a (fictitious) seventy-three-year-old woman who looks after her father with dementia. This decent, caring daughter discovers that the Greek urn logo mark on the back cover of every Iwanami Shinsho (literally, new books from Iwanami), an iconic paperback series for enlightenment in humanities and science, is the same shape as the glass urinal that she carries for her father as he loiters around in the house. The conclusion of this parodic letter to the editor states the importance of reading even when one needs a urinal for oneself, for one’s father, or one’s husband. Akiko-san does not actually send this essay to a newspaper but attaches it to her letter to one of her friends. The letter to the editor reads like an ordinary miscellany written by an elderly middleclass woman who looks after her father with love, care, and humor. That it is not a true story but Akiko-san’s fiction may offend some readers, yet it creates a kind of “gray” humor that lays bare well-meaning (and self-complacent) humanism in serious matters such as caring for elderly family members at home. Moreover, given Iwanami Shinsho’s prestige in the maledominated humanities, its association with a urinal for the elderly father with dementia can certainly be regarded as a critique, or at least a teasing, of phallocentric intellectualism. Kanai treats her “knowing audiences” (Hutcheon 2006) with a feast of intertextuality. Some of the texts are easier to recognize than others. Even if the reader misses some points, there are plenty of other amusements. As is usual with satire, some readers may find the black or gray humor offensive, but then, that would not be a concern to Kanai or to Akiko-san.

Conclusion As we have seen, Ogino, Itō, and Kanai use comic and parodic techniques in their texts dealing with contemporary social issues surrounding old age. The situations depicted in The River Cassis and The Thorn Puller concern daughters looking after parents with a range of difficulties, including geographical distance, clashes with other family or personal commitments and work, the deterioration of the parents’ mental and physical conditions, and the daughters’ own health issues. In the Akiko-san texts by Kanai, on the other hand, care for the

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elderly is one of many other topics, but when it appears, it is accompanied by “gray,” and to some readers possibly unfunny, humor. Each of the texts examined here takes a hybrid mode. Ogino and Itō adopt the pseudo“I-novel” mode, crafting the main narrator/persona to be easily identifiable with the authors, but they subvert it by bringing in many other modes and devices. In Ogino’s case, the central idea is “parody as rhetoric,” whereas Itō’s principal mode is the sekkyō-bushi with its theme of a michiyuki journey for life. Itō replaces the “Lego blocks for tears” of the sekkyō-bushi with Lego blocks for life-affirming laughter. Kanai rejects the autobiographical mode and invents fictitious characters, including those with eccentric and absurd features. Despite their errors and problematic words and conducts, they are effective as tricksters. The “perpetual orgy” of reading-writing-reading manifests itself in ubiquitous and intriguing intertextuality and meta-fiction/essay (i.e., fiction about fiction writing; essays about essay writing). Kanai’s texts are full of humor, some of which may be corrosive. The butt of derision, however, is not the obsessive and intellectually challenged characters; rather it is middle-class complacency. All three writers show the fall of male dominance without hostility. In Ogino’s text, the father is placed in a purgatory whereas the daughter-mother-grandmother trio is in a paradise. Itō re-writes the father’s fairy tale by replacing its protagonist with a wee-wee. She also recognizes her partner as her gakiami for life. Male characters in Kanai’s novels tend to be given comic-pathetic roles, or like Akiko-san’s husband, placed on the very periphery of the story, if not completely forgotten. There are many other contemporary novels that can be regarded as a parody or an alternative of the aged-care novel with varying degrees of humor. Nakajima Kyōko’s FUTON (2003), which is a brilliant parody of Tayama Katai’s Futon (1907, The Quilt*), includes an interesting side story about a kind of love triangle involving the heroine’s ninety-five-yearold great-grandfather, his “helper” and her girlfriend. Mizumura Minae’s Shinbun shōsetsu: Haha no isan (2012, Inheritance from Mother*) combines a generic parody of shinbun shōsetsu (newspaper serialization) with a specific reference to Ozaki Kōyō’s popular novel Konjiki yasha (1897–1902, The golden demon, serialized in the Yomiuri shinbun) as well as “I-novel” elements. Tawada Yōko’s acclaimed post-Fukushima dystopian novel, Kentōshi (2014, The Lantern Messenger; translated as The Emissary* [US] and The Last Children of Tokyo* [UK]), can be read as a reverse care novel in which a healthy and hard-working centenarian protagonist looks after his frail great-grandson. Parody and humor will continue to help us question and revitalize life and literature.

Notes 1 For a brief overview of “The (in)visibility of gender in discourses on Japanese humor,” see Aoyama 2015a, 26–30. One of the few exceptions to such invisibility is vol.10 of PAJLS (Orbaugh & Mostow 2009), which features parody in Japanese literature, including two papers on Kanai Mieko (by Atsuko Sakaki and Tomoko Aoyama), and one each on Mizumura Minae (by Eve Zimmerman) and Ogino Anna (by Caterina Mazza). Regarding Ame no Uzume, see Aoyama 2018. 2 The title involves a pun on the homophonic doku for “reading” and doku for “poison.” 3 This is the title of Ogino’s essay on Rabelais, “Retorikku to shite no parodii,” which is included in Ogino, Natsuishi, & Fukumoto (eds.) 1997, 104–11.

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4 There is a large corpus of important studies of the shishōsetsu (e.g., by Tomi Suzuki, Edward Fowler, and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit). A recent addition is Michalak-Pikulska & Kasza 2021. Ogino often teased the genre in her earlier works. The narrator of “Hashire Tokatonton” (Run, Tokatonton), for example, is a female futon owned by Dazai. She remarks that his fiction “apparently carries the triple sufferings of debts, illness, and cuckoldry.” (Ogino 1991, 200) We may also note that Futon is the title of Tayama Katai’s novel that is often regarded as an early representative of the shishōsetsu. 5 The title is taken from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “La Rivière de Cassis.” Ogino includes her translation of the poem. 6 A Kansai dialect-speaking mother appears as early as in Ogino’s 1989 Akutagawa Prize nominee short story, “Uchi no okan ga ocha o nomu” (My Mum Drinks Tea). Ogino’s real life mother is the abstract artist Emi Kinuko (1923–2015), whose paintings are used in many of Ogino’s book covers, including The River Cassis. 7 For convenience’s sake, I call them “chapters” but they are more like linked short stories. This also applies to Itō’s Togenuki and Kanai’s Kasutoro no shiri. 8 See Aoyama 2015b for a discussion of theories on mother-daughter relations and an analysis of Shōno Yoriko’s Haha no hattatsu (The Development of the Mother, 1996) and Sano Yōko’s Shizuko-san (2008). 9 In real life, Ogino has continued to work as professor of French literature at Keio University, while also supporting her mother’s work as an abstract painter. 10 The “shamaness” is from Kido Shuri’s comment and the “goddess” is from Minashita Kiriu’s. Both are quoted by Jeffrey Angles in his “Introduction” to the special issue of the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. on Itō (Angles 2007, 7–8). The introduction is also available as the “Translator’s Introduction” for Killing Kanoko (Itō 2009, vii). 11 There are book-length English translations by Jeffrey Angles (Itō 2009, 2014) and a German translation by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschenereit. Both translators have also translated The Thorn Puller into English and German respectively. The above-mentioned special issue of USJWJ on Itō includes a Foreword by Ueno Chizuko, an introduction by Angles, articles by Angles, Joanne Quimby, and Kyoko Omori, some translations, and a Bibliography. Some of Itō’s poetry readings and interviews are available on YouTube. I am grateful to Jeffrey Angles for sharing his draft translation and introduction for The Thorn Puller with me. In the following I use his translation for quotations from the text. 12 Itō (2015) translated three sekkyō-bushi tales: “Sanshō-dayū,” “Shintokumaru,” and “Oguri Hangan.” 13 Angles’s translation, Itō 2022, 123–24. In the Japanese bunko edition (Itō 2011), this is on p.162. Hereinafter I indicate the translation page first, followed by the Japanese page. Angles uses italics to indicate unusual or foreignized phrases (e.g. English-sounding expressions in Japanese sentences) and quotations from various texts. Here, all of Aiko’s “Uh-oh”s (“A, ō” written in hiragana in the original) are shown in italics, which I indicate by adding underlines in the quotation. 14 When Itō presented at the University of Queensland in November 2019, she read excerpts from this episode of The Thorn Puller as well as the urinal episode discussed below. 15 The story of Oguri has been adapted into many forms of performing arts such as modern kabuki, butoh, opera, and Takarazuka, as well as into a manga. 16 Tanizaki used an English translation of the novel. The translation was published in the January, February, and April 1928 issues of Josei but remained unfinished (Tanizaki 1974, v. 23, 597). 17 Indian Summer* (1988, English translation 2012) includes six essays and two short stories inserted into the primary narrative, presented as essays written by the first-person protagonist-narrator’s novelist aunt. 18 The “gold-dust” dance brings intertextuality, with its association with the cabaret dance show that Kara Jūrō (b. 1940) and Ri Reisen (I Yeo-seon, b. 1942) performed in the mid-1960s to raise funds for their avantgarde theater Jōkyō Gekijō (Situation Theater). There are also references to Tanizaki’s “Konjiki no shi” (1914, The Golden Death) and the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger. In Kanai’s narrative, the kind of cabaret attraction that the protagonists perform in the early 1970s is presented as something that is already out of fashion and which lacks the subversive energy of the underground theater performers. 19 The title is a parody of Tanizaki’s 1963 novel, Daidokoro taiheiki (translated as The Maids* by Michael P. Cronin). Taiheiki (The Chronicle of Great Peace) is the medieval text. Kanai’s earlier work Ren’ai taiheiki (1995, The Chronicle of Love) is a two-volume novel about four sisters’ loves and marriages, very much like Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki (1936–1941, The Makioka Sisters*). Both daidokoro and okatte mean kitchen. While

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daidokoro is still commonly used (together with the more modern-sounding kitchin), okatte, which sounds more feminine, is almost obsolete. 20 Some classic examples include: Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, and Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Jean Webster’s popular work of girls’ fiction, Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) is another example. Modern Japanese writers such as Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, and Murakami Haruki also produced epistolary novels. 21 See Aoyama, “Writing along with and against the Smugness of Writing: Kanai Mieko’s A Study of the Comfortable Life” in Orbaugh & Mostow (eds.) 2009, 244-61. 22 Formerly called “Mejiro tetralogy,” with Creative Writing Class (1985), Tama ya (1982, Oh, Tama!*), Koharu-biyori (1988, Indian Summer*), Dōkeshi no koi (1990, A Clown’s Love), and Kanojo(tachi) ni tsuite watashi no shitte iru ni, san no kotogara (2000, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (and Her Friends)). 23 This is Akiko-san’s error. Ema’s father is Mr. Watanabe. Satō is her husband’s surname.

References Auestad, R.A. (1998). Ogino Anna and parodic language. Japan Forum 10(1), 31–45. DOI: 10.1080​ /09555809808721602. Angles, J. (2007). Introduction: Itō Hiromi, writing woman. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 32: 7–16. Aoyama, T. (1994). The love that poisons: Japanese parody and the new literacy. Japan Forum 6(1): 35–46. DOI: 10.1080/09555809408721499. ———. (2005). Embroidering girls’ texts: Fashion and feminism in the fiction of Kanai Mieko. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 29. ———. (2015a). Translating humour in Kanai Mieko’s texts. In F. Benocci & M. Sonzogni (eds.), Translation Transnationalism World Literature: Essays in Translation Studies 2010–2014 (pp. 23–43). Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker. ———. (2015b). Narratives of mother-daughter reconciliation: New possibilities in ageing Japan. In L. Raith (ed.), Mothers at the Margins: Stories of Challenge, Resistance and Love (pp. 245–60). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. (2018). Ame no Uzume crosses boundaries. In L. Miller & R. Copeland (eds.), Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History (pp 34–50). Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). Rabelais and His World (H. Iswolsky, trans.). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Furukawa, H., Okada, T., Itō, H. & Ishii, S. (2019). Sakka to tanoshimu koten [Enjoy classic literature with modern writers]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha. Genette, G. and Lewin, J.E. (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirata, H., Inouye, C., Napier, S. & Thornber, K. (eds.). (2012). The Poetics of Ageing: Confronting, Resisting, and Transcending Mortality in the Japanese Narrative Arts. PAJLS, vol. 13. Hutcheon, L. (1985). A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen. ———. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Ishigaki, R. (2015). Ishigaki Rin shishū [A collection of Ishigaki Rin’s poetry]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Itō, H. (2009). Killing Kanoko (J. Angles, trans.). Notre Dame, Ind.: Action Books. (Original work published 1985) ———. (2011). Togenuki: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi [The Thorn Puller]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2014). Wild Grass on the Riverbank. (J. Angles, trans.). Notre Dame, Ind.: Action Books. (Original work published 2005) ———. (2015). Shin’yaku sekkyō-bushi [A New Translation of sekkyo-bushi]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. ———. (2022.) The Thorn Puller: New Tales of Sugamo Jizō. (J. Angles, trans.). Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. (Original work published 2007) Kanai, M. (2010). Kaiteki seikatsu kenkyū [A Study of Comfortable Life]. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, Asahi Bunko. ———. (2009). The Word Book. (P. McCarthy, trans.). Champaign & London: Dalkey Archive Press. (Original work published 1979)

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———. (2012). Indian Summer. (T. Aoyama & B. Hartley, trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series. (Original work published 1988) ———. (2014). Okatte taiheiki [The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. ———. (2017). Kasutoro no shiri [The Ass of Castro]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. (2019). Oh, Tama!: A Mejiro Novel. (T. Aoyama & P. McCarthy, trans.). Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. (Original work published 1982) Keene, D. (1956). The tale of the bamboo cutter. Monumenta Nipponica 11(4): 329–55. DOI: 10.2307/2382982. Kimbrough, R.K. (2013). Wondrous Brutal Fictions. New York: Columbia University Press. McKeon, M. (2001). Ogino Anna’s gargantuan play in Tales of Peaches. In R.L. Copeland & E. RamirezChristensen (eds.), The Father-Daughter Plot (pp 327–68). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Michalak-Pikulska, B. & Kasza, J.W. (2021). The “I” in the Making: Rethinking the Japanese Shishōsetsu in a Global Age. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang GmbH. Nakajima, K. (2007). FUTON. Tokyo: Kōdansha Bunko. Ogino, A. (1991). Watashi no aidokusho [My Love-Hate Affair with Books]. Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten. ———. (1993). Madonna no henshin shikkaku [Madonna’s Failed Metamorphosis]. Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten. ———. (2010). Paradox at play: Ango as Japanese humanist. In J. Dorsey and D. Slaymaker (eds.), Literary Mischief Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War (pp. 40–66). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. (2017). Kashisu-gawa [The River Cassis]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Ogino, A, Natsuishi, B. & Fukumoto, I. (eds.). (1997). Parodii no Seiki [The Century of Parody]. Tokyo: Yūzankaku Shuppan. Orbaugh, S. & Mostow, J.S. (eds.). (2009). Parody. PAJLS Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 10. Rose, M.A. (1993). Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tanizaki, J. (1974). Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū [Collected Works of Tanizaki Junichirō]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha. Tawada, Y. (2017). Kentōshi. [The Emissary]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2018). The Emissary. (M. Mitsutani, trans.). New York: New Directions Books. (Original work published 2017) U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 32 (2007) (special issue on Itō Hiromi).

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Part 7 Colonies, War, Aftermath

Chapter 18 Women and War: Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko Noriko J. Horiguchi Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko were highly acclaimed women writers during Japan’s empire-building era. While they—and their fictional characters in the homeland and outer territories of modern Japan—refused the ideological assignments that subjected their minds and bodies to nation-building, they also became active and sometimes aggressive participants in the creation of empire and its war efforts. This chapter explains the contradictory ways in which Japanese women envisioned and experienced the modern empire and—despite their marginalization because of their gender, class, ethnicity, and/or race—emerged as active agents both against and for the war efforts of the Japanese empire.

Introduction In attempts to understand the specific roles women played during the military aggression of the Japanese empire, scholars have for the most part presented Japanese women as (1) sacred mothers or goddesses who protected life and peace; (2) passive victims of men, the Japanese government, or Western imperial powers; (3) resilient strugglers at the fringes of society; or (4) artists and activists resisting state-driven nationalism. These four positions tend to smooth over the roles of women who actively participated in the formation of nationalism as a discursive tool serving Japan’s expansion as an empire. As historian Suzuki Yūko points out, in the 1970s and the 1980s the paradigm shifted from viewing women as victims to exposing them as aggressors when the following question was raised: Why did notable feminists such as Hiratsuka Raichō, Ichikawa Fusae, and Takamure Itsue make a commitment to imperialism? Since then, scholars of women’s history have argued the value and effects of exposing the support of female artists and intellectuals for imperial war efforts (see Nishikawa 1982; Suzuki 1986; Kano 1987). For example, Suzuki investigates female intellectuals’ activities during the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods and challenges what she characterizes as the long-established framework that has uncritically vindicated the aggressors among them. In contrast, sociologist Ueno Chizuko characterizes Suzuki’s approach as a historical perspective of “accusation” and instead suggests

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that women’s decisions and actions in support of imperial Japan were determined by the historical and political contexts of the time. Nevertheless, raising questions about women’s engagement in the imperial discourse does not amount to an accusation of past historical figures—nor was women writers’ active participation in the discourse, practices, and institutions of the empire inevitable. There were several options for writers during the war, including silence, resistance, cooperation, or a return to classics and tradition. The following analysis helps the reader understand that women were not simply passive victims or active participants but played both roles simultaneously. Thus, it acknowledges the effects of power generated by women’s discourse and the ways some women tried to improve their status and negotiate a larger role in society both by resisting and by incorporating nationalism, militarism, and the empire. This chapter examines the prose and poetry produced by the highly acclaimed women writers Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) and Hayashi Fumiko (1904–1951), whose work has generally been seen as moving away from the nationalist discourse on women. In what follows, I analyze the process by which Yosano and Hayashi—and their fictional characters in the homeland and outer territories of modern Japan—refused the ideological assignments that subjected their minds and bodies to nation-building, and yet became active and sometimes aggressive participants in the creation of empire and its war efforts. This becomes evident in my analysis of the discourse on women’s procreational and migrant bodies as the site of changes that ran the gamut from resistance to an imperial discourse that demarcated and expanded the border/body of Japan all the way to conformity with that discourse. Through this analysis I explain the contradictory ways in which Japanese women envisioned and experienced the modern empire and—despite their marginalization because of their gender, class, ethnicity, and/or race—emerged as active agents both against and for the war efforts of the Japanese empire.

Narratives on and by Yosano Akiko Yosano Akiko is among the most important writers of modern Japanese women’s literature, along with Higuchi Ichiyō and Hayashi Fumiko (Hasegawa et al. 2007). Yosano’s “colossal capacity to produce and reproduce” (Watanabe 1998, 7) has been acknowledged by many critics: while bearing thirteen children and raising the eleven who survived infancy, she translated classical Japanese literary works; wrote biographies, novellas, children’s literature, essays, and lectures; and composed an estimated 50,000 poems. (Kawade Shobō Shinsha 1991, 216–19). Most of the many studies on her cast Yosano as (1) a poet who reformed the Japanese tradition of poetry through her innovative use of language to freely convey “the direct, transparent, unmediated expression of the inner life” (Beichman 2002, 113); (2) a rebel who challenged militarism and protected peace; and (3) an individualist or liberal feminist who fought for women’s rights and empowerment in the face of state-driven nationalist ideas. Absent from these approaches is any view of Yosano as a political writer, especially with respect to her affinities with nationalism, empire, and its war efforts. Pioneering contributions to the study of women and the empire include Steve Rabson’s essay “Yosano Akiko on War,” which correlates the changes in her writing with the chronology of her life and the history of modern Japan. Rabson (1991, 65) dates Yosano’s support of the empire to the trip she and her husband, Tekkan, took to Manchuria and Mongolia in 1928.

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Based on the position that Yosano’s writings were enmeshed in power relationships, the following discussion examines how her writing challenges the state-driven nationalism on women yet simultaneously celebrates war and reaffirms the expansion of the empire. This paradox is nowhere more evident than in her depiction of mobility and female procreational bodies. In her poems and prose, the body emerges as the strategic site where women can move from a condition of stagnation to one of progress, emancipation, and empowerment. It is, however, also the body in Yosano’s texts—especially the female procreational body— that enforces the state discourse on the expansion of the empire and its war efforts. Thus, although Yosano uses the concept of mobility to disconnect the bodies of women from the state’s definitions of them within the space of the homeland (naichi), she also uses women’s reproductive corporeality to reconnect women with the empire and its militant expansionism, as explored below. Yosano as anti-war, personal, and apolitical When critics do consider Yosano’s politics, they often emphasize her resistance to the state and war as reflected, so it is understood, in her 1904 poem “Kimi shini tamōkoto nakare” (Brother, Do Not Give Your Life*): Oh, my brother, I weep for you. Do not give your life. Last-born among us, You are the most beloved of our parents. Did they make you grasp the sword And teach you to kill? Did they raise you to the age of twenty-four, Telling you to kill and die? Heir to our family name, You will be master of this store, old and honored, in Sakai. Brother, do not give your life. For you, what does it matter Whether Port Arthur fortress falls or not? The code of merchant houses says nothing about this. Brother, do not give your life. His Majesty the Emperor Goes not himself into the battle. Could he, with such deeply noble heart, Think it an honor for men To spill one another’s blood And die like beasts?

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Oh, my brother, in that battle Do not give your life. Think of Mother, who lost Father just last autumn. How much lonelier is her grief at home Since you were drafted. Even as we hear about peace in this Great Imperial Reign, Her hair turns whiter by the day … (Yosano quoted in and translated by Rabson 1991, 45–46) Contemporaneous male critics dismissed any political meanings in the poem. According to the poet Ken’nan (1904, quoted in Rabson 1991, 52), it simply expressed Yosano’s wish for her brother’s safe return from the battlefield, which hardly constituted “dangerous thoughts.” Nakagawa Yatsuhiro (1999, 142) maintained that “Akiko’s poetry sings passions of a certain time. We must not extract from her poetry political ideas at our own whimsy.” Noda Utarō (1991, 92) stated that “Akiko is passionate but can never be called an anti-war thinker.” Thus the free flow of emotions should not be equated with ideology or politics. Yosano’s own statements about her works complemented, and perhaps influenced, interpretations of her writing as apolitical. When “Brother, Do Not Give Your Life” was criticized as anti-war and anti-state, Yosano dismissed any political meaning, writing, “As a woman, why should I sing a song like the present war song?” (Yosano 1904a, 19). Other contemporaneous critics, however, condemned Yosano as a ranshin (unpatriotic) and a zokushi (traitor) who should be punished as a criminal (Ōmachi Keigetsu 1905, quoted in Kawade Shobō Shinsha 1991, 74). Still others acknowledged Yosano’s resistance against the state doctrine that demanded the emperor’s subjects to sacrifice their lives for him as the paternal head of the family empire. Historian Vera Mackie (1997, 60) explains that Yosano placed the individual family above the family empire, and that her insistence on independence, rather than passive support, marks resistance to state-driven nationalism and militarism during the Russo-Japanese War. With the focus on this poem, Yosano’s many postwar critics have reimagined her stance against war as one that stressed peace. Rabson makes this point in his examination of the first biography of Yosano, written by Yūri Kaoru after the war. Yūri wrote: “With the new Japan embarking as a peaceful nation, we Japanese can be proud that in our past we had a woman who so loved peace and advocated it so courageously” and that “the antiwar philosophy expressed in this poem and her hatred of military men and bureaucrats permeated her whole life” (Yūri 1948, quoted in Rabson 1991, 64). Indeed, Yosano condemned militarism in Japan in 1918 as “barbarian thinking,” and claimed that militarism “is the responsibility of us women to eradicate in a year” (Yūri 1948, quoted in Rabson 1991, 63). Shifting perspectives in Yosano’s writing The idea that Yosano was a rebel who challenged militarism and protected peace throughout her life is based almost entirely on “Brother, Do Not Give Your Life.” The following discussion explores other poems and essays she wrote, including her 1928 travelogue Manmō yūki (Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia*). My analysis demonstrates that voices and positions

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in Yosano’s texts shift from disconnection to connection with the nationalist and militant discourse that supported the expansion of the empire.1 On the one hand, Yosano’s writing questions the state-driven “nationalization” of women and asserts that Japan does not determine, or define, women. In the March 1918 issue of Fujin kōron, for example, Yosano participated in the bosei hogo ronsō (motherhood protection debate), writing against Hiratsuka Raichō’s position on the desirability of state protection for the maternal body: I cannot agree with the demand of the European women’s movements for the state’s special economic protection of women during pregnancy and childbirth. I, who feel that it is slave morality for women to be dependent on men because of their procreational role, must refuse dependency on the state for the very same reason. (Yosano 1918, quoted in and translated by Rodd 1991, 192) Yosano further asserts the potency of the procreational body as a proof of women’s strength and their superiority to men in “Ubuya monogatari” (1909, Tales of the Delivery Room): “It is strange that among those men who debate women’s issues, there are those who view women as being physically weak. What I want to ask these people is whether a man’s body could bear childbirth” (Yosano 1909, quoted in and translated by Rodd 1991, 180). She also elevates the value of giving birth to a supreme level: “There won’t be anything superior to the great role women play in giving birth to human beings” (Yosano 1909, reprinted in Kawade Shobō Shinsha 1991, 209). Thus, although she is known as an individualist or liberal feminist who stands in opposition to a maternalist feminist, Yosano’s texts share maternalist and radical feminist ideas by accepting the dichotomies of male versus female, by stressing the essential characteristics of the female, and by reversing the gender hierarchy and giving superior values to the female. On the other hand, Yosano’s writing celebrates the superiority of Japanese women’s bodies because of their fertility. Three years after the outbreak of World War I and the publication of her 1914 poem “Sensō” (War), discussed below, Yosano claimed that “the core characteristic of Japanese women, a source of pride for the world, lies in the high birth rate” (Yosano 1917, 98). Her 1904 “Open Letter” dismisses the glorification of women as mothers as well as the connection between the nation-state of Japan and women. In “War,” however, she reconnects Japan and women, and exhorts Japanese women to use their fertile bodies to bear more children for the empire, even stating that overpopulation inside Japan will cause no problem “as long as we can find places for children to emigrate” (Yosano 1917, 98). It is important to her that the high birth rate among Japanese women prove their strength and agency to reproduce for the empire and expand its population and territories. “Giving birth” therefore refers to the (re)creation not only of children and art but also of nation and empire. In Yosano’s writing, women’s empowerment is even more pronounced when it generates force for (instead of receiving protection from) the state and its expansionist agenda. Her poem “War” describes the female procreational body as follows: Now is the time to fight. Even I who dislike wars raise my spirit nowadays.

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The time has come for the spirit, flesh, and bone of the world to groan once and for all. The time for major labor pains has come. The time for the worries of birth has come. The world will even give birth to new life yet unknown by the baptism of rough bloodshed. What is it, if not the spirit that brings true peace to all humankind? Now is the time to fight by making any sacrifices. (Yosano 1914) At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when the Japanese state was redoubling its efforts to participate in the battles of the Western imperial powers (the Russian Empire, French Third Republic, and Great Britain), Yosano’s poem compares the power generated by the female reproductive body in labor to the war efforts of the world powers in generating peace. It is the female body, as the site of military power struggles, that sheds blood in pain to give birth to a new life—namely, peace in the world. If the female body is the battleground where wars are fought, then those who shed blood are the soldiers who die for the great causes of the state. By encompassing soldiers and using them as women’s body parts, Yosano’s writing on the reproductive capacity of the female body reconnects woman with the Japanese empire and its war efforts on the world stage. Conversely, women’s empowerment derives from their reproduction of the empire and its war efforts. Her 1914 poem “War” thus foreshadows the ideology of the Japanese empire in the text Kokutai no hongi (The Essence of the National Body), issued by the Ministry of Education in 1937: it is a strife which has peace at its basis with a promise to raise and to develop; and it gives life to things through its strife. … War, in this sense, is not by any means intended for the destruction, overpowering, or subjugation of others; and it should be a thing for the bringing about of great harmony, that is, peace, doing the work of creation by following the Way. (Tsunoda et al. 1958, 283) The celebratory discourse on reproduction of the empire and its war efforts had been evident in some of Yosano’s writings on Japanese women’s empowerment since the early 1910s. As we have seen, Yosano’s writing urges women to refuse the subjugation that state protection brings and move away from the central discourse of the state. Yet her protagonists also actively participate in the expansion of the empire and its war efforts in the outer territories (gaichi), where female bodies are re-inscribed into the state’s definitions of superior race/ ethnicity and the universality of Japan as a world power. Yosano’s discourse therefore moves toward a procreational faculty that reconnects the bodies of women, Japan, and the world.

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The female body and the body of empire I here turn to Yosano’s depictions of the bodies and spaces in the outer territories in her 1928 travelogue Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia. Three years before Japan’s colonization of Manchuria and the start of the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) there, Yosano and her husband Tekkan traveled to Manchuria and found themselves among the tourists and “continental drifters” (tairiku rōnin) who made up most Japanese residents there. By that time, Yosano wrote, “As a precaution against every eventuality … all Japanese women residents there had been evacuated, and only the male personnel from the South Manchuria Railway office remained.” Aware of “the local anti-Japanese climate,” Yosano realized that from the Chinese perspective she was a “lady warlord” of Japan (Yosano 1928, 66, 86), and that it was her Western clothes that especially alarmed the Chinese: While we were waiting, a crowd of people gathered around us. Their eyes were fastened particularly on me, with the Western clothes I was wearing, and because I associated this with anti-Japanese stories that I had circulated since the Jinan incident, I had a bit of an ominous sense. (Yosano 1928, 17) Jennifer Robertson (1998, 133) describes the Japanese empire as an “anti-colonial colonizer” that resisted the Western imperial encroachment on Asia and yet became an imperial power itself, dominating neighboring nations; the Western clothes that enwrapped Yosano as a “lady warlord” thus appeared in the eyes of Chinese to signify the Western(ized) imperial powers that had already invaded and dominated Manchuria. Despite, or perhaps because of, the heightened tension, Yosano’s travelogue attempts to re-create Manchuria as “gentle” and welcoming. She writes that “beautiful scenery” encompassing the ancient Chinese culture quietly “hugged the rail line”—that is, the engineering and technological “advancement” of the South Manchurian Railway Company (Yosano 1928, 29). Manchuria’s landscape is grandiose but appears to be tamable, and welcoming of economic development and Japan’s geopolitical expansion. As she travels from Mongolia to Manchuria, the countryside morphs in her writing into a Japanese garden, an extension of the Japanese empire: Nearby were paddy fields maintained, oddly enough, by the hot springs hotel, with frogs croaking and a thicket of trees reflected on the surface—the whole scene had a Japanese flavor to it (Yosano 1928, 54) The “paddy fields” were in fact maintained by Chinese and Korean farmers, who labored to meet the quotas of various crops to be delivered to Japanese authorities (Tamanoi 2009, 18). Yosano’s writing anesthetizes this power relationship between the Japanese empire and the people under its control, making it look natural and peaceful. Mariko Asano Tamanoi explains that “the ideology of the harmonious coexistence of Japan and China rose in response to an emerging Chinese nationalism contesting Japanese and Western imperialism” (Tamanoi 2009, 16). Behind the idea of Manchukuo as a racial and ethnic melting pot was the Manshū seinen renmei (Manchurian youth league) formed in 1928, the year Yosano traveled there. According to the League, “Japan and China” (Nik-Ka) coexisted as equals. At the same time, however, the League emphasized the importance of Chapter 18: Women and War

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the Japanese as the superior race in leading and enlightening other ethnic groups (minzoku shidō; Tamanoi 2009, 16). Yosano’s travelogue affirms the Manchukuo state’s official slogan of harmony among its thirty national, ethnic, and racial groups.2 Yet her text quickly changes from the celebration of harmony into re-creation of the dichotomies of Japan/China as new/old, wise/ignorant, truthful/misleading and superior/inferior. On “the Sino-Japanese issue from the perspective of a Japanese,” Yosano writes, although the South Manchurian Railway opens a path to Japanese and Manchurian coexistence and co-prosperity, Chinese warlords such as Zhang Huanxiang engage in “illegal” and “anti-foreign actions” (Yosano 1928, 56, 95). While denouncing the Chinese resistance, Yosano praises the “benevolent” and “sagacious” acts of the Japanese and displaces their military invasion and aggression. This point is repeated in her poem “Kōgan no shi” (1932, Rosy-Cheeked Death), where it is the “foolish” Chinese leaders’ deceptions, rather than Japanese atrocities, that have led Chinese soldiers to resist and “die like beasts.” Another poem, “Nihon kokumin asa no uta” (Citizens of Japan, A Morning Song), also written in 1932, a year after the Japanese colonization of Manchuria in 1931, extols the patriotic unity between the soldiers on the front lines and the women on the home front, “behind the guns” (jūgo). As translated by Rabson (1991, 59–60), it reads in part: And these men are not alone. Patriotic heroes with hearts like theirs Rise to the challenge wherever the Emperor’s forces go, To the north and to the south. And they are but one example. For we, too, the people behind the guns, Redouble our own courage many times over And rally everyone to the cause. Blood also courses in the eager hearts Of our countrymen who are not soldiers. They dedicate their lives day by day To serve on the nation’s behalf. […] Even I, a powerless woman, Am thus committed to our cause, As are those people, superior among us, Who carry out the esteemed ways of our peerless ancestors. Ah, the augustness of His Majesty’s Reign That inspires people’s hearts! It is a time that ignites our sense of duty, A time to unify in loyalty.

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This poem validates war for the sake of empire, and urges women and other noncombatants who are “behind the guns” to become one with Japan’s warriors in their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their common cause. As we have seen, Yosano has often been celebrated as a modern poet who championed freedom of expression, challenged the state’s war efforts, and opposed state protection of motherhood. The change in her writing from resistance against to support for the state discourse on empire has been understood to have taken place in the 1930s and 1940s, as Japan engaged in all-out war. I argue, however, that Yosano’s expansionist stance derived from her paradoxical discourse on the potency of the female bodies that give birth to, occupy, and move through the spaces of the empire of Japan. Although she calls for women’s independence, by constructing the world as the procreational body through which Japan participates in the conflicts of imperial powers, Yosano redefines the fecundity of women’s bodies as the source of empowerment for both women and the empire. Ironically, the universal values of humanity and the world in her writing were determined by the particularism of the female body and Japanese imperialism. Yosano’s poems and prose thus justify Japanese military aggression and the expansion of the Japanese empire.

Hayashi Fumiko in the homeland and outer territories As Japan’s empire expanded, other female writers also had the opportunity to leave the homeland and travel overseas. Hayashi Fumiko’s travels extended to what are now the Republic of Indonesia, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea, as well as the French Republic and the United Kingdom. With their movement within the homeland and to foreign soil, Hayashi and her narrators/characters negotiate with the state’s discourse on women, and describe and epitomize migrants who transcend provincial and national limits. Most pre-21st-century scholarship on Hayashi Fumiko focuses on the author and her characters as vagabonds at the peripheries of Japanese society whose lives highlight problems of gender and class in the Japanese homeland. Such studies often gloss over Hayashi’s writing on the Japanese colonization of neighboring nations. Many critics label her works “apolitical” or “proletarian”—or even “anarchist.” More often, however, her writing is considered to be personal and therefore apolitical. Joan Ericson (1997, 88) explains that “Hayashi’s fictional world was ‘of the people’ (minshūteki), but not from a sense of ideological commitment or political correctness. Hayashi painted her portraits small: descriptive depictions of everyday life (shomin no seikatsu).” As Janice Brown writes (in Hayashi 1997, 15, 17), “Fumiko directed the scathing anarchist vision towards her own life, demolishing through her poems the prison wall of past personal experience. … Thus, the ‘self-centered’ anarchist credo gave impetus to the portrayal of the female vagabond, victim and outcast, struggling to realize her own inner, dynamic potential in spite of the forces arrayed against her.” Migrant heroine in the homeland One of Hayashi Fumiko’s best known works is the novel Hōrōki (1930, 1939, 1949, Diary of a Vagabond; partially translated 1997), which became an instant success in the late 1920s. Serialized from 1928 to 1929 in the journal Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s arts) and first published as Chapter 18: Women and War

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a book in 1930, Diary of a Vagabond made Hayashi the most popular writer, male or female, in 1930s Japan.3 One might think that the novel’s challenge to the state’s central nationalist discourse was possible only from the standpoint of the postwar era. However, the prewar, wartime, and postwar editions of Diary all consistently depict migrant women in the homeland who live outside the institutions of the family and the family empire. It is this vagrancy that explains their spoken and unspoken desire for destruction of the status quo, eagerness to travel abroad, and sense of euphoria in the war zone. The narrator/heroine of Diary drifts from place to place in 1920s Japan and declares that she has neither home nor homeland. (Hayashi 1979) Unable to find residential or financial stability, she deviates from the “good wife, wise mother” life course prescribed for middleclass Japanese women by the Civil Code (1898) and the Ministry of Education. Her constant movement challenges the ideal of a united empire of Japan that nurtures its subjects. The notion of women’s role to nurture children (sekishi) who will become disciplined soldiers who fight for the Japanese family empire carries no significance for her. Disconnected from the central discourse of the nation-state on gender and family, the heroine instead discusses her links to colonials in adversity and her association with sexuality and ethnicity other than that of the idealized middle-class Japanese. For example, she reflects on a co-worker at a factory: “The woman called Ohatsu-chan … was taken by a man when she was twelve and was kidnapped to Manchuria. … She was soon sold to a geisha house” (117). In the context of Manchuria under Japanese invasion and colonization, “geisha” most likely refers to women who were abducted and forced into sex work or slavery for the Japanese military. As a factory worker and café waitress, the heroine of Diary realizes that laboring female bodies are sexually commodified, and sees herself in close proximity to prostitution: “If both peddling and writing are no good, there is nothing that can be done other than selling my body to Tamanoi [a red-light district]” (363). She also identifies with the ethnically and racially colonized people of imperial powers, and equates herself with a slave sold to the white race: “When night falls, I sing a useless song with the sorrow of an aborigine (dojin) who was bought by the white men’s nation” (102). Unlike the state discourse on the expanding border of the Japanese empire in its contest with the Western imperial powers, the heroine of Diary declares that Japan “is a kingdom of confinement” (477) defined in contrast to the presence and movement of the imperial family: “I belong to the class that must close shōji doors and hold its breath all day just because an imperial family member is going to pass by” (514). Contrary to the modern ideals of freedom of the autonomous individual and the nation, she feels suffocated living in a “hinminkutsu” (ghetto), immersed in impurity (yogoremono, “filthy things”; 511). Uncertainty, fear, and lack of power overwhelm the lower-class women in Hayashi’s Diary: “I have seen various tricks that make it impossible to know how much is true and how much a lie”; “There is neither beautiful thought nor good thought”; “The state of fearfulness before execution presses on my chest”; “My youth withers” (342–43, 366, 498). In her desire to destroy the status quo of Japanese society and renew her life, the heroine of Diary invokes natural disaster or war, declaring “I want to explode like gunpowder” (537), asserting her wish to leave the homeland, and envisioning the periphery of Japan as an unexplored place of salvation.

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Women and the family empire in the war zone Although many critics have dismissed Hayashi’s wartime activities and writing as so obviously pro-government that they need no further exploration, their sheer quantity make them too important to ignore. On assignment as a war correspondent for Tōkyo nichi nichi shinbun in 1938, Hayashi was the first Japanese woman to enter Nanjing after it fell to Japanese troops. After the attack on Wuhan began in 1938, Hayashi and Yoshiya Nobuko were the only two women (working for the army and navy, respectively) included in the first “Pen Squadron,” a group of twenty-two writers formed by the Information Agency. Hayashi’s participation in the Pen Squadron was voluntary (Takasaki 1995, 165), and her desire to accompany the Japanese army in China was so strong that she stated that it was worth even paying for it and living there for a while (Tokyo Asahi Shinbun 1938). With the military’s financial support and protection, Pen Squadron writers toured the war front and wrote for the Japanese readership back home about the soldiers’ circumstances and sacrifices. They also gave lectures in Japan, on military bases, and in Japanese settler communities in Korea, Manchuria, and China. Hayashi surveyed Northern Manchuria in 1940, and visited the Manchurian borders in 1941 as a reporter for newspapers and magazines. As a war correspondent, she also spent eight months in the Andaman Islands, Singapore, Java, and Borneo in 1942 and 1943 (Ericson 1997, 82). Based on her experiences at the front in Hankou, China, Hayashi wrote the war reports Sensen (1939, Battlefront), Hokugan butai (1939, Northern Bank Platoon), and Hatō (1939, Rough Seas). Battlefront depicts life at the war front in Hankou, China, in the form of twenty-two letters, and Northern Bank Platoon is written as a journal from September 19 to December 28, 1938, with not a day missing. Northern Bank Platoon, like Diary of a Vagabond, combines poetry with prose and depicts a woman’s physical motion for survival. Hayashi never expressed any political ideology, nor offered any explanation or apology for her participation in government-defined roles and in the war effort. When commentators discuss the continuity between her prewar and postwar works, it is often with respect to her depiction of nihilistic yet resilient vagabonds who engage in their inner struggles at the fringes of society (Kawamoto 2000, 141–51). Thus the personal is often disconnected from the political, and this has prevented many critics from examining the politics of Hayashi’s texts. More recent studies concerned with Hayashi’s writings do, however, explore nationalist subjects and/or gender relations in the war zone.4 Here I focus on Hayashi’s Northern Bank Platoon and offer an intertextual comparison with her Diary of a Vagabond. My analysis shows that her heroine’s physical movement away from the homeland of Japan to the war zone in China in the late 1930s indicates an ideological movement closer to central state discourses (such as those in the Imperial Constitution and school textbooks) that constructed Japan as a family empire. In the space of the battleground, the heroine’s physical movement connects the militant and expansionist endeavors of Japan with women’s sense of empowerment and liberation. Like the heroine/narrator of Diary, who wanders in the homeland, the heroine/narrator of Northern Bank Platoon finds her body in constant motion; the difference is the space of the war zone in which she marches, along with a Japanese platoon, from Beijing to Hankou in the late 1930s. By accompanying the Japanese army as a member of the Pen Squadron, she identifies with the soldiers: “The color of my face is soiled black with dust and grime, and I am no different from the soldiers”; “I am a noncombatant and, moreover, a woman. But as a

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Japanese woman … [m]y eyes are wide open with utter astonishment at the patriotic passion that has filled my body” (Hayashi 1977, 234). Overwhelmed by patriotism, the narrator of Platoon not only identifies with the soldiers but wants to become part of the family empire of these “pure” men who are “all kind and gentle” (Hayashi 1977, 256). Unlike the men in Diary, however, who exploit women’s sexualized and commodified bodies, she writes that It seems as though every soldier is always worried about his homeland (kokyō). Until they achieve heroic and incomparable deaths magnificently, they always think of their homeland. They are good husbands, fathers, and older and younger brothers. (Hayashi 1977, 308) In accordance with the ideology of the Aikoku fujinkai (Patriotic women’s society), the narrator of Platoon wishes to look after the soldiers as a sacred, motherly nurse on the battlefield.5 My analysis explores the intersection of gender, class, ethnicity, race, and nationality as the bodies of women move within the empire in Hayashi’s texts. Yet only in the war zone in China, under Japanese military invasion, is the narrator of Platoon’s euphoric connection with nationalism and the empire possible. As she reaches Hankou, she writes: “Having come this far, I feel that the reality of homeland has gradually come closer, and the difficult life and world [there] make me fall into a strange insecurity” (Hayashi 1977, 320). Rather than returning to her “daily life” of “suffering” in the homeland, the narrator wishes to stay on the battleground where she has experienced an exhilarating connection with the empire: “I will never forget, for the rest of my life, the feeling of love for the country. … I don’t care about my house in Tokyo” (Hayashi 1977, 241). As we have seen, Hayashi’s female bodies in motion—in the homeland in Diary, and in the outer war zone in Northern Bank Platoon—convey women’s paradoxical relationship with the empire of Japan. Whether refusing to become integrated into the body politic or enthusiastically participating in it, Hayashi and her narrator/heroines are often discussed in scholarship as women who transcend the borders of the nation. However, Hayashi’s wartime collaboration and that of the narrator in Platoon signify their quest to gain power within the empire rather than beyond it. Women’s wandering and memory of war In Hayashi’s texts, a recurring image of women’s mobility and of impermanence manifests itself in the clouds that appear and disappear with the passage of time. Her last complete novel, Ukigumo (Floating Clouds*), serialized in 1949 in the journal Bungakukai, has received critical acclaim and popular attention ever since its publication.6 Its heroine, Yukiko, an unmarried working-class woman, moves in the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras from her native home in Shizuoka to Tokyo, and from there to the fringes of Japanese empire and the war zone in French Indochina. Narrated while living under the American occupation, Yukiko’s personal sense of liberation across these spaces is both disconnected from and connected with the empire of Japan in the postwar and wartime periods. In the early 1940s, Yukiko is “unhoused” in the homeland, with no stable home or family background, and thus she is not a candidate for the status of sacred wife and mother. Since

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she is not respected as a pure woman, she is repeatedly forced to serve her brother-in-law Iba sexually after she moves into his house in Tokyo. Raped, sexually repressed, and exploited, she struggles economically in the lower and peripheral strata of society. In stark contrast, Yukiko attains a sense of physical and material freedom, comfort, and security when she voluntarily moves to Dalat, French Indochina, as a typist for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under the auspices of the Japanese imperial army. There she experiences the luxury of upper-class society by staying in a French-style mansion, dining with Japanese bureaucrats, and accompanying her boss Tomioka in the open, bright space of the Indonesian woods. On the one hand, Floating Clouds stresses the disconnect between a Japanese woman’s personal experience and the imperial and military efforts of Japan, noting that “Yukiko was truly happy then. … When the soldiers were fighting for the sake of life and death, Yukiko was wonderfully in love with Tomioka.” 7 Many critics, including Noriko Mizuta (1996, 346), consider Yukiko’s experience in Indochina to be apolitical and “outside Japanese history.” For Yukiko, “the chaos of wartime Japan, where the social system is moving toward destruction, that makes possible her anarchic existence outside society and gives birth to the possibility, however illusory, of woman’s freedom” (Mizuta 1996, 338). On the other hand, Yukiko’s presence and actions in Indochina are not free from the nation-state’s war efforts and endeavors to expand the empire. Tomioka explains that it is Japan that determines both Yukiko’s and his own well-being: “This country has made us what we are … although we are like floating leaves without roots.” 8 Although Yukiko and Tomioka appear to move freely like drifting clouds, without aim or direction, their presence, actions, and relationship as occupiers and lovers in Indochina would be impossible were it not for the Japanese empire’s militarist expansion. For example, Yukiko and Tomioka first meet at the French-style mansion that is used as the Japanese occupiers’ official residence. There, Yukiko is part of the state apparatus that displaces the Western imperial power of France and controls “Asia,” as reflected in the Japanese civil servants’ use of an Annamese maid, Niu. Yukiko benefits from the Japanese occupiers’ social conventions, which exploit neighboring Asian nations, ethnicities, and races as the inferior servants of the Japanese empire. Unlike Mizuta and other critics, I contend that Indochina is not “outside” but “inside” the system of Japan, for Yukiko as well as for Tomioka, and that Yuriko’s experience of freedom there is that of an agent acting out the central discourse of the state and its war efforts. The Ministry of Agriculture was at the margin of the Japanese government system, and Indochina was on the geographic periphery of the Japanese empire. However, it was the building of an economic base in the occupied territories at the periphery, such as Indochina, that made possible the expansion of Japan’s national body (kokutai). In this sense, the core state discourse brought about its subjects’/soldiers’/civil servants’ movement toward the periphery—which in turn supported the central discourse of the state and its imperial ambitions. Yukiko’s body, which moves from Tokyo to Dalat and enters the woods at the hand of Tomioka, redraws the expanding body of the Japanese empire during wartime. It is precisely the political discourse of kokutai that governs Yukiko’s “personal” body and its experience. Thus, despite Yukiko’s estrangement from the system in which Japanese women live, she does not exist outside the discourse of nationalism that contributes to the expansion of the empire and its war efforts. Although Yukiko has worked for the Japanese government in Indochina, as a war returnee, she is unable to secure a socially and financially stable position through marriage or a job. With no stable home, she moves into the dark storage room of a hardware store, behind Chapter 18: Women and War

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which stretch the ruins and burnt fields of postwar Tokyo. To make ends meet she becomes a prostitute for an American soldier, Joe, while continuing her relationship with Tomioka, who does not leave his wife to marry her. She equates her sexual services for Joe in postwar Japan to those of the Annamese maid Niu for Tomioka in wartime Indochina, thus comparing the material and sexual dominance of the occupying American military in postwar Japan to the occupying Japanese forces in wartime Asia. Living in the devastated landscape of postwar Japan, Yukiko is nostalgic for the lost time and space of Japan’s wartime territory. To re-create her happiness with Tomioka in Indochina and recover her health, weakened by abortion, she therefore insists on accompanying Tomioka to a position at the Ministry of Agriculture posting on remote Yakushima, a semitropical island at the southern end of Japan whose village, the narrator explains, “was exactly like an Annamese hamlet in French Indochina” (Hayashi 2006a). However, the warm, sunlit woods of French Indochina during the war are replaced by the cold, rain-swept forests of Yakushima in the postwar era. The space of the nightmarish fringes of postwar Japan threatens and represses Yukiko’s weakened, bedridden body. While Tomioka is away, visiting a forestry station, Yukiko “suffers considerably” and dies alone in the official residence of the Ministry of Agriculture (Hayashi 2006a). In reading this death at the end of the novel, the critic Hasumi Shigehiko holds that Hayashi meant to punish Yukiko as a participant in the invasion of Asia. As shown earlier, Hayashi herself made no apologies for her own activities as a war reporter at the front. Yukiko, however, does express remorse about the military occupation of French Indochina: “Were not the Japanese—who were suddenly rummaging about among the treasures of other people that had taken them centuries to develop—nothing but robbers?” (Hayashi 1951b, 38). She also feels “ashamed of the highhanded tactics that the Japanese had used to take over everything—even these fields—in a short amount of time” (Hayashi 1951b, 98). Her nostalgia is therefore accompanied by her reflections on the aggressive and exploitative practices of the former Japanese invaders. As a text, Floating Clouds represents not only remorse but a sense of responsibility. For example, in conversation with Tomioka in the novel, Yukiko refers to the “war trial” broadcast on the radio and comments, “You and I are involved too, in these trials” (Hayashi 1951b, 286). Thus she recognizes that Japan’s colonization policy and military actions relied not only on male politicians, bureaucrats, and military officials—and on low-ranking civil servants such as Tomioka at the geographical periphery of the empire—but also on socially and economically marginalized women such as Yukiko herself.9 Kanō Mikiyo (2002, 52) has pointed out the importance of facing the paradoxical contradiction of being simultaneously victim and aggressor. This realization is driven home by Hayashi’s depiction of how Yukiko, who lives at the economic margins of society and outside the institutionalized womanhood of Japan, nevertheless participates in the central discourse of kokutai that undergirds the Japanese empire’s invasion of its neighboring nations. It is important to recognize, as recent studies have done, how women such as Yukiko made attempts to transgress the borders of their designated roles and thus gain freedom and power outside the spaces of home and the homeland of Japan. However, it is equally important to acknowledge that it was within the expanding kokutai, which mobilized all its subjects in Japan’s “total war,” that women such as Yukiko explored the possibilities of their personal freedom and empowerment in modern Japan. Nostalgia for the perished empire of Japan is in some sense prevalent among the Japanese in the early 21st century. Mariko Asano Tamanoi explores “how the memory of victimization 288

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has turned to nostalgia for the same past that ‘victimized’ the Japanese” (2009, 6). In Hayashi’s novels, the memory of victimization of women in the homeland has turned to nostalgia for the same past that also victimized Japanese women and the colonized/occupied nations and ethnicities in the outer territories during the war.

Conclusion The paradox of Yosano Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko’s resistance/indifference to and participation in Japan’s imperialist agenda and war efforts springs from intersectionality—or, as Wakakuwa Midori (2001, 342) has pointed out, from the dynamics of “the triple principle of control of class, women, and … ethnicity (minzoku) that connects one to another inseparably and constitutes the principle of the modern nation-state.” When Yosano, Hayashi, and their narrator/heroines tackle the problems of survival, liberation, and empowerment, they focus on questions of gender and/or class when they are in the homeland. Whereas the identity of the nation-state is perceived to be secure in their eyes, it is each of these women’s personal self—defined by the state discourse on gender and/or class—that is threatened and insecure in the homeland. Thus, these two female authors and their protagonists become active agents by either resisting the nation-state or functioning outside of it, rather than accepting a position as passive observers or victims. This explains why Yosano, Hayashi, and their heroines criticize or stand outside the system of the state that controls Japanese women when they are in the homeland. In Yosano’s and Hayashi’s works of literature, female procreational and/or migrant bodies in the homeland violate the boundaries imposed on women and deviate from the norms of a united, organic body of Japan (kokutai). This destabilizes the centralized state’s definition of gender roles and its protection/utilization of women in its expansion of the territories and population of Japan. At the same time, when Yosano and Hayashi’s writings concern procreational or migrant bodies as active agents of the empire and its war efforts in Japan’s occupied/colonized territories, their ideology swings toward the central discourse of the state that celebrates and reproduces the superiority of the Japanese nation, ethnicity, and race. This contradiction helps us understand that our focus on women’s liberation and empowerment often enables us to envision Japanese women’s writings and movements against the state discourse on gender and class, but also helps us forget that female migrants sometimes redrew the borders of the peoples whose lives were invaded and violated by the Japanese empire. As Yosano’s and Hayashi’s writings about Manchuria and Indonesia show, women who lived outside the institutionalized constructions of Japanese womanhood sometimes explored the possibilities of their personal freedom and empowerment within—rather than beyond—the expanding territories of Japan and its war efforts, which mobilized all its subjects. By examining the paradoxical body politics in Yosano’s and Hayashi’s writings, we come to understand the contradictions in women who at once resisted and participated in the militarism of the Japanese empire.

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Notes 1 Beichman (2002, 227–49) directs our attention to the multiple voices—and shifts from one voice to another—within even a single piece of Yosano’s poetry. 2 According to a 1933 census, the thirty groups included Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Chinese, Soviets (those with Soviet passports), Russians (those without Soviet passports), Americans, British, French, Germans, Italians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Dutch, Turks, Austrians, Hungarians, Danes, Latvians, Portuguese, Czechs, Armenians, Belgians, Serbs, Swedish, Romanians, Swiss, and Indians (Tamanoi 2009, 14). 3 Repeatedly revised by the author, there are three versions of Hōrōki. This discussion is based on the canonical text (1951/1979), a single volume that combines the revisions of 1939 and 1949. 4 See Arai Tomiyo (2007; 1999) on women’s relationship with war in modern Japan. Nomura Kōichirō (2007, 32–35) explains the “ambivalence” in Hayashi Fumiko and her shift in identify from an urban resident to a national subject through her war experience. He attributes this change to Hayashi’s personality and inner psychology. In his exploration of Hayashi’s Sensen, Lee Sanghyuk (2020) argues that the overwhelming and continuous sound of artillery as the soundscape of the battlefield led to Hayashi’s experience of anxiety and fear, the fluctuation of her former urban identity, and her pursuit of her national identity. Ericson (1997, 83) notes that Hayashi participated in the general enthusiasm for the war effort during the Pacific War, only raising her voice against the death and misery caused by war in the postwar period. Kawamoto 2000 and Takasaki 1995 also point out and question Hayashi’s cooperation with the Japanese government’s war efforts. 5 In her analysis of Sensen, Kan Satoko discusses Hayashi’s reconfiguration of gender relations and roles on the war front. Kan posits that Hayashi’s writing creates the self as a Japanese female war reporter in contrast to and in support of the male soldiers. By creating her position as a caring nurse for the injured and ill soldiers on the war front, Hayashi identifies with female readers “behind the gun” in the homeland (Kan 2010, 25–26). 6 See Hayashi 1951 (English translation by Lane Dunlop in Hayashi 2006). Among others, Noriko Mizuta (1996, 346) evaluates Ukigumo as follows: “Drifting Clouds captures the spirit of Japan after its defeat, and it is a masterpiece of postwar literature.” 7 The original reads: “ano toki wa hontō ni kōfuku data … heitai no minna ga seishi wo kakete tatakatte iru toki ni, yukiko dakewa tomioka to fushigina koi ni toritsukarete ita noda kara” (Hayashi 1951, 210). In Lane Dunlop’s translation (Hayashi 2006), this part is omitted. 8 My translation. The original appears in Hayashi (1951, 307–8): “kono kunigara ga oretachi wo tsukuru yōni nattandayo. … Ne no nai ukigusa mitai na wareware daga.” 9 Historiographical research on the empire of modern Japan (1868–1945) has shifted focus in recent years from the emperor, state bureaucracy, and military to the Japanese people themselves. In the field of “people’s history” (minshū-shi), scholars tackle questions about the relationship between the ideology of the state and that of the people, as indicated in the roles the populace played in building and expanding the empire. Minshū-shi scholars such as Yasumaru Yoshio, Irokawa Daikichi, and Kano Masanao have been active since the 1970s.

References Akiyama, K., Itō, N., & Okamoto, J. (eds.). (1969). Nihon hansen shishū [Collection of anti-war poems in Japan]. Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha. Arai, T. (1999). Hayashi Fumiko no jūgunki [Hayashi Fumiko’s war correspondence]. Ōtani Daigaku Bungei Ronshū 53: 1–21. ———. (2007). Chūgoku sensen wa dō egakareta ka? Jūgunki wo yomu [How was the Chinese battlefront described? Reading war correspondence]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Beichman, J. (2002). Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Modern Female Voice in Japanese Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ericson, J.E. (1997). Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Gomibuchi, N. (2018). Puropaganda no bungaku: Nicchū sensōka no hyōgensha tachi [Propaganda literature: Writers during the Second Sino-Japanese War] (Chapter 2). Tokyo: Kyōwakoku. Hasegawa, K., Iwabuchi, H., Miyake, K., & Watanabe, S. (eds.). (2007). Shinpen nihon josei bungaku zenshū, 1: Tamura Toshiko hen kaisetsu [Comprehensive collection of Japanese women’s literature, New edition, vol 1: Commentaries on Tamura Toshiko]. Tokyo: Seishidō.

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Hayashi, F. (1939a). Hokugan butai [Northern Bank Platoon]. Fujin kōron, January. ———. (1939b). Sensen [Battlefront]. Osaka: Asahi Shinbunsha, December. ———. (1951). Ukigomo [Floating Clouds]. Tokyo: Rokkō Shuppan. ———. (1951–1953). Hayashi Fumiko zenshū [Complete Works of Hayashi Fumiko]. (23 vols.). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. (1965). Gendai nihon bungaku eiyaku senshū, 9: Ukigumo [Selected works of modern Japanese literature in English translation, vol. 9: Floating Clouds]. (Y. Koitabashi & M.C. Collcutt, trans.) Tokyo: Hara Shobō. ———. (1977). Hokugan butai [Northern Bank Platoon]. In Hayashi Fumiko zenshū, vol 12 [Complete works of Hayashi Fumiko, vol. 12]. Tokyo: Bunsendō. ———. (1979). Hōrōki [Diary of a Vagabond]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. (1997). “I Saw a Pale Horse” and Selected Poems from “Diary of a Vagabond.” (J. Brown, Intro. and trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2006a). Floating Clouds. (L. Dunlop, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1951) ———. (2006b). Sensen [Battlefront]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. ———. (2014). Sensen [Battlefront]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. Horiguchi, N. J. (2006). Idōsuru shintai: Hayashi Fumiko gensaku Naruse Mikio hon’an eiga wo megutte [Bodies in motion: Naruse Mikio’s film adaptations of Hayashi Fumiko’s novels]. In Saitō A., (ed.), Nihon eigashi sōsho: Shintai, jendā, sekushuaritī [Japanese film history series: The body, gender, sexuality] (pp. 221–66). Tokyo: Shinwasha. ———. (2009). Migrant Women, Memory, and Empire in Naruse Mikio’s Film Adaptations of Hayashi Fumiko’s Novels. U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, no. 36: 42–72. Iida, Y. (2005). Jūgunki wo yomu: Hayashi Fumiko Sensen Hokugan Butai [Reading war correspondence: Hayashi Fumiko’s Battlefront and Northern Bank Platoon]. In Shimamura T., Iida Y., Takahashi O., Nakayama A. & Yoshida M., (eds.), Bungaku nenpō 2 posuto koroniarizumu no chihei [The literature annual report, 2: The horizon of post colonialism]. Yokohama: Seori Shobō. ———. (2016). Kanojo tachi no bungaku: Katari nikusa to yomareru koto [Women’s literature: Difficulty of narrating and being read]. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai. Kanai, N. (1984). Shiryō bosei hogo ronsō [Sources on the motherhood protection debate]. Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan. Kan, S. (2010). Hayashi Fumiko: Sensen Hokugan butai wo yomu: Senjō no jendā, haisen no jendā [Reading Fumiko Hayashi’s Sensen and Hokugan butai: Gender on the battlefield; gender in defeat of the war]. Hyōgen kenkyū 92 (October): 25–32. Kanō, M. (1987). Onnatachi no jūgo [The women’s home front]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. ———. (2002). Tennōsei to jendā [The emperor system and gender]. Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai. Kawade Shobō Shinsha, (ed.). (1991). Shinbungei tokuhon: Yosano Akiko. [New literature reader: Yosano Akiko] Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha. Kawamoto, S. (2000). “Akarui sengo” no naka no “kurai sensō.” [“The dark war” within “the bright postwar”]. Daikōkai 34: 141–51. Ken’nan. (1904). Sunday Supplement of Yomiuri shinbun, 13 November. Quoted in Rabson 1991. Kōno, K. (2009). Ken’etsu to bungaku: 1920 nendai no kōbō [Censorship and literature: Battle in the 1920s]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha. Lee, S. (2020). Senjō ni okeru jōdōteki taiken: Hayashi Fumiko no Sensen ni okeru kankaku to fuan [The affective experience on the battlefield: The sense and anxiety of Hayashi Fumiko’s Battlefront]. In Chōikiteki Nihon Bunka Kenkyū 11: 124–38. Mackie, V. (1997). Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matsusaka, Y.T. (2001). The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Asia Center. McDonald, K. (2017). Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (2019). War, Firsthand, at a Distance: Battlefield Tourism and Conflicts of Memory in the Multiethnic Japanese Empire. The Special Issue: War, Tourism, and Modern Japan of Japan Review: Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies 33: 57–85.

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Ministry of Education. (1937). Kokutai no hongi [The essence of the national body]. In R. Tsunoda, W.T. de Bary & D. Keene, (eds., 1958). Introduction to Oriental Civilizations: Sources of Japanese Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. Mizuta, N. (1996). In Search of a Lost Paradise: The Wandering Woman in Hayashi Fumiko’s Drifting Clouds.” In P.G. Schalow & J.A. Walker (eds.), The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nakagawa, Y. (1999). Nihon shisōka ron 2: Yosano Akiko to han feminizumu [Studies on Japanese thinkers, 2: Yosano Akiko and anti-feminism.] Seiron, no. 319: 136–50. Narita, R. (2001). Rekishi wa ikani katarareruka—1930 nendai “Kokumin no monogatari” hihan [How history is narrated: A critique of the “National Narratives” in the 1930s]. Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai. Nishikawa, Y. (1982). Sensō eno keisha to yokusan no fujin 5 [The turn to war and women’s assistance for imperial rule, 5]. Joseishi Kenkyūkai [General study group of women’s history] (ed.). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Noda, U. (1991). Akiko ni okeru sensō to shi: Futatsu no shi ni tsuite [War and death in Akiko]. In Kawade Shobō Shinsha (ed.) Shinbungei tokuhon: Yosano Akiko [New literature reader: Yosano Akiko] (pp. 90–94). Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha. Nomura, K. (2007). Toshi hyōryūmin no nashonarizumu: Hayashi Fumiko to nisshi jihen [Urban drifters’ nationalism: Hayahsi Fumiko and the Second Sino-Japanese War]. Josei Rekishi Bunka Kenkyūsho gaiyō (March): 32–35. Ōmachi, K. (1905). Shika no kotsuzui [The essence of poetry]. Taiyō (January). Quoted in Kawade Shobō Shinsha 1991. Rabson, S. (1991). Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One’s Life or Not: A Question of Which War. The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 25(1) (April): 45–74. Robertson, J. (1998). Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rodd, L.R. (1991). Yosano Akiko and the Taishō Debate over the “New Woman.” In G.L. Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (pp. 175–98). Berkeley: University of California Press. Satō, T. (2006). Hayashi Fumiko no hōkoku to Asahi Shinbun no hōdo sensen [Hayashi Fumiko’s patriotic reports and the battlefront of Asahi Newspaper’s reporting]. In Hayashi F. Sensen [Battlefront] (pp. 245–61). Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. ———. (2014). “Hayashi Fumiko ‘Sensen’ to ‘Shokuminchi’: Asahi Shinbunsha no hōkoku to Rikugunshō no hōdō to” [Hayashi Fumiko’s “Battlefront” and “Colonies”: Asahi Newspaper’s patriotism and the Ministry of the Army’s news]. In Hayashi F. Sensen [Battlefront] (pp. 246–71). Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. Suzuki, Y. (1986). Feminizumu to sensō: fujin undōka no sensō kyōryoku [Feminism and war: Women’s movement activists’ cooperation with the war]. Tokyo: Marujusha. Takasaki, T. (1995). Senjō no joryū sakka tachi [Women writers on the battleground]. Tokyo: Ronsōsha. Tamanoi, M.A. (2009). Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Tsunoda, R., de Bary, W.T. & Keene, D. (eds.). (1958). Introduction to Oriental Civilizations: Sources of Japanese Tradition. New York and London: Columbia University Press. Ueno, C. (1998). Nashonarizumu to jendā [Nationalism and gender]. Tokyo: Seidosha. ———. (2004). Nationalism and Gender, (B. Yamamoto, trans.). Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Wakakuwa, M. (2001). Kōgō no shōzō Myōken kōtaigō no hyōshō to josei no kokuminka [The portrait of the empress: Representations of Empress Myōken and nationalization of women]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Watanabe, S. (1998). Yosano Akiko. Tokyo: Shintensha. Yosano, A. (1904a). Hirakibumi [Open Letter]. Myōjō, 11 November. Reprinted in Yosano A. Yosano Akiko hyōronshū [Collected Essays of Yosano Akiko] (Kanō M. and Kanai N., eds.). (pp. 19–20). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985. ———. (1904b). Kimi shini tamōkoto nakare [Brother, Do Not Give Your Life]. Myōjō, September. Reprinted in Yosano, A. Yosano Akiko hyōronshū [Collected Essays of Yosano Akiko] (Kanō M. and Kanai N., eds.). (pp. 25–28). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985. ———. (1909). Ubuya monogatari [Tales of the Delivery Room]. Tokyo niroku shinbun. 17–20 March. Reprinted in Shinbungei tokuhon: Yosano Akiko. [New literature reader: Yosano Akiko] (pp. 209–13). Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha.

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———. (1914). Sensō [War]. Yomiuri shinbun. 17 August. ———. (1917). Nihon fujin no tokushoku wa nanika [What Are the Characteristics of Japanese Women?]. Reprinted in Yosano A., Gendai nihon no essei: Ai, risei, oyobi yūki [Essays in Modern Japan: Love, Reason, and Courage] (pp. 94–101). Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993. ———. (1918). Joshi no tettei shita dokuritsu [Women’s Complete Independence]. Fujin kōron 3, no. 3 (March). Reprinted in Kanai N. (1984). Shiryō bosei hogo ronsō [Sources on the motherhood protection debate] (p. 85). Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan. ———. (1928). Manmō yūki [Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia]. Tokyo: Osaka Yagō Shoten. ———. (1932a). Kōgan no shi [Rosy-Cheeked Death]. Tōhaku, April. Reprinted in Yosano (1979–81) Teihon Yosano Akiko zenshū [Complete Works of Yosano Akiko, vol. 8] (pp. 272–75). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1932b). Nihon kokumin asa no uta [Citizens of Japan, A Morning Song]. In Nihon josei, a separate volume of Nihon kokumin (June). Translated in Rabson, S. (1991). Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One’s Life or Not: A Question of Which War. The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 25(1) (April): 59–60. ———. (1979–81). Teihon Yosano Akiko zenshū [Complete Works of Yosano Akiko]. (20 vols.). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1985). Yosano Akiko hyōronshū [Collected Essays of Yosano Akiko] (Kanō M. & Kanai N., eds.). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. (2001). Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China (J.A. Fogel, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press (Original work published 1928) Yūri, K. (1948). Akiko no shōgai [Life of Akiko] (p. 25). Tokyo: Saika Shobō.

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Chapter 19 Women and Colonies: Shanghai and Manchuria in the Autobiographical Writings of Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko Lianying Shan What do women’s experiences in the colonies reveal about the historical reality of Japanese colonialism and war? What do women’s autobiographical accounts of the colonies demonstrate about the relationship between identity and memory? In their autobiographical writings about Shanghai and Manchuria, Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko provide readers with a glimpse of family life and women’s physiological experiences in the colonies amidst the historical background of military and social conflicts. Their accounts show that colonial memories participate in a complex narrative process of selecting, arranging, and interpreting past experiences to give shape to present identities and subjectivities.

Introduction The largest human migration in Japanese history occurred in the early 20th century when millions of Japanese citizens settled overseas in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Shanghai following the economic and territorial expansion of the Japanese empire throughout Asia. With the end of World War II, most of this overseas population had returned to Japan in an organized reverse migration called hikiage (repatriation) by the end of 1946. In postwar Japan, there emerged a great number of literary works reminiscing about civilian Japanese’s colonial and war experience in overseas territories. Although many of these works were written by women, there have been few studies that systematically examine them from a woman’s or gendered perspective. As a starting point for understanding the unique experiences of women in the colonies and the rich literary representation of those experiences by Japanese women writers, this essay examines the autobiographical writings of Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko. Their writings represent the diversity of women’s colonial experience as well as the multitude of genres, narrative foci, and styles that women

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writers have used to reconstruct their personal experiences in the colonies. Through autobiographical stories, memoirs, and novels, these three authors recount lives lived as young girls or as young wives and mothers and how their respective colonial experiences transformed their lives and identities after the war. Together, these three women authors not only tell the concrete colonial history lived by women, but also highlight the private emotional lives of women in the colonies through their autobiographical accounts. The three authors’ varied representations of the colonies are a result of their different experiences there as well as their distinct postwar conceptualizations of their colonial memories. In her short stories Hayashi Kyōko writes about a carefree childhood in Shanghai in counterpoint to the traumatic experiences endured in the Nagasaki atomic bombing. For her, writing means making sense of how both experiences significantly contributed to her postwar identity. Sawachi Hisae in her memoir depicts the chaotic and difficult life in Manchuria after August 1945 as the defining memory of her colonial experience. Sawachi’s purpose for writing is to convey the pacifist message that colonialism and war must not happen again. Miyao Tomiko in her autobiographical novel also describes the hardships in Manchuria, especially the exacerbated adversities after August 1945, but focuses on her inner reality and personal growth during those last two years in the colony. Miyao demonstrates that the external reality of the colony and the war does not have total dictatorship over a woman’s psychological wellbeing and sense of identity. In their accounts of the historical events they experienced in the colonies, all three writers construct strong female subjectivities based on their opinions and value judgments about what those external events have meant for their identity and sense of meaning in life. Hayashi Kyōko constructs a complex subjectivity of a female character who searches for meaning through simultaneously remembering Japanese colonialism in Shanghai and the Nagasaki atomic bombing. Sawachi Hisae in her memoir constructs a unique narrating subject who emphasizes the importance of education about the war for contemporary youth through depicting her fourteen-year-old self in the colony as both an unknowing supporter and a helpless victim of the war. The female subjectivity in Miyao Tomiko’s autobiographical novel is not constructed from a postwar perspective, but is rather firmly situated in the temporal and spatial reality of Manchuria in 1945 and 1946. Through depicting the way the main character Ayako becomes stronger and more independent as a result of her turbulent experience in Manchuria, Miyao constructs a dynamic female subjectivity based on individual agency instead of victimhood. Despite their different personal circumstances, the writings of all three authors are unified by the same emphasis on the realm of daily life, the woman’s perspective, and the concerns for others. Their accounts are less about the war or colonial administration than they are about family routines, interpersonal relationships with neighbors and friends, and their private emotions. They also write about experiences unique to women, such as child rearing, menstruation, hygiene, and fear of sexual violence. Although they focus on their own personal experiences, they all show considerable concern for others—playmates, classmates, neighbors, even the Chinese that they encountered in the colonies. Through depicting personal feelings, small happenings, and ordinary people in their lives, these writers are able to communicate their private realities parallel to the historical reality of Japanese colonialism and the war. Through an in-depth analysis of the works of these three writers, this chapter shows that their narratives of the self in the colonies are not a simple, passive recalling of the past but an active selection and arrangement of personal experience into a coherent Chapter 19: Women and Colonies

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narrative of a colonial past and the way it has impacted their present sense of the self and the world. Ultimately their autobiographical writings provide great insights into the relationship between female subjectivity and historical events.

Hayashi Kyōko’s dual identity: Colonizer and atomic bombing survivor Hayashi Kyōko (1930–2017) was born in Nagasaki and lived from 1931 to 1945 with her family in Shanghai where her father worked for the Mitsui Corporation. She returned to Nagasaki in March 1945 and enrolled in Nagasaki Girls’ High School, where she was mobilized in the Mitsubishi Munitions factory. She was working at the factory when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 9, 1945. While the whole factory was destroyed, Hayashi miraculously survived but was exposed to nuclear radiation and was seriously ill for months. This experience inspired her to become a writer. Whereas known for her “atomic bombing literature,” Hayashi also writes about her childhood experience in colonial Shanghai. Two characteristics can be identified in Hayashi’s representation of colonial Shanghai—her description of the alleys of Hongkou, Shanghai, as a primarily feminine and domestic space occupied by women and children, and her retrospective memory of Shanghai through the unique perspective of an atomic bomb survivor. The Hongkou district of Shanghai was Japan’s leased territory and was inhabited by a large Japanese population. Hayashi’s family lived on the edge of that district where many Chinese also lived. Her story “Rōtaibo no Roji” (2001, The Alley of the Old Lady) is told from the perspective of a young Japanese girl, who describes the alley as a space of women, where both Japanese and Chinese women interacted. The narrator remembers the familiar morning scene of Chinese housewives chatting while doing their chores of scrubbing out commodes with brushes and taking out laundry to dry. She also remembers running into them in the crowded market. “Rōtaibo (Old Lady)”—a wealthy Chinese lady—draws the narrator’s attention because she is the most powerful woman around and her family owns most of the housing in the alley. The narrator describes Rōtaibo as friendly toward the narrator’s mother. At one point the narrator’s family returns to Japan for a few months to escape the military conflict between the Chinese and the Japanese in Shanghai in 1938. When they return to Shanghai, she finds that the ally still bears marks of the intense battles: the buildings are visibly damaged; pieces of wood and brick and discarded sandbags are scattered everywhere; anti-Japanese activities are still on the rise; gunshots can be heard at night; and anti-Japanese slogans are plastered all over the streets. However, the narrator’s family is greeted warmly by their Chinese neighbors. The women are delighted about their reunion and do not see each other as enemies. Many of those neighbors also just recently returned home after taking refuge in the countryside during the conflict. Rōtaibo and her family are the last to return to Shanghai from the countryside. As soon as she gets out of the car, Rōtaibo joins the narrator’s mother and starts chatting about the war. She laments that the war makes her heart ache and says she is worried that the war might come again. The critic Kawanishi Masaaki insightfully comments on the unique mother-centered plot:

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With “my mother” and “Rōtaibo (the old lady)” at its center, the alley of Mile Street is where the Japanese and Chinese women co-exist. Within Japanese literature about China, there is no other work that creates such a space, where the Japanese mother and Chinese mother are at the center and where ordinary Japanese and Chinese people communicate and sympathize with each other. This space is the distinctive feature of the collection of short stories Missheru no kuchibeni. (Hayashi 2001a, 423) The ordinary Shanghai alley is in fact an extraordinary transnational space in which the women, regardless whether they are Chinese or Japanese, sympathize with each other and form a special community based on their shared everyday space. These women are able to temporarily transcend the national conflicts because they identify with each other and share the same routines and concerns with everyday life. Another short story by Hayashi entitled “Kōsa” (1977, Yellow Sand*) also depicts life in the Hongkou district of Shanghai from a young girl’s perspective. The story centers on the narrator’s memory of a Japanese prostitute named Okiyo who lives in the same neighborhood as the narrator. Okiyo is different from all the other Japanese: she wears a Chinse dress and Chinese satin shoes; she flirts with Chinese men, often poor coolies; she receives the cholera vaccine on the street of Shanghai with poor Chinese, while all the other Japanese receive their immunization at designated hospitals or neighborhood associations. In the narrator’s eye, there is nothing Japanese about Okiyo. The young and curious narrator talks to Okiyo a few times and develops sympathy for her. Yet her mother calls Okiyo “shameful” and “a disgrace to Japan” and forbids the narrator to go near her. The narrator later learns that Okiyo has committed suicide. Okiyo’s story represents the suppressed history of marginalized and alienated Japanese individuals who struggled at the bottom of Japanese society in colonial Shanghai. Hayashi gives voice to the tragic figure of Okiyo who would otherwise be forgotten in contemporary Japan. It is also worth noting that “Yellow Sand” was published in a collection of atomic bomb stories—Giyaman biidoro (1988, Cut Glass, Blown Glass)—in which Hayashi commemorates her classmates, teachers, and friends who died in the bombing of Nagasaki.1 Hayashi explains why she decided to include a story about her Shanghai experience in a collection of stories about the atomic bombing: The reason that I bring the story “Yellow Sand” into this collection [of short stories] is that I want to make my Shanghai experience and my post-August 9th life echo each other and make the war at the start of my life and the present echo each other. I want to tie them into a ring. It is also because the Shanghai period, which had been a positive part of my life, now has a dark shadow, which transforms it into a negative experience. (Hayashi 1988a, 372) The idea of creating “echoes” through juxtaposing both her Shanghai and atomic bombing experiences together is a recurring motif in Hayashi’s writings. For Hayashi, interpreting the meaning of her time in Shanghai is always with reference to her atomic bomb experience. The two subjectivities of a former colonizer and an atomic bombing survivor thus “echo” each other in her writings. In many of her works, Hayashi reflects on her double identity as an atomic bomb victim and simultaneously a member of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. In her autobiographical Chapter 19: Women and Colonies

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short story “Hibiki” (1988, Echoes), the fourteen-year-old character flees the devastated Nagasaki through a tunnel. Among hundreds of survivors, she notices the smell and groans of the wounded and hears the sound of pans and pots clattering against each other on the backs of those who are fleeing. The sight reminds her of the Chinese in Shanghai: “when battle began, the fleeing people with pots and pans on their back were always the Chinese, not foreign Japanese” (Hayashi 1988b, 250). Experiencing firsthand the catastrophe of the atomic bombing enables the character to understand the suffering of the Chinese in colonial Shanghai and especially their traumatic experiences caused by Japanese military attacks. Hayashi was still young when the two Shanghai Incidents occurred in 1932 and 1938, and she might not have clear memories of seeing the Chinese fleeing the city amidst the Japanese bombings. However, her mother remembers and feels that the atomic bomb has symbolically changed herself and her daughter into “Chinese”—the miserable victims: [We are] the same as the Chinese, like refugees,” my mother said. … My mother had watched her compatriots fleeing and recalled the sight of Chinese who had once been driven from Shanghai by the war. But we were not “like refugees,” we were refugees. My mother could not believe the fact that Japanese, herself included, could be fleeing with our own pots and pans. She had lived in Shanghai as the citizen of the victor nation. … While living in someone else’s country, Japanese mothers—citizens of the victor nation—could watch the Chinese flee from the sidelines. That is why “Chinese” and “refugees” were the same thing for my mother. (Treat 1995, 115–16). The mother and daughter’s personal memories become the site where two national traumas merge into one single narrative of human suffering. For both individuals, the memory of colonial Shanghai helps them process the current catastrophic experience of the atomic bombing. Through juxtaposing her atomic bomb experience and her childhood experience in colonial Shanghai, Hayashi Kyōko constructs a complex subjectivity based on her double identity as both victim and victimizer. In the same story the narrator also connects the various sounds that she remembered hearing on December 8, 1941 in Shanghai with the sounds she hears on August 9, 1945 in Nagasaki. While listening to the eerie sounds of people fleeing from the debris in Nagasaki, the narrator also seems to faintly recall the triumphant sound of the Japanese warship Izumo operating on the Huangpu River, the thud of boots worn by the Japanese military patrols echoing in the streets, the celebratory banzai cries of Japanese elementary school children in Shanghai: The footsteps of these fleeing people became heavy. The sound of dragging oneself in wooden clogs and straw sandals spread like the noise of worms gnawing the roots of grass and trees. The cargo carts sounded sluggishly. The sound crossed the road and reached the farmer’s yard [where I was resting]. It also reached my body. Meanwhile, the bombing sound of the warship [Izumo] that had been accumulating inside me since my childhood began to oscillate slowly and regularly. (Hayashi 1988b, 262)

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The two historical events of the atomic bombing and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai are thus connected naturally in her head through these sounds. The effect then is to enable the reader to recognize the common human suffering in the two vastly different national historical events and to foster in the reader a sense of empathy toward all those who suffer war violence and social injustice regardless of their nationality or race. “Echoes” refers to both the real sounds that the narrator remembers from both events and the symbolic resonances between the two different historical experiences. Hayashi’s literature demonstrates that an individual’s colonial memory is not a simple account of a preexisting reality, but a creative process in which both the remembered events, complexly entangled with the present, and the self-image of the author merge through the act of narration.

Sawachi Hisae and her reluctant Manchuria memoir Sawachi Hisae was born in Tokyo in 1930 and in 1934 moved with her family to Jilin, Manchuria, where her father worked for the Southern Manchuria Railway company. The family returned to Japan in 1946. Sawachi established herself as an important writer of non-fiction in the 1970s. Her memoir 14-sai “fōtīn”: Manshū kaitakumura kara no kikan (Fourteen Years Old: Return from a Japanese Pioneer Village) was published in 2015—seventy years after the events depicted. Referring to her fourteen-year-old self as shōjo (a teenage girl), Sawachi emphasizes the gap between the narrating self in 2015 and the narrated self of 1945 and presents her colonial memory as a unique internal dialogue between the present and the past. On the one hand, the shōjo’s personal experience provides the reader with an insider view of how Japan’s defeat in the war plunged Japanese civilians in Manchuria into a life of chaos and danger. On the other hand, the narrator’s adult perspective and historical hindsight are used to shed light on the injustice of Japanese colonialism that the shōjo was not aware of at the time. The shōjo is depicted as a staunch supporter of the military during the two years before the end of the war. She fervently followed the news about the war and enthusiastically participated in various kinds of work at school in support of the war efforts, such as collecting horse manure for fertilizer, making rice for soldiers, and recycling metal for military use. The shōjo only ate one small bowl of rice at each meal to save the rice for the war. When the shōjo’s mother casually comments that Japan would lose the war, the shōjo refuted her by saying “Mom, you are unpatriotic!” (Sawachi 2015, 34) The shōjo blindly believed that Japan would win the war without knowing what the war was really about. She never thought of Manchuria as a colony. In retrospection, however, the shōjo (still referred to as the shōjo even though the narrator has already grown up) remembers that she was once shocked by the sight of the dilapidated houses of the Chinese. The shōjo also remembers that she had a Chinese classmate in the Japanese High School for Girls in Jilin. While all the Japanese students had rice for lunch, that Chinese student alone always had coarse grains. The shōjo vaguely knew that the Chinese were not allowed to have sugar or rice, but she never thought much about it. She was merely living the life that was given to her. In contrast to the shōjo’s lack of understanding, the narrator—the older version of the shōjo—is able to insert historical hindsight into the narrative: “Paradise under the kingly way” is a beautiful phrase. It’s followed by “five races in harmony.” The national anthem sings about the “new Manchuria” and its

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“thirty million residents.” Manchukuo was founded in March 1932. But in a nutshell, Manchukuo was Japan’s colony despite the fact that the Japanese living here had praised the harmony among five races (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian) as an ideal and advocated the paradise under the kingly way. The shōjo never thought about the founding of Manchukuo because it was already there. (Sawachi 2015, 40) The shōjo’s reflection on her naïve belief in the benignity of Manchukuo reveals ordinary Japanese residents’ deep-rooted ignorance of the reality of Japanese colonialism in this region. These quintessential Confucian concepts of “kingly way” and “social harmony” in the slogans evoke the image of a paradise based on the Confucian ideals of rule with benevolence and achieving social harmony through virtue. The reality, however, is that these Confucian concepts were used to mask Japan’s racial superiority as well as its economic exploitation, political suppression, and military control of Manchuria. Japan’s tactic of using Confucian concepts to legitimize the Japanese rule in Manchuria was repeated and expanded in its Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere policy declared in 1940, which called up Pan-Asian unity and shared prosperity to justify Japan’s military, economic, and cultural dominance across Asia. Thus, Sawachi juxtaposes her recollection of childhood in Manchuria with a commentary on what that experience means for her in the narrative present. This creates an effect of line crossing between the colonial past and the present in contemporary Japan. Sawachi shows that her Manchurian experience is not a self-contained world solely located in the past, but a construction and interpretation based on her present knowledge, perspective, and reflection. Family life is at the center of the shōjo’s Manchuria experience. The harsh climate and living condition of Manchuria took a heavy toll on the family. The shōjo’s two younger brothers died from infectious diseases at very young ages. The shōjo and her little sister also contracted scarlet fever and were hospitalized for weeks in the summer of 1944. Another of the shōjo childhood’s memories is the close relationship between her family and her uncle’s family who were living in Korea at that time. In postwar Japan, the shōjo discovers how her family history is intricately linked to Japan’s colonialism. The shōjo finds a copy of her family register in which the dates for her late younger brother’s admission into and dismissal from the register were recorded: February 16, 1944 and September 8, 1944. What surprises the shōjo about the document is the fact that both entries were authorized by the Great East Asia Ministry with the personal seals of Japan’s ambassadors to Manchukuo at that time—Umezu Yoshijirō and Yamada Otozō, respectively. The narrator inserts her comment: “This means that a state organization that worked to connect Manchuria and Japan was still in existence in January 1945—the year of Japan’s defeat in the war” (Sawachi 2015, 60–61). Her family history bears witness to the existence of Japan’s colonial government. The narrator implicitly questions the silent process of the dissolution of the dual citizenship of Japanese residents in Manchuria after the war. Sawachi subtitles her memoir “a return from a Japanese pioneer village” because her experience of working at a pioneer village right before Japan’s defeat left a deep impression on her. In the village called Suikyokuryū where she was mobilized, the shōjo encountered a different reality than that in Jilin. For the first time she witnessed how Japanese settlers lived in primitive earthen houses with no glass windows, water, or electricity. The settlers ate simple meals made of sorghum without vegetables. Even tofu was a luxury. Although each 300

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household possessed a vast piece of land, their life was inconvenient without baths, books, magazines, or radios. To make matters worse, most of the men in the settlement were drafted into the army in May of 1945 leaving the elderly, women, and children behind. In one of the families where the shōjo stayed, a pregnant woman was expected to give birth unassisted as there was no doctor in the village. When the shōjo returned home a month later, she was worried about those she left behind, knowing that they were in a precarious situation. The narrator inserts the historical facts that the shōjo only understood after the war: This is the ruined Japanese politics and the military at that time. On July 5th, the Kwantung army made a top-secret decision on the final plan of military operations. This happened during the shōjo’s mobilization work in the village. The plan designated the triangle area that connects Tomon, Shinkyō, and Dairen as the absolute defense zone and gave up the rest of the two-thirds of Manchuria. Only a very limited number of people knew about this. No one else knew about this. At that time the preparation had started for the Manchukuo Emperor to move to the new center—Tsūka. The fourteen-year-old shōjo was mobilized to the forsaken land outside of the absolute defense zone. (Sawachi 2015, 96) Realizing that Japan’s defeat in the war is inevitable, the Kwantung army made the ad hoc plan to ensure a military defense for southern Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula at the expense of the vast territory of northern Manchuria where most agricultural immigrants lived, including the settlement that the shōjo visited. Long after the end of the war the narrator acquired the important information that the Japanese army evacuated military families and government officials’ families several months before the defeat, but did not inform ordinary Japanese residents about the condition of the war leaving them to their own fates. The narrator laments how unknowing her fourteen-year-old self was about the danger she was in and how blind she was believing that the Japanese army would always protect the Japanese in Manchuria. By incorporating this historical information in her memoir, Sawachi implicitly criticizes the Japanese government for abandoning millions of civilian Japanese and leaving them unprotected in a hostile land before the imminent Russian invasion in August 1945. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s defeat in August 1945 plunged the shōjo into a life of displacement and danger. The shōjo had her first period not long before the defeat, and the beginning of her womanhood was unfortunately marked by a heightened instinctive awareness of potential sexual violence against women. The shōjo vividly remembers the horror of living under the Soviet occupation as a young woman: Around that time, Japanese soldiers who escaped from captivity ran around and appealed to us: “All women! Cut your hair and dress yourself in men’s clothes!” The shōjo didn’t hear them directly, but after she overheard this from others, she took action immediately. She cut the string that bound her hair and let her hair down. Facing down to the concrete floor of the entrance, using her mother’s sewing scissors she cut her hair with no hesitation. She didn’t know words such as gōkan or rape. However, the shōjo understood through instinct the kind of fate that women under occupation would face. (Sawachi 2015, 111)

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Despite all of the precautionary measures that her family took, the shōjo had a horrifying encounter with a Soviet military officer in her own home. One day, two Soviet officers burst into the house. One of the officers spotted the shōjo sitting at the table and approached her. Without any explanation he tried to grab her and take her away. The shōjo’s mother and all the other adults in the house desperately fought off the officer. In the end, the officer gave up and left. The narrow escape from potential sexual violence left a scar on the shōjo’s psyche. The shōjo remembers that during the last year in Manchuria, she stopped being a child and “became a mere living creature in a state of loss” (Sawachi 2015, 183). As the oldest child in the family, the shōjo shouldered part of the responsibility of ensuring its survival; she worked at a make-shift pancake store, cooked on a primitive stove for the family, and helped her parents in various ways. Compared to those Japanese refugees who fled from agricultural settlements near the border to Jilin, the shōjo’s family was able to stay in their own company housing until the spring of 1946. With heating, electricity, and food her family survived the harsh Manchurian winter. The shōjo was even fortunate to be surrounded by books—a solace for her in a time of eerie uncertainty. The shōjo learned that contagious diseases ran rampant in the refugee camps, and many people died from cold and hunger including a few people she knew. When the shōjo’s father contracted typhus, a sense of crisis struck the family. Fortunately, her father miraculously recovered with the help of a doctor. When the actual repatriation began in Jilin, the shōjo finally saw the end of the tunnel and felt the return of normalcy: “At that moment, the young girl was finally being brought back from being a mere living creature to the realm of childhood” (Sawachi 2015, 185). Dedicating her memoir to her grand-nephew, who was fourteen at the time of the book’s publication, Sawachi writes: “I want him to know what war is like” (Sawachi 2015, 10). In her memoir, Sawachi presents both the raw colonial and war experience of a fourteen-yearold shōjo and the wisdom and historical hindsight of the eighty-five-year-old “shōjo.” It is the dynamics between the two selves that enable her contemporary readers to see how the relevance and meaning of a distanced war and colonial history can be renewed in the present through personal memory. Sawachi’s memoir can be seen as the reluctant reminiscence of a Manchurian past not only because it took the author seventy years to write but also because of her detached attitude towards her childhood self. However, this belated memoir creates a unique female subjectivity that is based not on her own need to remember her childhood in the colony but on her strong sense of responsibility as a witness of history to connect her own past experience in the war and contemporary Japanese youth through writing.

Miyao Tomiko’s Manchurian narrative and the celebration of an independent female subjectivity Miyao Tomiko (1926–2014) spent less than two years in Manchuria from March 1945 to August 1946. Although she arrived at the worst possible time and experienced tremendous hardships after August 1945, she produced one of the most detailed and elaborate postwar Japanese accounts of Manchuria. Miyao established herself as an important novelist in the 1970s and published the autobiographical novel Shuka (Red Summer) in 1985 based on her experience in the colony. Shuka is a unique work among all postwar Japanese Manchurian narratives because of its length, descriptiveness, subtlety, and lyricism. It focuses on the heroine Ayako’s inner emotions of sorrow, anger, joy, and delight and painstakingly describes

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the sceneries she saw, the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the thoughts she had, and the people she encountered during those two years in Manchuria. The novel is written in the third-person, but the narrative perspective is close to that of the main character Ayako. The opening passage shows the novel’s elegant style, and highlights Ayako’s emotional sensitivity: That morning, the shivering petals of the cherry blossoms on the branches above the river in front of the gate clearly burned into Ayako’s eyes. Under the clear cloudless sky of spring, around seven in the morning, Kaname and Ayako lined up in front of the main house; Kaname was wearing a field cap, a suit, and a pair of gaiters and carried a backpack on his back and Ayako was wearing work pants, a sweater, and a coat and carried fifty-days-old Miya on her back. The eighty-two-year-old Grandfather Michitarō tottered out to the veranda where the morning sun slantingly shone in to see them off. He was almost blind because of cataracts. (Miyao 1985, 7) The image of the cherry blossoms manifests Ayako’s initial joy of embarking on her longanticipated journey from Kōchi Prefecture to Manchuria, but also forebodes that the joy is short-lived like the shortness of cherry blossoms’ lifespan. Ayako does not appear particularly worried about her new life ahead, nor is she sentimental about leaving the grandfather and mother-in-law behind. This opening passage clearly shows Ayako’s character trait as a naïve young mother who does not yet understand the hardships of life or the reality in Manchuria. It also sets the tone of the entire novel; the novel is an intimate revelation of Ayako’s perception and feelings instead of focusing on the external reality. In a brief flashback the narrator tells the reader that Ayako was only eighteen years old when she married Kaname and moved in with his family in a remote village in Kōchi Prefecture. Kaname soon went to Manchuria to teach at an elementary school in an agricultural settlement, leaving pregnant Ayako to live with his mother and grandfather. Ayako was eager to follow Kaname because she believed that it was safer there than Japan. She also hoped for better living conditions as well as simpler human relationships in Manchuria than the village. Therefore, going to Manchuria was an escape for Ayako from the war in Japan and from the constraints of living with her husband’s family. Soon after Ayako gave birth to their daughter Miya, Kaname came back to bring them to Manchuria. The main narrative starts from that point. The narrative tone of the novel is not that of melancholic reminiscence but of thoughtful recreation of Ayako’s feelings at the moment of the events. Once Ayako arrives in Yinmahe—an agricultural settlement in Jilin province, Manchuria —she finds herself trapped in an unfamiliar and harsh natural and social environment with no escape. The Soviet invasion and Japan’s defeat a few months after her arrival in Manchuria further throws her into a desperate situation. However, it is in such a tumultuous and dangerous condition in Manchuria that Ayako experiences the self-transformation into a mature and independent woman. When Ayako first sees the vast landscape of Manchuria, she is overtaken by a strong sense of loneliness and vulnerability: Although she had seen the Manchurian wilderness in several photos, now putting herself in the very middle of it and thinking that she would have to live here

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from now on, she felt overwhelmed by the vastness of its nature. Looking south, on the opposite side of Village One, what entered the field of her vision were the railroad that looked like a line drawn by a pencil and a little black train running on the track like a toy. However, Village Three, where the Taishō and Tsudai groups were housed, was too far way to count it as a neighbor because it was buried in the horizon far away and could only be vaguely seen as a village-like place with houses in it. Standing in the wildness, feeling the howling wind passing through her, she wondered where the wind had come from and where it was going and thought that the wind must be having a long journey. Thinking about that, she felt remote, uncertain as if she has been swallowed by the earth. However, Ayako understood that her fellow countrymen were fighting somewhere in the continent, and that the battle field might just look like what was in front of her eyes. She [stopped thinking and] just swallowed down a mouthful of saliva. (Miyao 1985, 98) The landscape of rural Manchuria overwhelms and disorients Ayako. Although feeling uncertain about her situation, Ayako nonetheless is reassured by the thought of her fellow countrymen there with her. In her thoughts Ayako hardly has the consciousness of being a colonizer. She merely hopes for a better life in Manchuria while being anxious about the ongoing war. Ayako gradually learns how to rely on herself to cope with the harsh living conditions of the settlement. Challenges in day-to-day life include the lack of electricity, clean drinking water, and fire wood. The only source of light in her house is a small oil lamp, and it reminds her of the Meiji era. Ayako is often choked to tears by the smoke from the sorghum stalks that she burns for the stove. Even washing Miya’s diapers becomes a problem because of the absence of running water. The only advantage of living in Manchuria is eating white rice for every meal and having abundant vegetables during the summer. Another joy that Ayako finds is her sense of mission and fulfillment by taking care of the students in the boarding school. She makes clothes for those in need; she helps a girl who gets her first period in school; she assists students with their cooking chores. Nevertheless, Ayako is still shocked by the gap between the Manchuria she has imagined and the real Manchuria in front of her eyes: “even if she counts the joy of living with the students, still she feels resentment toward material scarcity and lack of culture” (Miyao 1985, 133). Ayako’s knowledge about Manchuria is expanded when she encounters the Chinese for the first time. She describes the Chinese coolies on the train in terms of their bad smell, navy blue clothes, dark skin, and dusty, expressionless faces. The sheer poverty of the Chinese makes Ayako cringe and even cry. Ayako stands out from her Japanese travel companions because she is sentimental and curious about the Chinese while the others are dispassionate. She seems to be more sensitive to the presence of the Chinese than the other Japanese. When doing chores around her house or doing errands in the village Ayako vaguely feels with unease that some Chinese locals might be watching her from afar in the corn field. Even when her husband and others reassure her that nobody is watching her, Ayako still feels unsafe in regard to the unknown Chinese community nearby. At the same time, Ayako is able to connect with a few Chinese on a personal level. After she arrives in Jilin, she becomes familiar with the Chinese helpers that the school hires to

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take care of the food supplies and other chores: Xu Xianwen, Old Wen, Wang, and Zhang. The narrator provides detailed description of the Chinese from Ayako’s perspective: Ayako heard that Xu Xianwen learned Japanese at the Japanese language school in Jiutai. Although he only spoke halting Japanese, he could exchange conversations with the Japanese. Ayako once tirelessly gazed at the faces of those Chinese on the train in Andong. But once she started to live here, within less than one week she no longer saw those faces as belonging to a different race. It’s strange, but just like what Kaname had told her. The oldest son of the Wang household especially had a finely-cut face. Not only that, it was surprising that he had an intellectual face that was even rarely seen among the Japanese. Xu Xianwen was also fair-skinned and had a nice-looking face. Whenever he flashed a smile, he revealed a set of white teeth and looked quite charming. He always wore a brown gown and a wool winter hat. She only saw him take off the hat once. He had a very gentlemanly haircut and looked very mature. (Miyao 1985, 102) The narrative focus on the appearance of the Chinese shows that Ayako relates to them on the human level instead of the political level. She does not see the Chinese as the Other for the Japanese. She finds Zhang especially handsome and even compares him to the famous Japanese actor Uehara Ken. At that moment Ayako is not seeing Zhang as a member of the occupied Other from whom Ayako should feel distanced—but as a fellow human being with an uncanny physical resemblance to another man. Ayako’s interest in the Chinese is also revealed when she laments that she never gets to know any Chinese women because they normally do not go outside. Like all the Japanese in Manchuria, the news of Japan’s defeat devastates Ayako. She only learns about Japan’s surrender on August 18th. She breaks into tears and thinks: What’s in front of her eyes became dark. She felt that the earth she was standing on was crumbing. How could the defeat be even possible? Intense feelings blew up inside her. Who was able to ever think of such a wretched result? Even if the fortune of war was against Japan temporarily, she had believed in Japan’s final victory and had always held her pride as a Japanese. Therefore, this cruel pronouncement was so difficult to bear. (Miyao 1985, 240) Ayako and her family evacuate to the nearby city Yingchengzi where settlers from adjacent areas have all gathered. Here they switch from one housing to another until the repatriation begins a year later in the summer of 1946. In the beginning Ayako depends on the rationed food, but she constantly battles hunger and worries about Miya’s health. A crisis befalls her when her husband Kaname is abducted by the Chinese communist army. Ayako realizes that she must rely on herself from now on. Fortunately, Kaname escapes from his captivity and returns home two days later. Yet Ayako has already determined to take things into her own hands. When Kaname falls ill Ayako borrows money to buy good food. She exchanges whatever happens to be in her possession for money or food. She makes fried soybeans and hires a few Japanese children to sell the soybeans in the streets for her. In this way, she can stay home and care for her daughter Miya. Ayako is very proud of herself for starting her own business. She remembers her father once telling her that women should not work outside Chapter 19: Women and Colonies

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the home. Now, Ayako is firmly convinced that women must work in order to make their own living and become independent. She gains confidence and a new outlook on life from overcoming the trials and tribulations in Manchuria. Ayako’s hard work ensures her own survival and the survival of her family. While most of the small children in the Yingchenzi community died of diseases, malnutrition, and bad living condition, her daughter Miya miraculously remains healthy. Ayako becomes stronger, more confident, and more self-reliant at the end of the turmoil in Manchuria. Critics often describe Miyao’s literature as “feminine” because of its detailed description of emotions and its focus on gender issues. Her narrative is full of Ayako’s observation of gender inequality being played out in daily life. Ayako notices that during the entire trip from Kōchi Prefecture to Yinmahe Manchuria, Okamoto, the school principal, never helps his wife, Kinue, take care of their three young children. In the communal life after the defeat, Ayako sees how Okamoto still orders people around and takes more shares of rationed food for himself than the others. Ayako openly expresses her discontent toward Okamoto’s selfish behavior resulting in a strained relationship between the two families. Ayako is a keen observer of other Japanese families and women around her during the period of communal life. Ayako feels that although in the beginning, there is violence against Japanese and Japanese women from Soviet soldiers and Chinese mobs, a sense of normalcy remains. Even during the Soviet occupation, the Japanese, including the women, have a degree of freedom. When a few Soviet soldiers demand on threat of death that the Japanese turn in all their watches, many Japanese simply ignore the order. Ayako sees that the two Kizaki sisters hide three watches in their luggage despite the repeated warnings from the Soviet soldiers. Ayako is also amazed by the Kizaki sisters’ business-as-usual attitude when seeing them apply make-up every morning even with the presence of Soviet soldiers nearby. When the chaos subsides and things began to settle in Manchuria, Japanese women begin to buy cream, powder, lipsticks, and perfume. They also start to keep their hair long. Bathing becomes popular again among women. When Ayako’s friend Ai visits her, Ayako is impressed by how clean and healthy she is. Ai also shows Ayako some paper patterns for making clothes resulting in Ayako being surprised at how Ai is full of hope even in the face of such difficult circumstances. Although many Japanese women retained a degree of normalcy in Manchuria even after August 1945, the narrative shows that women were indeed the worst victims among the refugees. Ayako heard that some Japanese women slept with Chinese men for food and some sold their children to Chinese families for money. At the end of her repatriation journey in the summer of 1946, when Ayako arrived in the port of Sasebo, she was led to a building, together with all the other women from her ship. When asked by a female doctor if she had been raped by the Soviets or Chinese, she said no. Ayako learned that many women from her ship were hospitalized to have an abortion or to be treated for sexually transmitted diseases (Miyao 1985, 618). Although historical records show a large number of cases of sexual violence against women, there are few direct accounts by victims themselves. Miyao’s reference to Ayako’s medical checkup in Sasebo confirms the history of sexual violence against Japanese women in Manchuria. Despite the many cases of violence against Japanese women in Manchuria during and after August 1945, Ayako herself is not completely disempowered or helpless, but has a small degree of control over her life. In fact, for Ayako, despite the many trials and tribulations in Manchuria, she experiences tremendous self-growth. Scholar Fujimoto Chizuko 306

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characterizes Ayako’s personal growth as follows: “We have seen Ayako’s transformation from a spoiled daughter to a hungry wild dog, and further to a woman who understands the joy of working. Ayako’s awakening is the awakening to the realization that escaping and depending on others is a dangerous way of living and to the fact that women also must achieve independence through working” (Fujimoto 1986, 119). Indeed, without diminishing the violence and tragedies that many women suffered during their repatriation, Miyao’s novel constructs a positive female subjectivity based on the character Ayako’s sense of agency and strong will during that chaotic time of history. Ayako demonstrates not only resilience and determination to prevail against hardships but also tremendous wit and humorous energy throughout her stay in Manchuria. The title of the novel “shuka” literally means red summer, and it can also mean the prime of a person’s life. As such, the title implies that although Ayako suffered in Manchuria, her suffering also led to an intense period of personal growth. With her newly discovered strength and independence, Ayako clearly sees her Manchuria experience as a path towards maturity.

Conclusion: Subjectivity and colonial memory Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko use the autobiographical form to reflect on and reconstruct their past in Shanghai and Manchuria. Because of the differences in family circumstances, marital status, and rural vs. urban location these three writers’ colonial experiences are distinct from one another. Their different writing styles also help them achieve their respective goals: Hayashi creates mental echoes or connections between her two drastically different experiences in colonial Shanghai and the Nagasaki atomic bombing; Sawachi recreates an image of her fourteen-year-old self as being shaped by social and historical factors that she only became aware of long after the war; Miyao elaborates on her two years in Manchuria as an internal journey to maturity. Despite their differences in circumstances, they share in their writings the same attention to domestic life, personal emotions, as well as women’s unique physiological experiences. They also all demonstrate a knowledge of the culture of the colony and a broader understanding of the concepts of oppression, violence, and victimization. Author’s Note: Parts of the section on Hayashi Kyōko are based on a chapter from my unpublished dissertation Narrating the Colonial Past in Manchuria and Shanghai in Postwar Japanese Literature, 2007.

Notes 1

These twelve stories were first serialized in the journal Gunzō from March 1977 to February 1978. They were published as a single volume by Kōdansha in May 1978.

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References Hayashi, K. (1988a). Kōsa. [Yellow Sand]. In Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro [Ritual of Death / Cut Glass, Blown Glass]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. (Original work published 1977) ———. (1988b). Hibiki. [Echoes]. In Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro [Ritual of Death / Cut Glass, Blown Glass]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1988c). Chōsha kara dokusha e: futatsu no inochi to jinsei [From Writer to Reader: Two Lives]. In Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro [Ritual of Death/Cut Glass, Blown Glass]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (1991). Yellow Sand. In N.M. Lippit & K.I. Selden (trans. & eds.), Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction (pp. 207–16). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1977) ———. (2001a). Rōtaibo no Roji. [The Alley of the Old Lady]. In Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni [Shanghai / Michelle’s Lipstick]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2001b). Yami. [The Darkness]. In Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni [Shanghai / Michelle’s Lipstick]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Fujimoto, C. (1986). Miyao Tomiko “Shuka”—osanai haha Ayako no Manshū taiken. [Miyao Tomiko’s “Red Summer”—young mother Ayako’s experiences in Manchuria]. Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū, vol. 31(5), (1986): 117–19. Kawanishi, M. (2001). Kaisetsu, Kōhokō no kaze [Commentary: Wind from the Huangpu River]. Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni [Shanghai / Michelle’s Lipstick]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Miyao, T. (1985). Shuka. [Red Summer]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1985. Sawachi, H. (2015). 14-sai “fōtīn”: Manshū kaitakumura kara no kikan. [Fourteen Years Old: Return from a Japanese Pioneer Village]. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Treat, J. (1995). Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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Chapter 20 Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami Davinder L. Bhowmik Since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, Koza, a military base town adjacent to the largest US Air Force base in the Asia-Pacific, has served as fertile ground for the setting of literature from Okinawa. The writing of Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko and, in particular, Sakiyama Tami illustrates the impact the US military has had on residents of Koza from the dispossession of land to aircraft and vehicular accidents to rape and murder. Their writing on aging bar hostesses, vibrant mixed-race children, and intrepid tourists rails against interminable war, the loss of home, and violated bodies. Furthermore, their work stands counter to male writers’ literature of Koza in the form of indelible female characters who challenge depictions of passivity through bold action.

Introduction In this chapter I introduce readers to three contemporary female authors—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami. Their works depict the culturally hybrid space of Koza, a military base town in Okinawa built from the ashes of war. In its early days, Koza’s bars, nightclubs, pawnshops, and restaurants attracted individuals to the city from across Okinawa and its surrounding islands. These new residents’ interactions with and observations of U.S. military servicemen resulted in a flourishing of writing by women starting in the 1980s, after a dearth of such literature.1 Relative to the scant writing by women prior to Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty on May 15, 1972, women have published steadily post-reversion often setting their works on the town of Koza. Although Koza is not explicitly named in Tōma Hiroko’s poem “Senaka” (2005, Backbone*), the line “street bright with neon are the man’s playground” most certainly refers to Koza. “Kamaara shinjū” (1984, Love Suicide at Kamaara*) by Yoshida Sueko is set squarely in Kamaara, a district of Koza, and Sakiyama Tami’s Kuja genshikō (2017, Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja) is a collection of seven thematically linked short stories

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in which Koza, or Kuja, as Sakiyama’s renders it, figures prominently. What is it about Koza that impels these authors to set their work there? Koza, a heterogenous space wherein the foreign and the local intermingle, is at once built upon land forcibly seized by American occupation soldiers and fertile ground for the rich literature of a growing number of female authors in Okinawa. Adjacent to Kadena Air Force Base, now the largest of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, the newly formed municipality of Koza (Goeku until 1945) drew to it Okinawans seeking employment from throughout the main island of Okinawa as well as from neighboring islands in the Ryūkyū archipelago. Not only was the local population of mixed origins but the US military soldiers who frequented Koza businesses, too, were ethnically heterogeneous. In its heyday during the Vietnam War a section of the city known as “The Bush,” ruled by Black soldiers, barred White and Hispanic soldiers entry to the area they considered theirs. Soldiers going to and from Vietnam spent cash so freely in Koza during their rest and relaxation (R&R) trips they thought nothing of laying out a thousand or even two thousand dollars for a bar drink ticket.2 This cash kept the streets of Koza ablaze in neon lights. Shortly after Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972 when Misato, a town near Koza merged with the latter, city officials chose a new name for Koza—Okinawa City. Other changes ensued. B.C. Street, notorious during the Vietnam War for clubs that enticed soldiers to lewd sex shows, received, along with the aspirational name of Central Park Avenue, white facades to hide seedy bars, a row of palm trees, and a one-way thoroughfare to reduce traffic to the area. More recently, city officials have rebranded Koza music town (oto ichiba), which has launched several musicians. These concerted efforts to whitewash Koza’s violent past and make Okinawa’s second largest city a tourist destination have largely failed. This is because a newer entertainment area near the East China Sea in Chatan, ironically named American Village, now attracts more of the military crowd than does Okinawa City, which most people still call Koza.3 In the following I will analyze a poem by Tōma Hiroko, a short story by Yoshida Sueko, and several thematically linked works by Sakiyama Tami, Okinawa’s leading female writer. My readings will underscore the place of Koza to show how thoroughly imbricated the foreign presence is in this locale.

Tōma Hiroko: Age of Yamato, Age of America I begin with an analysis of “Backbone,” though it appeared two decades after the publication of “Love Suicide at Kamaara,” an analysis of which follows. Tōma’s “Backbone” is important for understanding how omnipresent the military “footprint” is in Okinawa. This spare poem not only contains a concise history of Okinawa but also succinctly depicts the burden the island’s citizens carry owing to the prefecture’s dark history. Given the poem’s short length I include it here for reference: “Backbone” Your back’s hunched like a cat Said the man from the city I had forgotten That my back is hunched like a cat

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Until that day one year ago that I had forgotten What dangers lie just beyond the wire fence Does everyone on your island hunch their backs like cats? The man blows smoke with his words Don’t be absurd Yet as the words leave my mouth My heart whispers, it might be so Black smoke, blackened walls, black-burnt trees The campus that day was not Japan In a flash before our eyes it had become America An island too small to see on a world map Its island words can no longer be heard Camouflaged forms roaming too freely Since the time of katakashira to the present day Forced down, unable to speak The weight of chagrin borne heavily upon its shoulders Across the sea from my island I cry out Age of Yamato, land battle, age of America, wire fence, fighter jets The man closes his ears and grins Blue skies, white beaches, burnt orange roof tiles, tropical Lemon-limes, red hibiscus Brilliant hues trying to scratch out the black The weight of sorrow saddled heavily upon its back The streets bright with neon are the man’s playground My playground is a would-be place where the wire fence is swept away I just want to stand up tall and stride through my backyard (Tōma 2016, 221–22) The poem consists of five stanzas, the first of which begins with a contemporary scene of the everyday danger in militarized Okinawa that hunches the back of our speaker. Stanza two reveals this danger warps the figures of all Okinawans. In stanza three, light is shed on the unnamed danger of the poem’s opening. The keywords “smoke,” “blackened walls,” and “campus” point definitively to one glaring example among the myriad dangers that have attended militarization in Okinawa. Mid-afternoon on August 13, 2004 during summer break, an Army helicopter crashed into Okinawa International University, located adjacent to Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma, which Donald Rumsfeld called “the world’s most dangerous airport.” Looking down on his flight over MCAS Futenma in 2003 Rumsfeld saw an airstrip built in the middle of a dense city packed with schools, homes, and businesses all the way to the surrounding barbed wire fence. The helicopter parts that fell in 2004 hit seventeen houses and thirty-three vehicles. Hundreds of university staff and students fled in Chapter 20: Women and Aftermath

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the ensuing confusion. One crew member was severely injured and two others were slightly wounded. Had the university been in session it is likely civilian lives would have been lost. That infamous day, gone in a flash is tiny Okinawa, its ever-dying languages no longer audible. Okinawans bend over in humiliation as “camouflaged forms” freely roam as they have since the island’s 1879 annexation. The 2004 helicopter crash illustrates just how fraught and porous everyday life on either side of military fences is in Okinawa. Located in the township of Ginowan in congested central Okinawa, MCAS Futenma had been slated to close permanently since the 1996 Special Action Committee in Okinawa (SACO) Accord, created in response to the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl by three soldiers. To this day MCAS Futenma remains open despite other crashes after 2004, deafening aircraft noise that forces local school to stop instruction intermittently, and ongoing protests. To add insult to (literal) injury, on the day of the helicopter crash the US military immediately closed off the accident site, indisputably located in a civilian area, restricting the movement of university staff and even local police. The poem’s speaker, painfully cognizant of this violation of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, which stipulates that US property is under US jurisdiction, laments how that day the Japanese campus became America, or rather, an off-base base. In the following stanza the poem’s speaker gives a nutshell history of Okinawa—“Age of Yamato, land battle, Age of America.” From the early 15th century, the Ryūkyū Kingdom, the center of which is Okinawa Island, prospered economically and flourished culturally as a monarchy enriched by maritime trade. It paid tribute to the Chinese Qing imperial officials and the Japanese Satsuma clan, two powers that shaped Okinawa. Yamato, or mainland Japanese, influence, intensified when the Shimazu clan from Satsuma, in southwest Kyushu, invaded Okinawa in 1609. Assimilation to Japanese culture further accelerated when Japan incorporated Okinawa into the nation-state in 1879. Decades of emperor-centered education and schooling in standard Japanese, akin to a foreign language for Ryukyuan speakers, inculcated Japanese values in Okinawans. Tragically, upon “becoming Japanese” 100,000 or more Okinawans perished in the aforementioned “land battle,” or the Battle of Okinawa, the only fighting that took place on Japanese soil during the Asia-Pacific War. The “Age of America,” continues today for Okinawa, which not only remained under US occupation for two decades longer than did the rest of Japan, but also, subsequent to reversion in 1972, saw an increase in the number of US military bases on its soil while bases in mainland Japan were reduced in numbers (Hosokawa, 4). The adverse impact of the US military on local populations has been well documented by anthropologists, historians, and social scientists (McCormack 2012; Enloe 2014; Vine 2015). Much of this scholarship documents the dangers that accompany the military presence from sexual violence, environmental damage, to aircraft and vehicular accidents. Owing to the fact that the vast majority of US military installations in Japan—70%—are located in Okinawa, which is just 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land mass—virtually every writer from the prefecture has penned literature that concerns the soldiers and their bases. The fences and jets mentioned in “Backbone” are part and parcel of the “Age of America” in which accidents that befell Okinawa International University have been rampant. None of the brilliant hues of Tōma’s poem—whether of the skies, the sea, flora, or fauna—can obliterate the black fuel that marks the walls of both university buildings and neighboring apartment complexes. The final stanza points to two juxtaposing playgrounds, one the speaker, frame bent in sorrow, can only dream of, and the other, Koza, securely possessed by men on the prowl. 312

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From her home in neon-emblazoned Koza, the speaker longs simply to stand upright and one day walk through what she calls her “backyard.” This backyard, adjacent to Koza, is none other than Kadena Air Force Base (KAB), built on land seized after the Allied victory in Okinawa. Hidden behind barbed wire fences lined with oleander, or “military base flowers” that the Americans planted throughout the island to camouflage damage caused by the Allied bombardment, the sheer size of KAB is difficult to fathom. Forty times the size of the Japanese imperial airfield out of which it grew, twice the size of Haneda airport in Tokyo, and amassing more land area than five mainland Japanese bases combined (Misawa Air Base, Yokota Air Base, Yokosuka Naval Base, Iwakuni Air Base, and Sasebo Naval Base), KAB is home to over 20,000 service personnel and civilian contractors. If one includes dependents the number is closer to 50,000. In addition to two major runways, KAB boasts schools, medical facilities, churches, banks, a post office, a commissary and postal exchange, movie theaters, a bowling alley, recreation center, and more. When, in the mid-1950s, the speaker’s backyard was forcibly taken by soldiers with bulldozers and bayonets, the Okinawans’ sudden dispossession of land sparked a furious yet ultimately ineffectual all island protest (Inoue 1997). With few exceptions, such as for families wishing to visit ancestral tombs located on KAB, no one without Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) status can enter Kadena or any other of the island’s military installations. Hence, the speaker’s seemingly modest wish to stand upright would entail the dissolution of, or at least a major change in SOFA, cemented by the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, created in 1951, hastily renewed by Kishi Nobusuke in 1960, and maintained thereafter. The base town of Koza and KAB can be thought of as intimates, the former more often than not serving the latter. Whereas any writer of heavily militarized Okinawa might well pen fiction about the dynamic that arises between civilian and soldier, Koza, in particular has been a rich source for literary material in the postwar era. Michael Molasky calls Koza “a convenient metonym of occupied Okinawa” explaining how its bars and nightclubs offer foreign soldiers native bodies (Molasky 55). If Koza constitutes a feminine space, as Molasky has underscored, it stands in marked contrast to militarized, muscular Kadena. What happens when these spheres collide?

Yoshida Sueko: Diaspora and desire Yoshida Sueko made a name for herself as the first female author to set a fictional story wholly in Koza. Her short story “Love Suicide” illustrates how, for the main character, Kiyo, Koza is, until she ages out, a place of refuge. For her story, Yoshida won the New Okinawan Literature Prize in 1984. Ultimately critics found this piece, which portrays the relationship of Kiyo, a 58-year-old prostitute and Sammy, an 18-year-old American GI whom Kiyo shelters after he goes AWOL, deserving of the prize, but not without certain reservations. In particular, some critics found the story’s sex scenes verging on pornographic (tsuuzoku suresure). Hyoduk Lee counters this claim by noting that the scenes are not gratuitous for without them the work does not cohere (Lee 2013, 22), a point to which I will return. Yoshida’s “Love Suicide” cannot but bring to mind “Beddo taimu aizu” (1985, Bedtime Eyes*) Yamada Eimi’s sensational debut story concerning Kim, a Japanese woman infatuated with Spoon, a Black American soldier whom, like Kiyo, she shelters when he goes AWOL

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after stabbing his platoon leader. John G. Russell argues that the popularity of African American culture among young Japanese in the 1980s stemmed from “the value of the black other as a metaphor for rebellion against the stifling, jejune values of bourgeois Japanese society” (Russell 1991, 424). Sammy, the soldier in Yoshida’s story could also be construed as an Other, but he is White and Yoshida’s story is not rife with troubling, stereotypical depictions of Black male sexuality as is Yamada’s. Granted, in “Love Suicide” Kiyo worships Sammy, whom she refers to as her “Adonis,” but despite the prickly judges’ comments the work is less about sexuality per se than it is about the economic forces that shape the life of a woman like Kiyo. In a scene tangential to the bulk of “Love Suicide,” which takes place in Kiyo’s Koza apartment where Sammy is hiding, Kiyo leaves the entertainment district behind her: She stood at the bus stop and thought of going to Nakagusuku Park. From atop the stone wall of the old castle there, she’d be able to see Tsuken Island. She wanted to look at the white crest of the waves dashing against the far reef. On days when she felt down, she longed to see the outline of the island where she was born and would come to gaze at the ocean surrounding it whenever something was troubling her. Perhaps because she had fallen on hard times, Kiyo was often depressed these days. She constantly dwelled on the past, something she hated doing. Or maybe it was because she was getting old that she thought more and more about the past, especially about her husband and children, long estranged. (Yoshida 2000, 224) Prior to visiting the park, cash-strapped Kiyo secures some money at a Koza pawnshop whose owner’s wife is also from Tsuken Island. Another small neighboring island mentioned in passing is Iheya where Kiyo’s friend Hiromi lived before moving to Koza to work in one of its many bars. Razed by aerial bombardment, outlying islands of Okinawa such as Tsuken and Iheya did not enjoy the economic boom brought about by the soldiers who flocked to KAB during the Vietnam War. Hence, young women like Kiyo and Hiromi moved to Koza, Okinawa’s newly created base town made up of islanders from throughout the prefecture. Kiyo’s lack of fear in taking Sammy in after he stabbed his superior owes in part to having witnessed countless acts of violence during the two-decades-long Vietnam War. “She had even seen a man shot to death right in front of her, so a mere stabbing didn’t frighten her in the least” (Yoshida 2000, 221). Another reason Kiyo shelters Sammy is her weakness for young, pretty boys. Several passages in the story point to the impact Kiyo’s decades laboring as a Koza sex worker have had on her body and livelihood. By the time she meets Sammy, standing at her usual place on B.C. Street, she has already reduced the price for her services to ten dollars, less than half the market rate. Sammy offers her only five dollars to which Kiyo muses, “Does he really think he can have a woman for as little as a thousand yen?” (Yoshida 2000, 219). What makes Kiyo accept this pittance is the visage of her body in the mirror: Her face was discolored and bloated, perhaps from a lack of sleep. It was a loathsome face. Her neck had become scrawnier recently. Not only was it thinner, but it had lost its color. The yellow, wrinkled skin clinging to her neck hung down, sagging lifelessly. A trace of her youthful past remained in her arms, but veins floated on the backs of her hands, and her yellowed palms were pitiful. Her chest, 314

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too, was bony, having lost its glow, and her flabby belly was covered with fine wrinkles She was acutely aware that she was no longer young, which made her feel all the more ugly. (Yoshida 2000, 218) Repulsed by this body ravaged by time Kiyo draws vitality from her Adonis Sammy. In contrast to earlier works such as Higashi Mineo’s “Okinawa no shōnen” (1971, Child of Okinawa*) which focuses on a young male’s adolescent desire intertwined with American male soldiers seeking sex in Koza or Matayoshi Eiki’s “Jōji ga shasatsu shita inoshishi” (1978, The Wild Boar that George Gunned Down*) which further underscores sexual violence perpetrated by soldiers in the base town, Yoshida’s “Love Suicide” is notable for revealing its female protagonist Kiyo’s desires and agency. For example, in the following scene of oral sex rebuked by critics Kiyo is transformed: He was life itself, and when Kiyo held him in her mouth, her aged cells were restored, as if she were being rejuvenated. Injected with pure youth, she felt imbued, through her lips and her cheeks, with that young vigor. The powerful force that raged inside her mouth made her want to suck in this essence of life with all its youth and joy and make it her own. (Yoshida 2000, 216–17). In another sex scene Kiyo devours Sammy crying at the realization of how glorious intercourse between a man and a woman is: “She’d never been so thankful to be in the business of selling her body. It was her line of work that had made this experience possible. Otherwise, she’d never have had the chance to be held by a man like Sammy, not even in three lifetimes” (Yoshida 2000, 222). Here, one must take care not to overly romanticize Kiyo’s occupation. It is—certainly during the heyday of Koza’s boom economy in the Vietnam era—fraught with danger and even otherwise, not always safe. Still, despite the risk involved in harboring Sammy, Kiyo willingly does so. And, even as she observes clear signs of Sammy’s disenchantment with their relationship, Kiyo continues to enjoy from it deep sexual pleasure. Having left an alcoholic husband behind on Tsuken Island does not fully liberate Kiyo whose age makes it increasingly difficult to support herself. But there is no question that in choosing to house Sammy and revel in his body, Kiyo acts according to her desires. Kiyo panics when Sammy finally tells her he plans to turn himself in to the military police (MP). When he rejects her idea to run away to Tsuken Island, full of abandoned homes (akiya) due to depopulation, Kiyo executes her final, boldest form of agency: love suicide. In the story’s anachronistic last scene, Kiyo who suddenly wished to bathe, does so before standing once again in front of a mirror. Only this time, “[h]er eyes sparkled in the pallor of her face.” (Yoshida 2000, 232.) Rather than put on a gaudy pink dress fitting for her occupation, she decides to wear an indigo Kumejima kimono. As she secures the door and windows a military jet from nearby KAB roars. Kiyo then opens up all three propane gas jets in the kitchen and joins Sammy who is asleep in bed. In the story’s last line, she summons her resolve and turns the flint wheel of a lighter. Readers familiar with the narrative trope of love suicide, popularized by Edo period playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), know from Yoshida’s title alone the fate of Kiyo and Sammy; their certain death comes as no surprise. What is intriguing in this final scene is its spatial representation. That is, rather than maintain the story’s two clearly demarcated Chapter 20: Women and Aftermath

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spaces—Tsuken together with other outlying islands and Koza—the suicide scene blends them. Mayumi Manabe’s reading of space and gender in Higuchi Ichiyō’s “Nigori-e” (1895, Troubled Waters*) is instructive here. Ichiyō’s story, which concerns a merchant (Genshichi) who falls in love with a prostitute (Oriki), whom Genshichi’s wife (Ohatsu) despises, consists of two major spaces. These are everyday life as represented by the sphere of Genshichi’s wife and the space of play as represented by the licensed quarter. The floating world as heterotopia place outside all places, functioned as an oppositional place in the Edo period, a place where norms were subverted. Manabe points out that the commodification of things starting in the Meiji era (1868–1912) surfaces in “Troubled Waters” when rather than revel in the knowledge that Oriki and Genshichi will attain Buddhahood through their deaths the townspeople rue the financial hit the licensed quarter will take because of Oriki’s demise. In short, while still a heterotopia, the floating world in “Troubled Waters” is simply “a node in a web of communications that organizes itself around the logic of capitalism…, a node to which women flow, forced by economic necessity, and are, in the process, transformed into commodities” (Manabe 2016, 45). If Oriki’s imbrication with the marketplace is subtly referenced in Ichiyō’s story, then Yoshida’s “Love Suicide,” penned nearly a hundred years later, makes explicit how the military base produces Koza, the heterotopic node that draws to it impoverished diasporic women. Kiyo longingly gazes at Tsuken Island, the childhood home to which she cannot return even as the harsh neon of Koza only makes more obvious her rapid aging. To prevent Sammy from returning to his base and to keep her Adonis nearby she enacts an age-old Japanese custom: love suicide. Theirs is a not mutually agreed upon death (gōi shinjū) but rather, a murder-suicide (muri shinjū), with Kiyo very much in charge. After bathing and applying makeup Kiyo casts aside the gaudy pink dress that represents Okinawa’s Age of America, complete with its military bases, electing instead to wear a garment from Kumejima, another of Okinawa’s outer islands. Kiyo’s death may seem at odds with her earlier action of rejoicing in life-giving sex with Sammy, however, through this dignified death in a hermetically sealed and self-fashioned (with indigenous cloth) heterotopic space, Kiyo ultimately rejects Koza, which is now—post-Vietnam War—an ageist and aging military base town.

Sakiyama Tami: Spectral Koza The author foremost associated with Koza today is Sakiyama Tami. Born in Iriomote Island Sakiyama lived in Ishigaki and Miyako Islands before moving to Okinawa Island at the age of fourteen. Drawn to the natural cadence of language spoken in her new home, Koza, as Higashi Mineo so skillfully demonstrates in his critically acclaimed “Child of Okinawa,” Sakiyama has endeavored, since a conspicuous turn in her methodology around 2001, to incorporate Okinawa’s distinct, albeit dying languages into her fiction, which is set throughout the island prefecture. This language, often completely unglossed, presents a serious obstacle for the general reader. Even so, over the course of a work meaning becomes clearer from contextual clues and Sakiyama’s repetition of island language (shima kotoba). Koza, or Kuja, as Sakiyama puts it, serves as the backdrop to her thematically linked short story collection Kuja genshikō (2017, Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja). Below, I analyze Kuja, the collection’s remarkable setting, in five of its seven stories. The stories reveal how the complex underbelly of Koza belies the city’s relative newness.

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Sakiyama’s Kuja brings to mind Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Joyce’s Dublin, or Alice Munro’s Western Ontario; Kuja is a place Sakiyama conjures for her decidedly modernist writing. Koza’s hybridity, made up of both diasporic Okinawans settling there and American soldiers rotating in for tours of duty, is reflected in its unique orthography—Japan’s only place name rendered in katakana, the syllabary Japanese reserves for foreign terms. Sakiyama has long lived in Koza where people speak different languages—Japanese, English, Sindhi, and Tagalog, to name just a few. Perhaps this is owing to her own linguistically diverse childhood during which she recalls hearing all around her island languages from neighboring Miyako, Hatoma, and Sonai (Bhowmik 2008, 174). Although each of the collection’s stories is linguistically challenging given Sakiyama’s infamous intention to make local languages-cum-guerilla aircraft collide into the World Trade Center-like tower of standard Japanese (Sakiyama 2002, 170), careful and repeated rereading results in a general understanding of what transpires within the works. The collection begins and ends with a male narrator, Ore, who is a photographer from mainland Japan. On island to capture with his equipment the landscape of Cape Hedo, in northern Okinawa, Ore ultimately fails to do so. However, in the space of seven days, he plumbs the depths of Kuja, the town into which he stumbles after taking the wrong bus. The underbelly, as it were, of Kuja is explored in stories two to six after which the collection ends with a return to Ore in story seven. To illustrate the richness of Sakiyama’s depiction of Kuja in “Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja” below I pay close attention to what their respective narrators reveal about this military base town. Ore is introduced in the opening story, “Kōtōmu dochuimuni” (Solitary Island Dream Soliloquy, hereinafter “Dream Soliloquy”). He is a 39-year-old freelance photographer, specializing in B&W landscape photography, and has come to Okinawa to compile a book featuring abysses. Rather than heading toward Cape Hedo, Ore’s bus turns into the island’s interior where barbed-wire fences announce his arrival in the military-base town of Koza. There, he wanders into an audio shop where he spies a pamphlet advertising a performance taking place shortly by a troupe named Kuja. Ore goes to the venue where a young Filipina woman, Takaesu Maria, is performing. Described as “the last firework” of Kuja Maria is the troupe’s remaining member. In an impassioned soliloquy Maria describes soldiers who paraded through Koza during the Vietnam War, many of whom assaulted women. As a kid, these assaults seeped into her consciousness while she hung around the bars. Maria distinctly recalls a junior-high girl assaulted one evening and wonders what became of her. These assaults occurred daily until the war ended. In one recollection, Maria says, Back then, during the war, this alleyway in Kuja overflowed with American soldiers coming and going to Vietnam. During the day they lazed around town but at night Kuja became a spot where the soldiers plastered themselves to women. These guys who’d received orders to kill from their government had no way to escape a war where they had to kill or be killed other than to lay bare their craziness until the early hours of morning. I’m not sure how best to put it but every night they let out cries like “Haiiyaaiiyaa.” They were like armies of ants swarming Kuja. (Sakiyama 2017, 18) The child of a Filipino soldier and Okinawan mother, Maria, Kuja’s lone firework whose very name suggests an association with the military, is not only abandoned by her parents Chapter 20: Women and Aftermath

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but also loses at age thirteen the grandmother whose loving care shielded Maria from being bullied for her ethnic difference. The circumstances of the grandmother’s death—struck while crossing against a red light— may seem simply due to bad luck. However, Maria reveals that her aged grandmother who had safely crossed the streets in Kuja before Okinawa’s reversion grew unaccustomed to changes, such as the installation of traffic lights, wrought by the traffic changeover inaugurated on July 30, 1978 (nana-san-maru).4 For three decades following the US Occupation Okinawans had driven on the right side of the road before they were forced to convert to the left. Thus, this overnight change, the last of the postwar projects, links Maria’s beloved grandmother’s death inextricably to the presence of the US military as surely as Maria’s life is itself tied. During Maria’s soliloquy Ore periodically attempts to snap a photograph but each time the effort coincides with his falling further into a deep torpor (doro yume) from which he finally rouses. Now Ore finds himself alone, the curtains of the stage drawn. The only trace left of Maria is in the pamphlet featuring an advertisement of the one-woman show. Though Maria’s monologue ends, “Soliloquy” includes a final scene in which Ore is at Cape Hedo, the landscape abyss that was his intended destination. It is evening and the rain has let up. Ore has with him his camera but feels no urge to photograph his surroundings. He ponders the faces of the 18 members of the troupe Kuja at their height in 1975. The heterogeneous group so emblematic of Kuja includes among others, “…a comedian with a droll round face and kinky hair; a doltish man with gleaming dark skin who clearly loved the sea; a husky voiced woman with jet black eyebrows and overly long shadows playing in her taut cheekbones—blond and slight in build, her deep pupils shone in blue eyes that suggested she liked to chat and tease others…” (Sakiyama 2017, 26). The troupe’s aura, the narrator says, must have overwhelmed audiences. Rather than conclude the story with this nostalgic look back at the Vietnam-era-fueled boom in Kuja the narrator appends the scene below of Ore at Cape Hedo, the landscape he so longed to capture, The scenery at the cape began to sway restlessly. The wind came in. Surging and frothing, the surface of the ocean that had begun to change color from the absence of the fierce sun made the belly of the waves appear and disappear. The field of vision grew increasingly vast. The smell of water hung over the scene. It was neither from the ocean nor from the rain. It was a scent of darkness that began to blow out of the crevice around my feet and hung about there. (Sakiyama 2017, 26) In these last lines of “Soliloquy” the narrative shifts dramatically from one rooted in sight and sound that describes Kuja during the Vietnam War to a world steeped in smells that lies beneath Ore. If the first and last stories of the Kuja stories form its overarching structure, then the five tales within the collection provide an in-depth view of Kuja’s underbelly, the smells of which assault, and perhaps, awaken Ore. A close examination of three of these five tales suffices to give readers a sense of the basetown. Uchi is the primary narrator of “Mienai machi kara shonkaneega” (Such is Life in an Invisible Town, hereinafter “Invisible Town”). Her addressee is Anta to whom she conveys that “Mama” has died and urges her to return to Kuja to attend to her death ceremonies. Mama, we learn, fled her home island of Yonaguni after the war (a stone’s throw from Taiwan) to 318

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run a bar in the black district (kuronbō-gai) of Kuja where she employed Uchi, Anta, and other young women to first service American soldiers during Okinawa’s occupation and then mainland Japanese men post-reversion. Unrelated by blood, Mama nevertheless treats girls like Uchi and Anta as if they were her daughters (their bar duties notwithstanding). The three women and others like them are emblematic of families in Kuja, born out of circumstances rather than biology. The time frame is post-reversion as there is mention of Kaiyōhaku (Expo ‘75), the world’s fair held in northern Okinawa to commemorate the prefecture’s return to Japan. The boom years of the Vietnam War, referred to as “back then” (ano jidai) throughout the collection, come up in descriptions of other bar hostesses such as Fumiko who couples with Jim, a gentle Black sailor who grows violent when ridiculed. Fumiko hears little from Jim after he is sent to Vietnam. Sachi, who leaves Kuja with her soldier-lover to settle in New Orleans where she has children and grandchildren, seems happy, at least in the photos she sends Mama. Uchi talks about how happy she was when Anta left Kuja to marry a Japanese man on the mainland. No longer would Anta have to endure occupational abuse to her body. Ironically, as the narrative develops, we learn that after years of domestic abuse Anta’s husband hurls her off a cliff. Uchi’s addressee, Anta, who “returns” to send-off Mama is thus, also dead. In the story’s final twist Anta asks if Uchi has figured out that she, too, is dead, You know, more than anything I regret that I passed away before Mama. I was only 48, and could still work. I coughed up blood one night and everything turned black. Mama rushed me to the hospital that night but I had only three months left to live. Mama held me and cried and cried until she was out of breath, “How can a daughter die before her mother?” Shaking me, I heard her say, “If you’re not here who’s going to take care of Mama? Open your eyes! Listen!” I made a promise to Mama then, “Don’t worry Mama. When it’s time, I’ll be by your side and I’ll call Anta. The two of us will prepare you for death.” (Sakiyama 2017, 51) Key to the segue from “Soliloquy” to “Invisible Town” is darkness. When Anta reaches Kuja after her flight from Tokyo Uchi tells her the town is pitch black at night unlike the 1960s and 70s when the town was bedazzled in gaudy signs and bright neon. And, in the story’s final lines, Uchi urges Anta not to cry as they have preparations to make before the sun arises. This synesthetic space of darkness where smells rise up is filled only with ghosts whose woes seep into Ore, the collection’s frame narrator. If “Soliloquy” did not make abundantly clear just how barren Kuja had become post-Vietnam War/reversion, then the sorority of ghosts in “Invisible Town” most certainly does. Less straight forward than “Invisible Town,” “Akoukurou genshikō” (Passing into Twilight Alley,* hereafter “Twilight Alley”) is perhaps the most intriguing and enigmatic of Sakiyama’s Kuja stories. Spatially, the narrator is in a town whose back alleys resemble Kuja. She wanders through a group of women gossiping about a woman who they claim is the daughter of a Chiji juri, or prostitute in Tsuji, the licensed quarter in Okinawa’s southern town of Shuri. Hearing the various threads of gossip, the narrator recalls memories of herself in Twilight Alley at the age of five. In the alley she followed behind a figure she called the mud woman owing to the fact she smelled like soil and looked like a clod of dirt.

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The mud woman is clearly a product of the alleyways of the town that, like Kuja, is quiet during the day and noisy at night, “its silent hollows lit by grimy neon” (Sakiyama 2012, 176). According to the narrator everything in the town smells rotten. She elaborates further, The stink’s source is alcohol, sweat, spit, urine, sex, and mold mixed and fermented. A sudden shriek becomes a scream, followed by the sound of an explosion. Yelling. Shouts. Accusations. A sound of sirens. Spasm. Mass seizure. Loud mocking laughter, like random gun shots, fire off through the dark alley, now dyed a sad blood red. (Sakiyama 2012, 176) Spatially “Twilight Alley” bears a striking resemblance to Kuja, the postwar military base town in central Okinawa. And yet, temporally the story harkens back to Tsuji, Okinawa’s historic licensed quarter, located in the south. Indeed, through the narrator’s dreams and fragments of memory what emerges in “Twilight Alley” is a kind of palimpsest, the surface of which is Kuja with Tsuji lying underneath. Not only are Kuja and Tsuji famed entertainment districts but they are similar topographically. Tsuji, which means “crossroads” is matched by Goya, a well-known four-corner intersection in sprawling Kuja. The connection between Kuja and Tsuji, which makes “Twilight Alley” far denser than other Kuja stories is clear. What begs questioning is the significance of the mud woman. The description of Kuja above resembles other of the collection’s scenes of the basetown, particularly during the prosperous yet violent period of the Vietnam War in Okinawa. The danger of Kuja during this volatile time is obliquely referred to in another scene when one of two gossiping women declares that she dreams nightly of killing men indiscriminately. The other woman blithely replies, “If you want to kill men, just kill them. Don’t worry. Kill as many as you want.” (Sakiyama 2012, 183). The narrator offers no explanation for this bizarre exchange only concluding, “Their conversation carries on nonsensically, perhaps only good for getting rid of pent-up frustrations, ceaselessly discharging in the dripping darkness through a back alley where everything accumulates, even as the child drifts after the mud woman” (Sakiyama 2012, 183). That the narrator alludes to a trauma-induced latent grudge the first woman bears, and given the bar district setting (Bar Texas, Yumi’s Bar, Okinawan Music Bar Attchame and so on), it is not far-fetched to presume that a soldier has violated the woman. The story’s connection to Tsuji notwithstanding, “Twilight Alley” is a fascinating work describing the dangers that accompany a vast military presence in as small a place as Kuja. The mud woman who reeks of soil might best be understood to represent those dispossessed of land during the Occupation. This story, comprised of the narrator’s reality, dreams, and memories, is but one of untold numbers of works inspired by the often-fraught interactions between the diverse local and heterogeneous foreign population that inhabits Kuja. “Twilight Alley” ends with the narrator still recollecting herself at age five mesmerized by the mud woman, “I waited in the alley as darkness fell faster and faster, murmuring yet invisible stories in yet silent voices, hutsu, hutsu, hutsu, singing out like, ho-oy, ho-oy. The darkness fell incessantly. Tapped by a heavy rhythm, the poto poto of dripping darkness, my eyes and ears were exhausted, left open for stories to come (Sakiyama 2012, 187). The next story to come, “Pingihirazaka yakkō” (Night Passage from Pingihira Slope, hereinafter “Pingihira Slope”) does not explicitly name Kuja but since its setting’s residents are outsiders (yosomon) who have fled from debt or poverty or physical abuse rather than 320

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family members that had lived there for generations, and references are made to “that war over there” (Vietnam), it is safe to assume the setting is Kuja. The sole character given a name is one Pisara Anga, a woman who serves as a kind of mediator for the town’s many ghosts, particularly the ones who have died uneasily. Anga has the ability to see and hear these ghosts nightly on Pingihira Slope where, one after another, the town’s residents hang themselves from mokumao trees or drown in the ocean unable to bear their everyday lives. By listening to these ghosts’ stories Anga helps secure their passage to “the other shore.” The most conspicuous ghost to appear in “Pingihira Slope” is a young girl dressed in white said to have been raped by an American soldier 50 years ago. Sadly, this girl in white refers to a crime committed in September 1955 when KAB sergeant Isaac Hurt raped and killed six-year-old Yumiko Nagahisa. The “Yumiko-chan incident” galvanized throughout Okinawa protestors then decrying the blatant seizure of land taking place as the United States fortified itself by building bases across the Pacific “like a giant wall” as part of their Cold War strategy (Vine 2015, 29). When a 12-year-old was raped by three servicemen in September 1995, precisely forty years after the “Yumiko-chan Incident” the victim’s young age provoked worldwide shock. Feminist critics Takazato Suzuyo and Miyagi Harumi, distressed by the frequency of sexual assault in Okinawa, have laboriously recorded these crimes from the end of the war to recent years. Horrifically, their chronicle includes a 1949 rape of a 9-month-old by a soldier.5 Thus, the recurrent, if fleeting appearance of the young girl in white in “Pinghira Slope” points both to Yumiko-chan and others violated before and after her. The central tension of “Pingihira Slope” occurs one night when one of the ghosts who comes to Anga refuses to speak. In the confrontation that follows Anga is forced to recall her own suppressed past in which she, as “elder sister” of a bar helped procure liquor and local girls for occupation soldiers. Even so, Anga treats one of the young girls in the bar’s employ as her own daughter. This girl vanishes after giving birth to a mixed-race child whom Anga mistreats together with another bar girl’s mixed-race child. The ghost disappears before Anga is able to figure out who she is, and having failed her, Anga kills herself. Remorse over her complicity with American soldiers drives Anga to suicide, thus ending “Pingihira Slope.” Victoria Young’s discovery that the name Pisara is a Miyako Island variant of the Japanese name Taira indicates Pisara Anga is a pseudonym for Sakiyama Tami whose birth name is Taira Kuniko (Young 2020, 595). Sakiyama thus lightens the bleak finale of “Pingihira Slope” by playfully transforming Anga’s suicide into the death of the author. Sakiyama’s conspicuous insertion of two real life figures—herself and Yumiko-chan—in this fourth of the collection’s seven stories is a poignant reminder that Kuja’s stream of ghosts need both a listening ear and a writer’s pen. When Sakiyama titled the collection’s closing story “Kuja kisō kyokuhensō” (Variations on Phantasmic Kuja) little did she know how varied would be the critics’ responses to the piece. As in the prologue, Ore, the mainland Japanese photographer, is the narrator. In this, the seventh day of Ore’s journey through the topos of Kuja, Ore’s trip takes a fantastic turn. Finding himself in a landscape filled with mounds of dirt Ore overhears an exchange between two women, one old and the other a younger, curly red-head. Ore becomes a banyan tree and persists in listening to the women. He surmises they are making preparations for a ceremony to “right the world” (yonaoshi) and finds himself participating in the silent ceremony that follows. In the story’s climax an old man followed by a bulldozer appears on the scene and is poised to destroy the community of which Ore has become part.6 The story, and collection, ends as follows, Chapter 20: Women and Aftermath

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The red-headed woman’s fury took hold of me. All smiles is that man who sold off the town’s land to the men in sunglasses. The threatening sound of the bulldozer assaults us. The ho-ho-ho rhythm welling up behind me was all I could count on. I rolled my body into the shape of a bullet and let out a silent cry. (Sakiyama 2017, 189) Heshiki Bushō reads the stand-off rather simply as that between Okinawans, represented by the community of which Ore is now part, on one hand, and mainland Japanese interests represented by the bulldozer accompanied by threatening men, one of whom is an Okinawan said to have sold off the town’s land (Heshiki 2008). Onaga Shihoko rightly states Sakiyama eschews such simple binaries and instead posits that it is the destruction implied in the ending that is key. Rather than affirm a community that is emboldened through ritual Onaga emphasizes a rupture, or gap (Onaga, 59). For her part, Victoria Young underscores the trace of Takaesu Maria’s speech that first transports Ore from the visual world to the world of scent into which he descends for the space of a week before reappearing near the mounds of dirt in the ritual scene. Through her particular speech (manchaa katari), mixed-race Maria pushes Ore to open his ears to the voices of the dead. She, Young writes, “uses Ore to blast open his own language in order to make her words, her body, her land, Kuja, potentially legible.” (Young 2016, 110) These and other critics’ various interpretations of “Variations” give rise to the notion of a gap, or deferral of meaning and this in turn reminds one of Ore’s initial pursuit of the abyss, the most confounding of which he reveals exists between two people. Is not Ore’s silent cry a stark reminder to open one’s ears, as Takaesu Maria would have him do, and heed the other, namely, ghosts of the past such as those that haunt the cracks and crevices beneath the military base town Kuja?

Conclusion If Tōma Hiroko’s “Backbone” depicts Koza as a bright, neon playground that is emblematic of the town’s heyday during the Vietnam War, Sakiyama Tami’s “Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja” reveals the ghostly aftermath of this military basetown hastily constructed amid the ruins of the Battle of Okinawa. Despite the clear violence that attends American militarism and too often manifests itself in physical harm to local women it is also important to note that Koza is a refuge as Yoshida Sueko shows through Kiyo, a woman who leaves her abusive husband to start afresh in “Love Suicide at Kamaara.” Koza, a postwar city saturated by the foreign, bears witness to nearly eight decades of U.S. military presence yet also gives rise to a rich vein of contemporary Japanese literature by women.

Notes 1 Prewar Japanese literature from Okinawa boasted few female writers save one notable exception, Kushi Fusako. Sadly, however, Kushi’s “Horobiyuku Ryūkyū onna no shuki” (Memoir of a declining Ryukyuan woman, 1932) created such a stir over its depiction of an Okinawan man who chooses to “pass” as Japanese, she stopped writing altogether. The Battle of Okinawa that raged in the spring of 1945 decimated the island prefecture, reducing the prewar population by one-third. This “typhoon of steel” and the prolonged

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American Occupation of Okinawa from 1945–1972 that followed severely limited opportunities for women to publish much literature. 2 See interviews with Koza musicians recorded in Koza to Rokku (Koza & Rock, 1998). 3 See Akemi Johnson, Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa. New York, NY: The New Press, 2019. 4 Nana san maru, or 7-3-0, is the month and date of the traffic changeover that occurred in 1978. 5 https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/03/18/national/social-issues/okinawa-women-military-violence [Accessed on August 17, 2021]. 6 This battle between bulldozer and protectors of the land is similar to Shima Tsuyoshi’s 1973 story “Bones.”

References Bhowmik, D. (2008). Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance. London: Routledge. Heshiki, B. (2008). Sakiyama Tami no rensaku kara. [From Sakiyama Tami’s series]. Okinawa Taimusu. March 27, (morning edition). Hosokawa, M. (1998). Are U.S. Japan Troops Needed? Reforming the Alliance. Council on Foreign Relations 77, 4. Accessed July 14, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20048959. Inoue, M.S. (2007). Okinawa and the U.S. Military : Identity Making in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Johnson, A. (2019). Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa. New York: The New Press. Kina, I. (2016). Postwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination: Stories of Eiki Matayoshi and Tami Sakiyama. The Japanese Journal of American Studies 27, 189–210. Lee, H. (2013). Hanshokuminchi gensō—Yoshida Sueko “Kamaara shinjū” to Okinawa bungaku. [Anticolonial illusions: Yoshida Sueko’s “The Love Suicide of Kamaara” and Okinawan literature]. Tokyo gaikokugo daigakuronshū no. 86. Manabe, M. (2016). From the Margins of Meiji Society: Space and Gender in Higuchi Ichiyō’s ‘Troubled Waters.’ US-Japan Women’s Journal 49, 26–50. Accessed July 21, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26401935. Molasky, M. (1999). The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa. London: Routledge. Onaga, S. (2015). Sakiyama Tami “Kuja kisōkyokuhensō”ron: kyōdōteki no kōchiku to “kaitai.” [A reading of Sakiyama Tami’s Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja: Communal Construction and Destruction]. Bulletin of Okinawa National College of Technology 9, 47–60. Russell, J.G. (1991). Narratives of Denial: Racial Chauvinism and the Black Other in Japan.” Japan Quarterly 38, 416–28. Sakiyama, T. (2006). Passing into Twilight Alley. (K. Ikue, trans.). In E. McKenzie (ed.), My Postwar Life: New Writings from Japan and Okinawa. Chicago: CQRB, 176–91. (Original work published 2017) ———. (2002). “Shimakotoba” de kachaashii. [A Wild Dance with “Island Language”]. In Imafuku R. (ed.), Watashi no tankyū [My explorations] (pp 157–80). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. (2017). Kuja genshikō. [Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja]. Fukuoka: Hana shoin. Tōma, H. (2016). Backbone. (V. Young, trans.). In D.L. Bhowmik & S. Rabson (eds.), Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (pp. 221–22). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Vine, D. (2015). Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm American and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books. ———. (2020). The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yoshida, S. (2000). Love Suicide at Kamaara. (Y. Ohta, trans.). In M. Molasky & Steve Rabson (eds.), Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (pp. 214–34). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Young, V. (2016). Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji and Tawada Yōko. 1857774234. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Leeds.] ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. ———. (2020). Inciting the Past: Okinawan Literature and the Decolonising Turn. Japan Forum 32(4): 577– 600. Accessed August 7, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2020.1807582.

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Part 8 Environment and Disaster

Chapter 21 Writing Human Disaster: Hayashi Kyōko, Ishimure Michiko, and Kawakami Hiromi Rachel DiNitto Atomic bombs, industrial poisoning, and nuclear accidents scarred the Japanese nation, people, and environment. The writing of Hayashi Kyōko, Ishimure Michiko, and Kawakami Hiromi spans over seventy-five years of Japanese history, a modernity that witnessed technological and military disasters and tragedies that threatened the existence not only of the Japanese but of humanity itself. Their stories about the atomic bombs, Minamata disease, and the Fukushima nuclear accident contest the power of government and industry to close down discourse on these disasters, to silence the victims, and to bury the evidence of the intentional harm of these human disasters.

Introduction Atomic bombs, industrial pollution, nuclear meltdowns. The authors discussed in this chapter responded to disasters that span the history of Japanese industrial modernity, war, and postwar economic growth. Hayashi Kyōko, Ishimure Michiko, and Kawakami Hiromi wrote in response to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, the decades-long methylmercury poisoning by the Chisso Corporation discovered in the 1950s in Minamata, and the meltdowns at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima that were precipitated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Their writings diverge and intersect on a number of planes. All three write of an invisible threat: Hayashi and Kawakami of radiation, and Ishimure of toxic wastewater. These invisible toxins killed instantaneously in some instances, while in others they silently claimed lives over multiple generations as they contaminated the air, ground, sea, and the human bodies that subsisted on natural resources. Despite the clear harm from these toxic substances, the reluctance to recognize the damage, and the refusal to place blame in both Minamata and Fukushima grew out of a sense of indebtedness to the industrial plants that had secured local livelihoods and economic prosperity. In all three cases, those harmed were doubly victimized: first damaged by the weapons and toxins themselves, and later discriminated against by society at large for their association with the tragedies. While it would seem easy to lay blame for these disasters on the American government, the Chisso Corporation,

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and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operators of the Fukushima plant), the question of blame has been complicated by local loyalties but also by the reluctance of victims to self-identify. On a surface level these contaminants and instances of exposure appear disparate: an act of war, industrial poisoning, and a meltdown caused by a natural disaster. But in all cases, we see an intentionality or intentional negligence, or as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck called it an “organized irresponsibility” that caused irreparable harm to human life (Asahi Shimbun 2011). The writings of these authors range from factual to fictional as they navigate the territory of victimization and narrate these catastrophic tragedies. Both Ishimure’s and Hayashi’s writings oscillate between reportage and fiction, and draw heavily on factual documentation that serves as a historical record of the events. Kawakami also drew on the new reality of life with radiation in 2011, but looked forward to imagine the fate of humanity itself. All three writers struggled to balance the “weight of the facts” on the fabric of novelistic fiction.1 For Hayashi and Ishimure, the need to hew closely to fact has created confusion about how to categorize their writing. Hayashi, an atomic-bomb victim, attempted to relate the events exactly as they happened, but faulted herself for succumbing to narrative fictionality. On the other hand, Ishimure embraced fictionality as a way to give voice to the victims of Minamata disease who were reluctant or unable to speak for themselves. Rather than see this mixing of fact and fiction as a defect or eccentricity, it signals the need for new writing styles capable of capturing the impact of the disasters they describe.

Hayashi Kyōko: From the atomic bombs and back again Hayashi Kyōko (1930–2017) was working at the Mitsubishi Munitions factory in Nagasaki with her fellow high school classmates when the US military dropped the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. Less than 1.5 km from the epicenter, Hayashi survived the blast to witness the horrors that decimated the city. Thirty years later she rose to literary fame when her short story “Matsuri no ba” (1975, Ritual of Death*) won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. Over the next four decades, Hayashi continued to write through the events of August 9th and is the author most closely associated with the Nagasaki bombing. Below I discus three works: Hayashi’s award-winning “Ritual of Death;” “Torinitī kara Torinitī e” (2000, From Trinity to Trinity*), based on her 1999 trip to New Mexico and the site of the first atomic bomb test; and her last major published work, “Futatabi Rui e” (2013, To Rui, Once Again*), written after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Over the course of these works, Hayashi moves from her first-hand encounter with the atomic bomb, to a wider understanding of the nuclear threat, and back to Japan as she attempts to fathom how the Japanese themselves could have created another generation of nuclear victims. Her fictional explorations of human disaster and responsibility are shaped by this cyclicality and by the intertwined personal and historical narratives. “Ritual of Death” uses a first-person narrator to relate accounts of the high-school aged female protagonist and other Nagasaki atomic-bomb victims known as hibakusha. Hayashi’s story is imbedded in the very local impact of the bomb, and she uses Nagasaki dialect to describe the physical state of other atomic-bomb victims, making them “more powerfully real” (Treat 1995, 320). For Hayashi the bombing is a very personal story, one which she believed could not be communicated to non-hibakusha. Her desire to write competed with her

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distrust of the narrative translatability of her experience. While this was a common struggle for other hibakusha, it sets Hayashi apart from Ishimure and Kawakami. But like Ishimure, in “Ritual of Death” Hayashi oscillates between different modes of narration: the personal, individual recollections of the bombing stand side-by-side with highly technical, factual details of the bomb itself. The narrator comments on the heat of the blast, the strength of the winds, the number of deaths in relation to the precise timing of the bomb and its aftermath, the pressure of the explosion and the tearing of human skin, the death rates in relation to distance from the epicenter, and the number of students lost from her high school. Hayashi also quotes from official documents from an exhibit on the bomb, medical reports, and newspaper articles. We see an almost obsessive noting of facts, but also a need to contextualize those facts or understand how they align with Hayashi’s/her fictional narrator’s experience and remembrance of them. The short story functions on two levels: as a historical record and a personal history. These multiple narratives are also present in the work of other atomic bomb writers and in Ishimure, even though Ishimure was not herself a victim.2 Hayashi attempted to relate the events as they happened, but her resistance to fiction did not yield a linear narrative. As John Treat argued: the “chronology is shuffled” and it is not a “narratively unified work” (Treat 1995, 322). “Ritual of Death” moves across characters and temporalities, shifting from the events of August 9th to thirty years in the future, as the narrator speaks of the continuing health problems of her friends who are also hibakusha. This cyclicality that draws the narrative back to August 9th structures both “From Trinity to Trinity,” and “To Rui, Once Again,” anchoring her fiction to the events of 1945. Hayashi addresses this cyclicality in “From Trinity to Trinity” and it is evident in the title itself. “Trinity was the departure point of my August 9th. It was also the terminal point for me as a hibakusha.” “By traveling this circuit, I would absorb the August 9th hanging between those points in my life cycle. I would put an end to my ties to August 9th, which were impossible to sever, by swallowing them” (Hayashi 2008, 4). The idea that Hayashi would put an end to her ties to August 9th runs counter to the body of her work, one function of which is to show that the damage from the bomb is never ending in the lives of the victims. In this sense, Hayashi refuses to confine August 9th to 1945, and her visit to the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico served to reaffirm Hayashi’s status as a hibakusha. Standing at the monument on the Trinity Site, her personal past merges with the history of the site itself: “It seems that in walking toward Ground Zero, I had reverted to being fourteen years old, before I was bombed. It may be that, as I started walking toward the unknown place called Ground Zero, I had returned to ‘a time’ before experiencing August 9th. When I stood before the Monument, I experienced the true bombing” (Hayashi 2008, 23). The visit to the Trinity site allows Hayashi to understand the atomic bombs not only through the lens of her fourteen-year-old self but as a global event that impacted both humans and the earth itself beyond Japan’s borders. She “extends the concept of hibakusha to the natural world” (Aukema 2011, 3). It may be that, for the first time as a human being, I now shed the tears that I did not shed on August 9th. Standing on the silent earth, I trembled at the earth’s pain. To this day, the days of my life had been of merciless pain that stung my body and mind. Yet that may have been an epidermal pain that was Chapter 21: Writing Human Disaster

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derived from the 9th. I had temporarily forgotten that I was an hibakusha, but, on this silent earth, I was in fact seeing the landscape of my escape, which I had suppressed in a corner of my heart over the years—seeing myself on that critical day. (Hayashi 2008, 23). While this experience allows Hayashi to return to her own experience on August 9th, the recognition of planetary harm signals a change for Hayashi. Whereas stories like “Ritual of Death” described her personal experience as a victim, here she addresses the effects of atomic energy on humans and the earth.3 This acknowledgment goes beyond even the recognition of nuclear victims outside Japan seen in works like Oda Makoto’s novel Hiroshima (1981, translated as The Bomb*). Oda’s novel is known for having created a new critical framework that radically expanded the scope of post-atomic-bomb writings via scenes that focus on Native American characters living near the Trinity site (Treat 1995, 383). After the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, Hayashi again emphasized the danger of radiation as a “problem for all humanity” (Aukema 2011, 11). Watching TV coverage of the 2011 disaster in “To Rui, Once Again,” Hayashi is transported back to August 9th, and she struggles again with the conflicting need for accuracy and the urgency of emotion: “As I try to express what the disaster was like, I feel the frustration of knowing that human emotions enter into all our words. I want words that can express things as accurately as chemical symbols” (Hayashi 2017a, 10). Yet, the ability to accurately represent reality alludes her once again. The essay wanders from reminiscences of Hayashi’s trip to the American southwest, to her childhood in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, to the Fukushima accident. Shifting among these temporalities and narratives, Hayashi ponders responsibility and blame, acts of nature, and the new reality that Japan has created yet another generation of hibakusha. She is bewildered that a nation scarred by two atomic bombings could be capable of this. In “To Rui, Once Again,” she solidifies the link she made in “From Trinity to Trinity” between atomic bombs and nuclear power plants, a linkage that both the American and Japanese governments and nuclear industries vociferously denied in their successful campaign to embed nuclear power in postwar Japan.4 In “From Trinity to Trinity” she talks about writing a letter to her friend Rui after learning of the 1999 criticality accident at the Japanese nuclear fuel conversion plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki. Hayashi opens “To Rui, Once Again” by mentioning she has been rereading Rui’s response to her letter. Hayashi’s mention of the atomic bombs alongside the Fukushima accident negates TEPCO’s attempts to escape culpability by claiming that the nuclear accident was purely a function of an unforeseeable natural disaster. Hayashi lashes out at the nation’s leaders for their disregard for human life and their deception and failure to provide the public with accurate information so vital to making choices about evacuation. In arguing that the Fukushima meltdowns were an “accident we should have expected,” Hayashi unequivocally asserts the human responsibility for this disaster (Hayashi 2017a, 6). Writing with the hindsight and power of history, Hayashi condemns all forms of nuclear power, asserts the rights and acknowledges the suffering of victims, and squarely places blame for these human disasters on the Japanese government and corporate greed.

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Ishimure Michiko: Paradise contaminated Ishimure Michiko (1927–2018) is known as the “Rachel Carson of Japan.” A native of the Minamata region, Ishimure began writing poetry and literary criticism after the war. Her interest in Minamata’s history led to her first literary account of the disease in 1960, and six years later she founded the Citizen’s Congress on Minamata Disease Countermeasures to aid victims.5 She is remembered as a “key activist and spokesperson” for the victims of Minamata disease (Monnet 2003, xi). Her Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (1969, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease,* hereinafter Paradise) has been called the “the most influential historical document of the incident,” namely the human and environmental damage caused by the petrochemical company Chisso Corporation when they discharged toxic methylmercury-laden wastewater into Minamata Bay from 1938–1968 (Takahashi 2014, 72). Chisso’s wastewater poisoned the local population of fisherman who relied on the Shiranui Sea for their livelihoods. The disease, which “affects the central nervous system, leading in severe cases to loss of neuromuscular control, paralysis, insanity, and death,” was first recognized in 1953 but compensation cases continued for many years after (Allen 2013, 40).6 Below I discuss the literary style of Paradise, Ishimure’s attention to the social dynamics of the disease and its stigmatization, as well as her ecological metaphors used to describe both the patients and their natural surroundings. Ishimure wrote over fifty volumes that are widely ranging in genre: “docufiction, historical novels, reportage, autobiography, poetry, children’s books, and a Noh drama” (Monnet 2003, xi). Paradise is remarkable for Ishimure’s mixture of narrative styles, and is perhaps best described as “creative nonfiction” (Takahashi 2014, 70). The novel is told through a firstperson narrator, who resembles Ishimure, and revolves around the stories of four victims who are based on real patients. Despite what appear to be quotations from these patients (protected by pseudonyms), critics Yuki Masami and Watanabe Kyōji point out that Paradise is not a verbatim record of the victims’ testimony (Masami 2016, 49; Watanabe 2016, 14). Rather, the episodes are primarily based on information and anecdotes Ishimure heard at gatherings in the town, since she rarely interviewed the actual victims and would not have intruded on their privacy with a tape recorder (Colligan-Taylor 1990, 138). Unlike Hayashi, who herself was a victim and told a story deeply embedded in her own bodily experience, Ishimure was not a Minamata victim. But, her mother did contract the disease later in life, and Ishimure experienced first-hand the poverty of the victims while growing up in a village on the outskirts of Minamata. Scholars have argued that she put into words the “nonverbal and unexpressed feelings of the patients” and got to the “heart of the patients’ silence” (Watanabe 2016, 16).7 Ishimure’s fictional interventions stand alongside the many historical documents she weaves into the text: medical records, clinical charts, newspaper reports, etc. The reader is exposed to a range of narrative and descriptive methods that provide a holistic vision of the disease and its patients, from the effects on the environment and livelihood of the community, to the suffering of individuals and their attempts to bring attention to their plight through protest. Like Hayashi, Ishimure’s narrative moves between the personal and historical—a move aided by the extensive quoting of official reports of municipal meetings and medical findings. However, the inclusion of this official material is not meant to create a fully rational documentation of the disease. Rather, as Yuki Masami argues, the work brings together

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opposing instincts—the rationality of science and the nonrationality of the fishermen who continue to fish in a contaminated sea (Masami 2016, 44). That said, we need to recognize that the fishermen hardly had a choice; they were fighting for their lives and livelihoods as their source of income and sustenance was poisoned and eliminated. This tension between the personal and historical, the rational and irrational, also lies behind the reluctance of Minamata patients to self-identify as victims. In order to receive compensation to pay for medical care, victims had to undergo a certification exam. Many fishermen mistrusted doctors and were averse to getting certified for fear of being stigmatized. The discrimination was real: “it is a fact that the victims and their relatives are still isolated and looked upon with suspicion, if not with open contempt, even in their native villages” (Ishimure 2003, 329). 8 The medical examinations were not only humiliating—especially for those with speech disturbances who were forced to repeat words and phrases that defied their condition—but it was difficult to receive official certification for the disease (Ishimure 2003, 43–44).9 As Christine Marran argues, “the compensation boards became increasingly rigid in certifying patients, requiring them to show five of the primary symptoms of mercury disease all at once during the certification exam, regardless of the day or time of the exam.” This “standard approach was unrealistic, as no two bodies react exactly alike to mercury poisoning” (Marran 2017, 68). This disinclination on the part of patients only exacerbated their desperate living conditions; Ishimure documents families who need the compensation funds to survive. The mother of one patient, Kuhei, says: “Without the rise in indemnity money we wouldn’t make it” (Ishimure 2003, 19). Toward the end of the novel, Ishimure discusses the meager consolation contract reached between Chisso and the Mutual Help Society of the Minamata Disease Families that mandated that even if Chisso’s wastewater was found to be the cause, the victims would “voluntarily abstain from claiming additional compensation” (Ishimure 2003, 325–27). Chisso sought to financially shelter themselves, but also to move away from the stigma of the disease. Minamata’s elites worried that if the “truth” came out and Chisso went bankrupt, so would the town. For Ishimure, this complicity with Chisso is a “murderous logic” (Ishimure 2003, 327). This “logic” derives from the historical relations between the company and the town and drives complicated questions of blame for this human disaster. Like the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan discussed below, the Chisso factory was a source of both jobs and local pride for the community. In order to highlight the evolution of this logic, Paradise documents the history of Chisso founder Noguchi Jun, who the citizens regarded as a personification of progress with the talent to transform Minamata from rural backwater to industrial town. Chisso was one of most powerful prewar corporations and it allowed the Minamata citizens to see themselves as the “industrial and cultural elite of the prefecture” (Ishimure 2003, 110). The novel mentions the high status assigned to the Chisso employees, a status and tension also present in discussions of the victims of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. Paradise was extremely influential as a work of environmental writing, especially for its innovative style. Author Ariyoshi Sawako spoke of the influence of Paradise on her Fukugō osen (1975, Cumulative Pollution), and of her realization upon reading Ishimure of the need for a new type of prose to capture other contaminants (Marran 2017, 104). Ishimure’s poetic language infuses her descriptions of the Minamata victims and their environment. She described the beauty of the Shiranui Sea and its natural surroundings, and extended this ocean 332

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imagery to man-made structures and human bodies, all damaged by Chisso’s poisonous wastewater. When remarking on the harm done to the town, she employs the language of natural disaster: “the river of the victims’ pain and anger had already overflowed its banks and that, if nothing was done to stop it, the town would soon be submerged in an unprecedented, apocalyptic flood” (Ishimure 2003, 102–3). The oceanic language describes both a pristine natural state and the conditions of contamination. Her poetic style invites the reader to understand the patients in a new way when she contrasts her descriptions of them with sterile texts such as a pathology report on the brain of a deceased Minamata patient. She quotes from the report of a doctor at the Kumamoto University Medical School, which uses medical terminology to describe the effect of the disease on the brain: “the parenchyma had been completely eaten away. Cerebral atrophy was conspicuous, and the gray matter was extremely thin” (Ishimure 2003, 168). In contrast, Ishimure’s description of the brain of patient number 18, seven-year-old Yonemori, is far more poetic: The section from Yonemori Hisao’s brain fluttered lightly in the glass vessel filled with a sepia-colored solution, like seaweed swaying in the sea. This section which, because of the holes left by the cells that had been eaten away by mercury, somehow resembled a coral cluster, seemed to invite you to plunge into a darkblue abyss of eternal silence. (Ishimure 2003, 168) Her metaphorical description draws powerfully on images of the ocean life that sustained the community of fishermen. Yonemori’s brain reminds her of a “coral cluster” floating like “seaweed” swaying about in the “dark-blue abyss” of the ocean waters. Note the lack of references to the dead fish or dark sludge that filled the contaminated water and eventually killed Yonemori. Here, his remains are returned to the beauties of the untouched sea. Ishimure offers dignity for the patient who in death can be spared Chisso’s contaminants, namely this toxic waste that fishermen in the 1950s complained of as “greasy, foul-smelling wastes” the plant discharged at night. The water would stick to their bodies and make them feel “their skin is coming off in layers” (Ishimure 2003, 281). Ishimure’s narrator tries to make soup with wakame seaweed from the contaminated ocean, but it turns the soup into a “thick, glutinous mass” that nauseates her (Ishimure 2003, 281). The blue abyss returns a few pages later when Ishimure’s narrator is observing the autopsy of a Minamata victim. The doctor looks over at the narrator to comment on the patient’s diseased heart and she says: “He seemed to be shouting at me from the bottom of an immeasurably deep, heavy ocean. I struggled to keep my balance in that still, blue, abyss.” (Ishimure 2003, 171). The abyss represents both the peaceful silence of death and untouched nature, but also the paralyzing shock of the disease’s ravaging effects on the body and the realization of society’s attempts to hide it. Ishimure employs the image of a cavern to describe the depths of society’s disregard for the disease and the burden it places on victims. The narrator tells us that Kuhei will not let the doctors examine him if he cannot be cured. She captures Kuhei’s reluctance with another natural metaphor: He had to lead a desperate, solitary fight, both with the organic mercury compounds in his body and with the apathy shown by the healthy people he distrusted so much, allowing the unprecedented Organic Mercury Poisoning Incident Chapter 21: Writing Human Disaster

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to sink into oblivion. In the dark stifling cavern of his body, he was alone. Only the throbbing of his heart broke the stillness. Tears welled into the depths of this cavern. (Ishimure 2003, 21–22) The oblivion created by the lack of public recognition for Minamata disease is echoed by the cavernous emptiness within Kuhei’s body. Rather than being filled with the beauty of ocean waters, it swells with his tears. These natural metaphors and pelagic language are meant to lend power to Ishimure’s narrative, not to exculpate Chisso. Similarly, the owners of the Fukushima nuclear power plant claimed that the earthquake and tsunami were of unforeseeable proportions and hence they could not be blamed for the meltdowns. Hayashi, however, as noted above, countered TEPCO’s attempts at evading blame by denouncing their attribution of the meltdowns to a natural disaster. Ishimure similarly places blame with Chisso, and she details the painful personal negotiations of victims and townspeople, as well as “murderous logic” used to silence this disease.

Kawakami Hiromi: Radiation and the end of humanity Kawakami Hiromi (1958–) debuted in the mid-1990s and is known for her stories that focus on the fantastical twists occurring within the everyday such as the appearance of talking animals. She wrote short stories for science fiction journals during and after her college years and then took a hiatus to teach biology in high school. In 1994, She garnered attention as a fiction writer with her short story “Kamisama” (1993, Gods; translated as God Bless You*). Kawakami went on to win numerous literary prizes in Japan, and made her mark in the post-disaster world with a revision of her 1994 story retitled “Kamisama 2011” (2011, Gods 2011; translated as God Bless You, 2011*), in which she addressed the problems of living in an irradiated zone soon after the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck the northeastern region of Tohoku on March 11, 2011 triggered a record tsunami that overwhelmed the backup generators of the Fukushima plant, creating meltdowns at three of the reactors. With the dead and missing exceeding 19,000 and over 470,000 displaced, this was the worst disaster in postwar Japan, which is still suffering from the radioactive fallout, and the man-made dimension of this massive triple disaster did not escape the nation’s writers. In this section I discuss Kawakami’s “God Bless You, 2011” and her novel Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō (2016, Don’t Get Carried away by a Giant Bird). These works not only reflect the realities of life with radiation, but challenge the reader to imagine the worldwide effects human disasters will have on humankind’s future. As mentioned above, Kawakami’s approach to the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan was to rewrite “God Bless You” by changing the setting to reflect the post-nuclear accident situation. Both versions describe the outing of the narrator and her new neighbor, who happens to be a bear. In the original story they go for a picnic by an unnamed river, but in the revision Kawakami repurposes the previously unspecified landscape to depict a post-disasterscape, as the protagonist and bear traverse the newly irradiated land. The narrator leaves her house wearing regular clothing for the first time since “that incident,” meaning that she is not clad in hazmat gear and her body is exposed to the toxic environment. This is in sharp contrast to the other humans in the story who are covered in protective gear. The narrator and bear are

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living in the nuclear exclusion zone close to ground zero, and are well aware of the dangers they face. At the end of the story the pair return home, and the narrator takes a shower and records her radiation exposure from the picnic. I carefully washed my hair and body, then sat down to write in my diary before going to bed. As I do every night, I recorded my estimate of the radiation I had received that day: 30 microsieverts on the surface of my body, and 19 microsieverts of internally received radiation. For the year to date, 2,900 microsieverts of external radiation, and 1,780 microsieverts of internal radiation. … All in all, it had been a pretty good day. (Kawakami 2012, 44) The story is set a few years into the future and although it does not directly reference the 2011 disaster, the setting would have been abundantly clear to Japanese readers through references to “protective clothing” (bōgofuku), “decontamination” (josen), and the “accumulated dosage” (ruiseki hibakuryō) of radiation, technical words that permeated everyday life postaccident. Astute readers would have recognized that the narrator is already over the allowable annual radiation exposure limit, meaning she has already sustained significant bodily harm (Komori 2014, 88–89). The absence of children and families enjoying the outdoors is further evidence of the disaster. In the original story, the narrator and bear meet a family swimming by the river. However, in the rewrite, the narrator laments that unlike before, there are no children to be seen, implying that the area is too dangerous. The absence of children and of visibly damaged bodies in Kawakami’s story sets it apart from both Ishimure and Hayashi. In both of their works, they depict bodies suffering from the atomic bomb and ravaged by disease. In Kawakami’s story the damage is far more invisible and must be inferred from the context. As mentioned above, in “God Bless You, 2011,” the lack of protective clothing and the narrator’s radiation records are indicators of her and the bear’s somatic damage. Due to his larger size, the bear may have higher exposure limits than humans, but despite the declarations of the decontamination workers they meet by the river, he is not resistant to radiation. She (and by association the bear) have suffered both external and internal damage. The latter is a long-standing point of contention for atomic-bomb victims. In Hayashi’s “To Rui, Once Again” she is shocked when she hears a government official speak of internal radiation damage in the wake of the Fukushima accident, because the Japanese government repeatedly failed to acknowledge the existence of and effects from internal exposure for atomic bomb victims. All three writers recognize the invisible status of these victims in society as well as the invisible nature of the damage done to the victims of these human disasters, including the genetic damage from radiation and mercury that inflicted harm across multiple generations of victims. In my book, Fukushima Fiction, I examine “God Bless You, 2011” for its treatment of nuclear victims marginalized in Japanese society. The victims of the Fukushima nuclear accident were harmed by the radiation and subsequently shunned by Japanese society, a double victimization that echoes the plight of the victims of the atomic bombs and Minamata disease. Writing on Ishimure, Bruce Allen outlines further similarities between the Minamata and Fukushima incidents. He draws parallels between the mercury poisoning in the former and the discharge of high levels of radioactive toxic metals in the latter (Allen 2013, 48). In both situations there had been sufficient warnings of lurking danger and both incidents inflicted long-term harm on humans and the environment. The release of toxic Chapter 21: Writing Human Disaster

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radiation from a so-called “safe” nuclear reactor in 2011 raised the specter of the atomic horror vividly documented in Hayashi’s work, as Japan gave birth to a new generation of nuclear victims. For Hayashi, the nuclear accident in 2011 left the bitter taste of repeated tragedy. In 2014, Kawakami began serializing Don’t Get Carried Away by a Giant Bird (hereinafter, Giant Bird), a science fiction novel set in an unspecified future where humanity faces extinction.10 Like Hayashi and Ishimure, who catalog the physical harm from the atomic bombs and Minamata disease, Kawakami reprises her interest in the effects of radiation on human bodies, but takes her vision a step beyond the invisible harm of the nuclear explosion to consider radical somatic solutions to the human plight. Unlike her predecessors, in Giant Bird, Kawakami overcomes Hayashi and Ishimure’s need to be anchored in reality, in order to expand the geographic and temporal scope of human disaster. Kawakami moves beyond the localized nature of the previously discussed human disasters to imagine a world where mankind faces the ultimate threat. The cause of their extinction is not clearly stated, but there are multiple references to the reckless behavior of the humans themselves. Kawakami imagines a truly planetary event or series of events that affect the entire earth and threaten to wipe out mankind as we know it. Giant Bird comprises fourteen chapters that at first glance are presented as discreet narratives, but begin to connect as the novel progresses. The semi-preindustrial setting would seem to imply the end of the industrialization that led to the conditions of the Anthropocene, but the relationship between humans and nature is still precarious. The human race itself is on the edge of extinction, and its survival relies on advanced technology of AIs and clones. The relationship between humans and animals is even closer than that between the narrator and Bear in “God Bless You, 2011,” but is far from any naturally occurring kinship. In the opening chapter of Giant Bird titled “Keepsake,” one of the characters discovers that the “factory” in town makes food and children. The children are made from the genetic material of cows, whales, rabbits, rats, horses, and kangaroos, because human stem cells are weak and prone to mutation. These humans are the creation of Eri, one of two sisters who are the protagonists in the book’s final chapter and the last humans on earth. As females, they cannot propagate the human race by themselves, but they are helped by their “mother,” the clone/AI who raises them and gives them a book with the recipe for cloning humans. The narrative refers to the people in the town Eri creates (the town described in chapter 1) as “fake humans” (nise no ningen) (Kawakami 2016, 336). This use of the term “fake” is puzzling in a novel that not only imagines the end of humanity as we know it, but questions what it means to be human through the presentation of a world where AIs, clones, and human hybrids are the result of various experiments to save humanity from extinction. The title of the first chapter, “Keepsake,” alludes to the lost memory of an earlier state of humanity, one that is at a far nostalgic remove. In some chapters of Giant Bird these animal-human hybrids are presented as a normal outgrowth of necessary experiments, but in others they are monstrous mutations, as in the Planet of the Apes style ending to Chapter 8 “Wandering.” The protagonist, a watcher tasked with surveilling humans, finds a rogue settlement of creatures who at first glance appear humanoid. However, as he observes their animal-like features and actions, he is filled with disgust. When he samples their DNA, he finds with horror that it is a 99.8% match for humans: I don’t remember what happened next. No, that’s a lie. I knew exactly what I was doing. I crawled on my stomach to the edge of the lake where they fished, swam, 336

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drank, and bathed their newborn child. Their lives depended on the lake, but I knowingly released the poison into the water. I couldn’t let them continue to exist in this world. I didn’t want to report this settlement back to the mothers. I feared these creatures had a better chance of surviving on this planet than the humans did. (Kawakami 2016, 149–50) This chapter channels the anxiety around bioengineering that gripped Japan in the 1990. Surveys from that time reveal that over 90% of respondents found cloning to be “ethically questionable” (Hutchinson 2019, 164). The attention to genetics in the volume also reflects on Kawakami’s brief career as a biology teacher. In Giant Bird, two characters, Ian and Jacob, devise a plan to save humanity that involves separating humans into colonies in the hope that genetic mutation will enable survival. The theme of mutation is a reminder of the congenital mutations of atomic bomb and Minamata babies who faced a life of health problems and societal discrimination. But in Giant Bird, despite the watcher’s visceral recoil toward these creatures, in other chapters far less humanoid-looking clones are accepted into society with no lament for the end of human distinctiveness. In fact, human-animal clones are presented as the only way humanity can continue to exist. Giant Bird urges acceptance for those who are different. Giant Bird does not pinpoint any one event as threatening human extinction, but places blame on the humans themselves. The novel mentions a catastrophe that resulted in the human population falling below critical numbers. The narrator comments that humans in the past could not have imagined they would become extinct or else they would not have “continued to contaminate the earth, engage in terrorism, and go to war like they did” (Kawakami 2016, 94). While some catastrophes had natural causes—population loss from sickness, famine, fire, and tsunami—humans had knowingly depleted their natural resources. The novel confirms that mankind was ultimately responsible for their own demise. Ian and Jacob reside in the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan, the area most affected by the 2011 disaster. With the exception of this one instance, the novel assiduously avoids reference to Japan or any nation state, pushing the scale of disasters to the planetary. Ursula Heise has written on the challenge of “deterritorialization” that “might be formulated in terms that are premised no longer primarily on ties to local places, but on ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole.” In Giant Bird, Kawakami present just such a “deterritorialized environmental vision” (Heise 2008, 10). In doing so, Kawakami urges the reader to consider the global repercussions of pollution or toxic events that have traditionally been discussed in the context of a discreet space, be it rural Fukushima or Minamata (Allen 2013, 50). Despite their local focus, the somatic damage in Ishimure and Hayashi’s writing was not limited to a single geographic instance. Ishimure’s writing is deeply intertwined with the history of Minamata, but the disease appeared in Niigata prefecture in Japan as well as in Canada, and her book and the documentary films of Tsuchimoto Noriaki were instrumental in bringing together the global community affected by this disease. Similarly, Hayashi’s “From Trinity to Trinity” widens the scope of nuclear harm beyond Japan. Scholars have documented the effects of radiation fallout on communities worldwide—from those in the American West affected by atomic bomb testing and plutonium processing to the communities in the South Pacific. The nuclear fallout from accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima spread toxic radiation around the globe. All three authors discussed in this chapter excel at Chapter 21: Writing Human Disaster

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storytelling and rallying the power of narrative to expand the reader’s ability to comprehend the incomprehensible consequences of these human disasters and to wonder about our collective, global future.

Conclusion: The power of storytelling Bruce Allen details Ishimure’s concern for the loss of language and the stories it shaped as modernity unraveled the connections to community and nature (Allen 2013, 35). In capturing the loss of life, livelihood, and community in Minamata, Ishimure also chronicled the voices of the victims who were economically and socially silenced. Despite the fictionalized nature of Paradise, or perhaps because of Ishimure’s powerful prose, her book was “seminal in motivating” Minamata activists to fight. For some, the characters in Paradise “are more real to them than the actual victims.” 11 But Yuki Masami warns readers about hearing only one of the many stories told in Paradise, for the value of the text lies in its multifaceted perspectives and refusal of dichotomies. The multivocality of the text and its ability to tell these many stories remind us that there is no single narrative about Minamata (Masami 2016, 42). Hayashi also excelled at storytelling, even though she distrusted fictional narration as a means to relate the events of Aug 9, 1945. She lamented that “the flow of time—Oblivion— washes away the details of an extreme situation, while only the most sensational parts are remembered” (Hayashi 1984, 41). However, Hayashi’s story is rich in detail, and as Christine Marran argues, her short stories “constitute a textual rejection of the bomb’s specularity” (Marran 2017, 59). Hayashi not only tells the story of human victims, but in her later writings portrays the “slow violence of radiation” in the nonhuman as well, like the flora and fauna of the New Mexico desert (Marran 2017, 59). Giant Bird builds on the storytelling of its apocalyptic predecessors. Written during an era of increased environmental awareness, Komatsu Sakyō’s famous Nihon chinbotsu (1973, Japan Sinks*) imagined the end of Japan, as the island chain is swallowed by the ocean in a catastrophic tectonic subduction. Tawada Yōko reimagined this very fate after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in her short story “Higan” (2015, The Far Shore*) when a nuclear reactor explodes and the Japanese become boat people. “There was only one way to survive, and that was to leave Japan. It was no longer possible to live anywhere on the Japanese archipelago” (Tawada 2015, paragraph 22). Kawakami’s Giant Bird also ends with an act of storytelling as Eri’s sister Rema wonders how stories will travel outward from the town that Eri created. The small, new people bathe in the river that runs through the town. Clothed in white gauze, the women and children walk the stone path to the water. Now and then a man and woman head downstream on a skiff, off to new places to create new stories. What will these new stories be like? Who will tell them and whose stories will be told? (Kawakami 2016, 339) This scene comes in the final pages of the book, but this last chapter temporally precedes the events in first chapter of Giant Bird in an act of cyclicality that echoes Hayashi’s retellings. It also highlights the thematic overlaps and temporal intersections across the three writers. Rema’s musings raise vital questions about who speaks and who listens. Atomic bomb writers like Hayashi spoke of the horrors of this new weapon in ways that made the effects of the

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bomb not only real but deeply personal. Ishimure’s eloquent and moving depiction of Minamata disease brought recognition to the victims and inspired anti-pollution movements in Japan. Similarly, Kawakami was one of the first writers to brave public stigma and speak out about the dangers of the nuclear meltdowns. These women writers gave voice to the unvoiced anxiety and horror experienced by the victims and residing in the collective consciousness. The atomic bombs, industrial poisoning, and nuclear accidents left their scar on the Japanese nation, people, and environment. The three writers examined here span over seventy-five years of Japanese history, a modernity that witnessed technological and military disasters and tragedies that threatened the existence not only of the Japanese but of humanity itself. These stories contest the power of government and industry to close down discourse on these disasters, to silence the victims, and to bury the evidence of the intentional harm or neglect. Not only do these writers give voice to information that was repressed, but they use the imaginative power of human storytelling to keep the facts from being reduced to statistical insignificancies that can easily fade into obscurity.

Notes 1 Ariyoshi Sawako used this term when discussing the difficulty of writing fiction about pollution (Marran 2017, 104). Inoue Mitsuharu also used this phrase when positively recommending Hayashi’s “Ritual of Death” for the Akutagawa Prize in 1975. (Treat 1995, 322). 2 Treat mentions that atomic-bomb writer Ōta Yōko also mixes statistics and reports with anecdotes in Shibakane no machi (1948, City of Corpses) (Treat 1995, 320). 3 Critic Kuroko Kazuo argued that Rui’s name, written in the katakana script used for emphasis or foreign words, is a reference to the word for humanity (jinrui). Aukema quotes from Kuroko’s introduction to volume 6 of Hayashi’s collected works (Aukema 2011). 4 See Hayashi’s short story “Shūkaku” (2002, Harvest) about a farmer dealing with the aftermath of the criticality accident at the Tokaimura plant (Hayashi 2017b). 5 See Colligan-Taylor (115–20) for more on Ishimure’s background. 6 Allen cites Timothy George’s book, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan, 3. 7 Karen Thornber rejects criticism of Paradise as fiction and argues that “it is through this novel that the voices of those suffering from Minamata disease have been most powerfully heard” (Thornber 2016). 8 Ishimure describes other instances of discrimination in Paradise: desperate to escape the stigma of Minamata disease, one man pretended to be a member of the discriminated minority, the hisabetsu burakumin; the daughter of one Minamata patient changed jobs often because of the discrimination against her father and family; and other patients related tales of discrimination (Ishimure 2003, 310, 312, 313–14). 9 Similarly, Hayashi laments the failure of the government and local health authorities to certify victims of the atomic bombs. She talks about how difficult it was to get certified, including the need for three witnesses to testify that the applicant was there at the time of the bombing. This was an impossible task when so many were killed by the bomb (Hayashi 1984, 34). 10 The novel was serialized in the literary journal Gunzō from February 2014 to January 2016. References in this chapter are to the book version published in 2016. 11 Thornber quotes from literary scholar Kanai Keiko’s “Making up for Minamata” https://international.ucla​ .edu/asia/article/35030 (Thornber 2016).

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References Allen, B. (2013). First There Were Stories: Michiko Ishimure’s Narratives of Resistance and Reconciliation. In S.C. Estok & W.C. Kim (eds.), East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (pp. 35–57). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Asahi Shinbun. (2011). JAPAN | INTERVIEW/ Ulrich Beck: System of Organized Irresponsibility behind the Fukushima Crisis. Fukushima News Online (blog). July 6, 2011. Accessed March 2, 2017. https:// fukushimanewsresearch.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/japan-interview-ulrich-beck-system-of-organized​ -irresponsibility-behind-the-fukushima-crisis/. Aukema, J. (2011). A Problem for All Humanity: Nagasaki Writer Hayashi Kyoko Probes the Dangers of Nuclear Energy. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 9 (47.3). Accessed November 25, 2020. https://apjjf​ .org/-Justin-Aukema/3670/article.pdf. Colligan-Taylor, K. (1990). The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Hayashi, K. (1984). Ritual of Death. In M. Sklar (ed.), Nuke-Rebuke: Writers & Artists Against Nuclear Energy & Weapons (pp. 20–57). Iowa City: The Spirit That Moves Us Press. ———. (2008). From Trinity to Trinity. (K. Selden, trans.). The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 6 (5). Accessed August 20, 2018 https://apjjf.org/-Hayashi-Kyoko/2758/article.pdf. ———. (2017a). To Rui, Once Again. (M. Mizutani, trans.). The Asia-Pacific Journal 15 (7.3). Accessed August 30, 2017. http://apjjf.org/2017/07/Hayashi.html. ———. (2017b). Harvest. (M. Mizutani, trans.). The Asia-Pacific Journal 15 (10.3). Accessed December 3, 2020. https://apjjf.org/2017/10/Hayashi.html. Heise, U.K. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford : New York: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, R. (2019). Japanese Culture Through Videogames. Abingdon: Routledge. Ishimure, M. (2003). Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. (L. Monnet, trans.). Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies/The University of Michigan. Kawakami, H. (2012). God Bless You, 2011. (T. Goosen & M. Shibata, trans.). In E. Luke & D. Karashima, (eds.), March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown (pp. 37–48). New York: Vintage. ———. (2016). Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō [Don’t Get Carried Away by a Giant Bird]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Komori, Y. (2014). Shisha no koe, seija no kotoba: bungaku de tou genpatsu no Nihon [Voices of the dead, words of the living]. Tokyo: ShinNihon Shuppansha. Marran, C.L. (2017). Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press. Masami, Y. (2016). The Danger of a Single Story: Ishimure Michiko’s Literary Approach to the Minamata Disease Incident. In B. Allen & Y. Masami (eds.), Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective: Between Sea and Sky (pp. 41–56). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Monnet, L. (2003). Translator’s Introduction. In M. Ishimure, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies/The University of Michigan. Takahashi, T. (2014). Minamata and the Symbolic Discourse of the South. In S. Slovic, S. Rangarajan & V. Sarveswaran (eds.), Ecoambiguity, Community and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (pp. 70–79). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Tawada, Y. (2015). The Far Shore. (J. Angles, trans.). Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature. March 2015. Accessed December 21, 2016. https://www.wordswithoutborders.org​ /article/the-far-shore. Thornber, K. (2016). Ishimure Michiko and Global Ecocriticism. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 14(13.6). Accessed December 3, 2020. https://apjjf.org/2016/13/Thornber.html. Treat, J.W. (1995). Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,. Watanabe, K. (2016). The World of Kugai Jōdo. (Y. Aihara, trans.). In B. Allen and Y. Masami (eds.), Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective: Between Sea and Sky (pp. 11–26). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

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Chapter 22 Teeming Up with Life: Reading the Environment in Ishimure Michiko, Hayashi Fumiko, and Osaki Midori Jon L. Pitt The works of Ishimure Michiko, Hayashi Fumiko, and Osaki Midori feature characters who learn to experience the liveliness of the environment around them—a phenomenon that Deborah Rose Bird calls “the shimmer.” The shimmer occasions a fundamental change in these characters that allows for new ways of inhabiting the world. As they wrote of this shimmer, all three writers explored the tension between a measurable, scientific view of the environment and an immeasurable, poetic view of the environment that does not separate nature and culture. Their works teach us how to read for the environment in literature that may not appear environmental at first glance.

Introduction Growing interest in the environmental humanities has created an opportunity to introduce readers to environmental writers and works of environmental literature. It has also created an opening to allow us to read for the environment in works of literature that may not appear environmental at first glance. This essay takes up three women writers of modern Japan— one whose work is virtually always discussed in terms of the environment (Ishimure Michiko, 1927–2018), one whose work is well known and regularly included in survey courses of Japanese literature but rarely discussed as environmental (Hayashi Fumiko, 1903–1951), and one whose work is rarely discussed at all (Osaki Midori, 1896–1971)—and proposes that each one is an environmental writer.1 This claim is possible if we take seriously a question posed in Ishimure’s 1997 novel Tenko (Lake of Heaven*). Lake of Heaven narrates the journey of a young man to a remote rural region of Kyushu that was once home to his deceased grandfather. He hopes to scatter his grandfather’s ashes in his ancestral village but finds it submerged under water. As the story unfolds, protagonist Masahiko, who has grown up in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, learns how to see, hear, and feel the world differently. Everything around him becomes

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overwhelmingly vibrant and newly alive. The narrator asks a question directed equally to Masahiko and to the reader: “if you were really aware of all the life that’s teeming about the earth, what might you see?” (Ishimure 2008, 207). Ishimure, Hayashi, and Osaki each brought to their work an awareness and close attention to the life that teemed around them. As if in answer to the question posed in Lake of Heaven, they each teamed up with the life they found teeming around the earth and wrote what they saw into their short stories, novels, and poetry. They captured in words something akin to what environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose has called “the shimmer.” Rose writes of learning to see the shimmer by working with the Aboriginal Yolngu people of Northern Australia. The shimmer (“bir’yun” in the language of the Yolngu) lures humans into a recognition of “the great patterns within which the power of life expresses itself ” (Rose 2017, G61). The shimmer is a form of situated Indigenous knowledge, and, following Rose, I invoke the term as an “environmental aesthetic” borne of an Indigenous cosmology in the hopes of shaking off the trenchant dualism that separates culture and nature. For Ishimure, Hayashi, and Osaki, what we commonly call “nature” did not exist in opposition to human culture. Their works present a nature inseparable from culture, and a culture inseparable from nature. They do so through the shimmer. Quoting philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, Rose refers to the shimmer as that which brings humans into a “reciprocal capture” with the nonhuman world, which she describes as “a process of encounter and transformation, not absorption, in which different ways of being and doing find interesting things to do together” (Rose 2017, G51). Learning to see life teeming up as shimmer opens the door for, in Stengers’ words, “new, immanent modes of existence” (Rose 2017, G51). In other words, experiencing the shimmer of life alerts one to the fact that other ways of being and inhabiting the world are possible. The shimmer puts the fictional characters of Ishimure, Hayashi, and Osaki in touch with the environment in radical ways that effect change. The shimmer creates space to reinvent oneself as something more than “one self ” independent from others. Learning to see life teeming with nonhuman beings (both animal and plant) brought these three writers in touch with things overlooked and at times purposely ignored—things like mosses, birds, and trees. They recognized that humans are deeply connected to these nonhuman beings as part of a greater environmental web. And while the notion of an environmental web calls to mind the scientific view of an ecosystem, the shimmer allowed these three writers and the characters they created to see something in the natural world that stands in excess to scientific explanation. This is not to say that they rejected science all together. Their concern was with the cold rationality of a scientific application that instrumentalized the natural world to capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal ends. As they wrote of human characters glimpsing the shimmer of life teeming up, each writer created environmental works where human characters come to realize that they are enmeshed within (and often at the mercy of) a natural world far from instrumentalized—a lively natural world that refuses to stay quiet in the background. And in this realization, they find new ways to live among the life teeming around them.

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Ishimure Michiko and the subtle signs of nature Ishimure Michiko is perhaps Japan’s most famous environmental writer. She has been referred to as “The Rachel Carson of Japan,” an epithet that speaks to her status as a writer of the environment whose work contributed to real world change. Ishimure’s 1969 classic work of poetic reportage Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease*) aided the protest movement that fought for environmental justice in the wake of industrial pollution off the western coast of Kyushu in Southern Japan. While Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is her best-known work, Ishimure was a prolific writer whose oeuvre includes poetry, fiction, theater, and children’s stories, in addition to her more overtly activist non-fictional writing. Several of these genres are brought together in Lake of Heaven. Dreamlike in its narrative unfolding, the novel blends poetry and mythological storytelling with theatrical elements into a hybrid form that poet Gary Snyder has called “a kind of myth-drama” due to its “a mythopoetic quality” (Ishimure 2008, xi). As discussed above, Lake of Heaven follows Masahiko on his journey to Amazoko, the birthplace of his recently deceased grandfather. Amazoko, we learn, now lies underwater. Thirty years earlier, this village (which is fictional but based on the village of Mizukami in Kyushu) was submerged due to the construction of a dam (Thornber 2016, 11). Like Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, Lake of Heaven grapples with the effects of anthropogenic change to the environment. It questions what becomes of a shared sense of community, a shared sense of culture, and a shared sense of history when the very material ground for these ties between humans (and nonhumans) is no longer accessible. It argues, in its “mythopoetic” way (to use Synder’s word), that there is no human community, no human culture, nor a human history that is able to stand independent from the environment from which it emerged. It is a pedagogical work, one that can help readers to see how the realm of “culture” is not separate from the natural world. As Masahiko arrives in what is left of Amazoko, he experiences its vernacular culture as villagers recount mythological tales, sing ceremonial songs, and perform theatrical rituals. All of this culture emerges from the material environment of Amazoko—a material world that has been in flux for centuries. Ishimure digs deep into the environmental history of Japan to make this point. Near the end of the novel, she has the omniscient third-person narrator recount the geological record of the Sanbo Mountain belt in Kochi Prefecture (on the island of Shikoku), which “contained some of the oldest geological strata in Japan. Sometime between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous Period this volcanic island which had been drifting amidst the oceans, and which contained a lagoon within it, had become attached to the ancient land of Japan” (Ishimure 2008, 289). The narrator remarks that the “local area” (i.e., Amazoko, on the island of Kyushu) “was composed of the same rock and fossil materials” as this area that now sits on a separate island of the archipelago (Ishimure 2008, 288). The point here is that the very land of what is now Japan has been in motion since ancient times, and that ancient tales may well account for histories and changes in the material world that are not obvious to us today. The suggestion seems to be that the stories of villagers are so old that they tell of a time in the deep geological past when the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku were not yet separated by the tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust.

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Masahiko connects this environmental history of what is now a distant mountain to the mythological tales common among the elders of the Amazoko area about a “lake set in the womb of the mountains.” Masahiko claims that such tales “could not be dismissed as the absurd dreams and delusions of country folk” and that “(t)he vestiges of such dreams could be seen in the cuts of the mountainsides. In the cross sections of the earth’s crust one could see small parts of the workings of the entire universe—of the wild energies in which the earth had been churned up and released amidst surges of basalt and conglomerate” (Ibid). History, oral storytelling, and the material make-up of the earth’s surface come together here and create an aural shimmer: “The sounds starting to be released within (Masahiko) were trying to establish relations with the moistures that had been slowly seeping out from the earth since the distant geological past” (Ishimure 2008, 289). Through the shimmer, Masahiko awakens to the “wild energies” of the environment. And through Masahiko’s environmental awakening, Lake of Heaven helps readers themselves become reenchanted with the sights and sounds of the natural world, and to see the natural world within human culture. In the introduction to his English translation of the work, Bruce Allen claims Ishimure “insists that we need to notice the subtle signs (kehai) of nature that are all about us in our daily lives—even in the city. These signs are readily available, but most of us have lost the ability to notice them” (Ishimure 2008, xi). In Allen’s reading of Lake of Heaven, Ishimure’s pedagogical project is also a warning, as “this loss of sensitivity becomes a fundamental cause of our loss of respect for the environment, and, in turn, precedes our political social and economic problems” (Ishimure 2008, xi). Lake of Heaven also proposes that in losing the ability to notice the subtle signs of nature, we have lost our ability to hear ancestral voices. For Deborah Rose Bird, it is the shimmer that reconnects us to them: “when one is captured by shimmer, one experiences not only the joy of the visual capture but also… ancestral power as it moves actively across the world” (Rose 2017, G54). In Lake of Heaven, the ancestral power held by the shimmer brings one closer to understanding humanity’s place within the environment and the threat of ecological degradation than do contemporary notions of environmentalism: In his childhood Masahiko had thought of these tales of a far-off forgotten mountain village as merely the fragments of memories of an old man who had been separated from his hometown… Now he had come to realize that in order to see into the world that had been hidden in his grandfather’s mind it wasn’t necessary to resort to ideas from ethnology or recently fashionable ecological theories about saving the earth. All that was needed was to share in the feelings of these elders right here… (Ishimure 2008, 275) The ancestral power of the shimmer teems up from the earth and moves within and through Masahiko. As Lake of Heaven progresses and Masahiko learns to see the subtle signs of nature emanating from the watery depths of Amazoko, his identity starts to merge with that of his grandfather, Masahito. He speaks words that he feels are coming from his grandfather’s mouth and, at one point, feels his grandfather’s spirit within him. He becomes someone/ something new through reciprocal capture, to return to Isabella Stengers’ term that Rose aligns with the shimmer.

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Lake of Heaven eschews the science of “ecological theories” in favor of something more obscure, both cosmic and earthly. Surrounded by the otherworldly and yet all-too-worldly environment of Amazoko, Masahiko starts to feel “something welling up within. A something that had never been there before” (Ishimure 2008, 91). As a young urbanite, his first instinct is to turn to science to understand this “something.” But faced with the life teeming up around Amazoko, he finds science inadequate: “He had watched all sorts of TV science programs … but even if they explained the general outlines of the origins of life they never helped him get at the basic question, Why am I here? Entirely different from the sort of things on those shows, his wonder at the fact that life has a voice and a presence was something that continually ran through his consciousness” (Ishimure 2008, 91). Masahiko is reminded of an event from his childhood. One day, while walking home from elementary school, he encountered an inchworm crawling on the branch of a cherry tree. This encounter produces a reciprocal capture between himself and the worm, in which each are affected by the other: “It had seemed to the young Masahiko that the inchworm was listening to the sounds of the universe and thinking about the meaning of the fact that there are things in the world that cannot be measured” (Ishimure 2008, 92). From this encounter, Masahiko learns to inhabit an inchworm-like state of mind (an act with strong echoes to the writing of Osaki Midori, as I discuss below). Masahiko learns to leave science behind and open up to the vitality of the unmeasurable life teeming around the environment. Lake of Heaven gives voice to the “things in the world that cannot be measured.” It speaks of a “darkness in the sky beyond the waters” that “could not be expressed in the words of astronomy” (Ishimure 2008, 65). It speaks of “shadows that flitted about in the mountain mists” that are a “living story that existed beyond the realm of what’s called intelligence” (Ishimure 2008, 103). It speaks of a world “more profound than what (Masahiko had) read about in the books he had on his desk” (Ishimure 2008, 168). Ishimure asks readers to look beyond science, to look beyond intelligence, and, ironically, to look beyond books in order to experience the environment in a new (and yet extremely old) way. To do so is to become like Masahiko becomes: “As if he himself were grass, he began to realize that he was becoming able to hear clearly for the first time” (Ishimure 2008, 78). In order to “hear clearly,” Masahiko is forced to leave behind the modern trappings of city life and abandon a scientific rationality that measures the life teeming around the earth. Such measurements turn life into objectifiable data. Amazoko’s fate—its submersion under water—is the result of such measurement and objectification. Lake of Heaven is ultimately critical of a science that turns the natural world into data and promotes progress at the expense of marginalized people and nonhuman beings. The dam project was, by all rational accounts, successful. The dam was completed and the old village of Amazoko now lay under the water. Villagers were, again quite rationally, financial compensated for their losses and the inconvenience of having to relocate. Yet, as Masahiko learns, the village of Amazoko experienced losses for which it was impossible to reimburse. The narrator peers into the memories of Ohina, an elderly villager who serves as something of a guide to the more-than-earthly realm of Amazoko, in order to recount the trauma of the dam construction. Ohina remembers the trees—sandalwoods, elms, ginkgoes, pagodas—and how the old women of the village watched as they sank below the surface of the newly engineered lake, “holding back tears” and “calling out ‘Souls—those are souls!’” (Ishimure 2008, 67). Near the end of the novel, we get a list of other nonhuman souls that floated up to the surface of the lake during the dam construction: ants, butterflies, Chapter 22: Teeming Up with Life

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salamanders, baby birds. Christine Marran argues that Lake of Heaven operates largely through simile, and just as human characters speak like nonhumans (Ohina’s speech is said to be bird-like), so too do nonhumans like insects scream as if human while they float to the watery surface. Marran calls this two-way logic of simile “an organic process of being supplemented by other bodies or supplementing other bodies,” a phrase that recalls Stenger’s reciprocal capture (Marran 2017, 47). These nonhuman beings that “normally went unnoticed” ended up casualties of the march toward progress. They are only noticed once their dead bodies float to the surface. But in addition to the loss of these unnoticed, subtle signs of nature, Lake of Heaven shows how something immeasurable was also lost—something that moves us from the loss of life to the loss of an afterlife. For in Lake of Heaven, notions of the afterlife are also deeply tied to the environment. Masahiko recalls a conversation he had with his grandfather before the latter’s passing. In this conversation, he lamented to Masahiko that villagers can no longer visit the graves of their ancestors, as they now lay underwater. He asks Masahiko to scatter his own ashes on the water after he dies. By visiting Amazoko and learning to see and hear the shimmer, Masahiko reconnects to the ancestral power that his grandfather feared was forever underwater. He returns his grandfather to the shimmer of life after death. But it is not the scattering of the ashes that connects Masahiko and Masahito to the shimmer. Accompanied by Ohina and her daughter Omomo, Masahiko releases the ashes to the water’s surface, but all three leave the ceremony feeling as if something is not quite complete. Ohina suggests that the only way they can truly get back in touch with the submerged village of Amazoko and all it represents is to “call it up.” And by the end of the novel, this is just what happens. Through ritual and song, Omomo helps call the village up from the depths of the lake. The life once hidden and sacrificed in the name of scientific rationality comes teeming up for all to see. This miraculous feat is accomplished through the invocation of kotodama, a term of Japanese antiquity marking the belief in the power of words to affect the material world. Ishimure uses this immeasurable, magical aesthetic concept, which harkens back to the earliest extent writings of Japan, to remind readers of the inseparability of nature and culture. Her invocation of kotodama is a means of reconnecting readers to the subtle signs of the environment, which for many of us lay hidden under metaphorical lakes of our own. Lake of Heaven is undoubtedly an idealistic work that engages in essentialist thinking. It is a deeply nostalgic novel that longs for a time when things were different, both simpler and yet infinitely more complex. It yearns for a return to a harmonious relationship with the natural world (however fantastical that may be, historically speaking) and makes use of distinctively Japanese aesthetic tropes in the process. Directed as it is at Japan’s economically depressed and environmentally ravaged countryside, Ishimure’s vision of a harmonious relationship to the environment is grounded in critique, and it is powerful in its resistance to a capitalist notion of progress. Decades earlier, however, the claim that there exists a uniquely Japanese relationship to nature was used to justify Japan’s colonial expansion. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki explains, the ideology of airin shisō (or “forest-loving thought”), a concept she describes as “an intriguing mixture of ecological science and nationalist romanticism, which brought together elements from myth, literature, aesthetics and cutting-edge botanical knowledge,” posited that Japan’s long history of forest management could (and indeed should) be brought to foreign lands like Taiwan and Korea precisely because “Japanese people were uniquely capable at once of making modern productive use of forests and of preserving the forest landscape and resources for future generations” (Morris-Suzuki 2013, 230). 346

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The extraction of natural resources, fueled by essentializing propaganda like airin shishō, binds the Japanese empire to Japan’s environmental history. It is from this viewpoint that we can begin to read the work of Hayashi Fumiko as environmental literature. But an environmental humanities approach to reading Hayashi pushes us further, towards the ineffability of life teeming around the environment—a vitality in Hayashi’s work that becomes legible once we apply the insights gained from reading Ishimure.

Hayashi Fumiko and a loveable world at war Hayashi Fumiko rose to prominence as a writer with the publication of her much-celebrated I-novel Hōrōki (Diary of a Vagabond*) in 1930. The work recounts the difficulties of a woman on the economic margins of interwar Japan. The success of the work allowed Hayashi to travel across Asia and Europe, and by the end of 1937 Hayashi was working as a war correspondent for the newspaper Mainichi shinbun. This job lasted several years and brought Hayashi to occupied China, Manchuria, Singapore, French Indochina, Java, and Borneo (Hayashi 2006, x). These experiences have left something of an indelible mark on Hayashi’s otherwise canonical legacy. They also provided Hayashi with the inspiration for some of her postwar writings, including the short story “Boruneo daiya” (1946, Borneo Diamond*) and the novel Ukigumo (1951, Floating Clouds*), both of which grapple with colonial resource extraction. Borneo Diamond features a man named Manabe who works for the imperial army mining diamonds in the South Pacific. Floating Clouds centers on characters who work for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Dalat, in the Japanese colony of French Indochina (present day Vietnam). In these works, which drawn from Imperial Japan’s environmental history, we find a scientific, measurable view of the natural world that aided Japan’s colonial expansion. But we can also find the immeasurable vitality of the shimmer teeming up in opposition, as well. Floating Clouds presents a critique of the instrumentalization of the natural world that proved central to Japanese colonialism. It does so largely through the figure of Tomioka, one of the story’s dual protagonists and love interest to Yukiko, the other main character. Tomioka and Yukiko work together for the Forestry Service, but Tomioka is critical of the agency’s reliance on statistics: “In this land belonging to someone else… (the) kacha pines must already be fifty or sixty years old, but the Japanese were felling great numbers of them all the time, with no idea of what to do with them. All they did was report the numbers, and nothing but the numbers, to the military” (Hayashi 2006, 47). Here we see Tomioka resisting the ideology of airin shisō, which supported Japanese imperialism by positing a link between proper forest management and a harmonious relationship with nature that was uniquely Japanese. Floating Clouds rejects this idea outright, as Yukiko tells Tomioka: “I don’t really know that people can live in harmony with nature” (Hayashi 2006, 59). But while she may deny the possibility of such harmony (which serves as the critical core of Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven), Yukiko does glimpse the shimmer of life in the verdant landscape of the French Indochina—even if it never fully offers her the transformative experience it provided for Masahiko. Throughout Floating Clouds, Hayashi contrasts the grim, bombed-out landscape of immediate postwar Tokyo with the warm, fragrant landscape of Dalat through a narrative structure that moves between interwar and postwar timelines. The contrast is palpable, and we get a sense of Yukiko’s nostalgia for the liveliness of colonial

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Dalat as she struggles to survive in the ruins of postwar Tokyo. For Yukiko, Dalat “was like a mirage” where “mimosas, with their golden blossoms, gave off a subtle, scarcely perceptible perfume… that put (her) into a dreamy mood” (Hayashi 2006, 20). For literary critic Noriko Mizuta, Yukiko’s ability to “wander” in Dalat allowed her to find “not only economic independence but freedom from the Japanese institution of womanhood” (Mizuta 1996, 338). But Mizuta recognizes such freedom was ultimately “illusory,” and claims that by the novel’s end, Yukiko’s detachment from Japanese society and attachment to her memories of the shimmer turn into “something futile and meaningless” (Mizuta 1996, 340). Floating Clouds ends with Yukiko and Tomioka on the semitropical island of Yakushima, where, in Noriko Horiguchi’s words, Yukiko tries and fails to re-create “in postwar Japan the sense of physical freedom and empowerment her body experienced as a Japanese colonizer in prewar French Indochina” (Horiguchi 2011, 153). Early in the novel, when Yukiko is still in Dalat, she is nevertheless attuned to the subtle signs (kehai) of nature that Bruce Allen claims permeate Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven. She follows Tomioka into the forests of Mankin, home to royal tombs of Annamese kings. Yukiko sees the shimmer in the “dense stands of giant rare deciduous and evergreen trees.” Here, in the forest of another’s ancestors, Yukiko feels “surrounded by the subtle signs of pollen, both sweet and sticky” (Hayashi 2011, 62). Yukiko feels the life teeming around the forests of Mankin, but Hayashi does not let her linger in the shimmer long enough to experience any kind of reciprocal capture. Colonial reality breaks the spell, as airplanes roar overhead and the two find themselves entering a man-made tree plantation of kacha pines. Yukiko loses interest in the environment and focuses on Tomioka instead, just as the narration shifts to his perspective. They share their first kiss, and in an instant Tomioka’s affection turns to disdain: “As he kissed Yukiko, he could not escape the feeling of having traded a forest habitat for a small, cramped cage” (Hayashi 2006, 45). Near the end of the novel, Yukiko tracks Tomioka down after both are repatriated back to the Japanese mainland. Tomioka begins writing articles about his time working for the colonial Forestry Agency that express “his nostalgia for the forests of the south” (Hayashi 2006, 217). And yet with Yukiko, he resists such nostalgia: “Yukiko… kept talking about the forest of Mankin. But Tomioka would not enter into the remembered scenery of Mankin with her” (Hayashi 2006, 196). Ultimately, Yukiko dies an unceremonious death on Yakushima, and Floating Clouds leaves readers (and likely critics such as Mizuta and Horiguchi) feeling that the life teeming around Dalat could never have shimmered enough for a woman like Yukiko to become anew in the way Masahiko was able in Lake of Heaven. But Hayashi’s earlier story, “Borneo Diamond,” offers a different take on the shimmer— one not foreclosed by the intersectionality of gender, colonialism, and the environment. As its title suggests, Borneo Diamond is set in the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo in the South Pacific. It is a short, complex work that presents the radical possibilities of the shimmer. The story’s protagonist, Tamae, decides to leave the Japanese mainland for Borneo in order to escape her difficult life as a teenage runaway in Tokyo. In the colonial metropole, Tamae has become dependent on a man named Matsuya. Tamae gives birth to Matsuya’s child, but is forced to give up the newborn daughter to strangers. At the advice of an innkeeper, Tamae heads for the South Pacific without a clear understanding of what her new work there will entail. Once she arrives, she learns she is to be a comfort woman, forced to provide sexual services for the occupying Japanese military forces. “Borneo Diamond” contrasts Tamae’s experience with that of another comfort woman, Sumiko. Unable to endure both the sexual 348

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violence inflicted upon her body and the violent murder of her lover (who receives corporal punishment at the hands of the Japanese military for attempting to defect and start a new life with Sumiko in Borneo), Sumiko takes her own life. Tamae, on the other hand, turns to the life teeming around Borneo in order to survive. Unlike Yukiko in Floating Clouds, Tamae experiences the reciprocal capture offered in the shimmer as she opens up and out to the liveliness of the environment around her. Throughout the story, Hayashi highlights the warm, subtropical environment of Borneo and contrasts it with the bleak reality of the Japanese mainland. Tamae’s room—a liminal space that is decorated in a Japanese fashion—embodies this contrast: “Out of place in this lush tropical clime the anomalous Japanese-style room seemed bare and poverty-stricken” (Hayashi 1994, 166). Tamae prefers to leave the confines of her room and explore the city of Banjarmasin. Her descriptions of the city, and in particular the river for which Banjarmasin is famous, show life teeming all around: “Among the bustle of boats prodigious masses of the water weeds called iron-iron, jostling against each other, were pushed upstream by the tide. The flow of the water plants, so dense that one could not even see the water, if one watched it for a while, induced the illusion that the boat was sliding along on rails. One had the sensation of the earth itself turning” (Hayashi 1994, 176). Tamae enjoys taking boat rides along the river. She feels the shimmer enveloping her as she gazes along the river’s banks: “On this river, at least, man and nature, heedless of the war, disported themselves with each other as frolicsome as puppies, creating together a lovable world” (Hayashi 1994, 177). The shimmer of life teeming around the city of Banjarmasin fundamentally changes Tamae through a reciprocal capture that allows her not to merely “wander” in an illusory paradise (as Mizuta might claim) but rather to become wholly new and present in a “lovable world” at war. The shimmer does not offer a way out of her precarious situation—rather, it offers her a way in. Sumiko finds a way out through death; Tamae finds a way in through a radical openness that moves her beyond herself: Something like a brilliant, golden radiance, like ether, seemed to transpire from the pores of her body. Whatever the place, Tamae was not afraid. With a passion that was full of strength, she settled herself in. The history of her four months in Borneo faded away like a passing moment. When she felt the ease of knowing that the person called herself had been naturally and totally destroyed, she could settle down calmly wherever she was. (Hayashi 1994, 170) The golden, ether-like radiance that moves through Tamae is the shimmer, and it resembles that “something that had never been there before” that Masahiko feels “welling up within” (Ishimure 2008, 91). But where Masahiko’s environmental epiphany is idealistic, Tamae’s is anything but. It is realistic, in touch with a material world equally ravaged by war and yet nevertheless fully alive, and at times even beautiful. Near the end of the story, Tamae and the other women “employed” as comfort women are given the day off due to the discovery of Sumiko’s dead body. They head to the beach. One woman comments, “It’s so peaceful. It makes you wonder where the war is” (Hayashi 1994, 181). The “tragic countenance” of Sumiko’s face floats before Tamae’s eyes and she sits looking out at the water. For a brief moment she feels a sense of guilt, but then offers these feeling up to air: “Perhaps I’m a bad woman… Dismayed, Tamae gazed at her recent, half-forgotten feelings in the distance of the empty sky” (Hayashi 1994, 181). “Borneo Diamond” closes with Tamae returning to the shimmer, Chapter 22: Teeming Up with Life

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watching a “heavy wind, laden with moisture, thrashing the foliage” (Hayashi 1994, 181). The force of life teeming through the trees is rough and heavy, but Tamae remains alive to see and feel it, both terrifying and life-affirming in its power.

Osaki Midori and plants of the 20th century Hayashi Fumiko saw the shimmer in her friend Osaki Midori’s writing. She recognized an environmental quality in Osaki’s stories and remarked how the verdant Tokyo neighborhood of Ochiai (where both Osaki and Hayashi had lived) influenced Osaki’s work: “Osaki had lived in Ochiai before I had, and she wrote a truly magnificent novella called Dainana kankai hōkō (1931, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense*) while being caressed by the scenery of trees: paulownias, chestnuts, peach trees, and the like” (Hayashi 1977, 156). Osaki’s oeuvre overflows with environmental images of non-human life, like trees, mosses, osmanthus flowers, and tadpoles, to name a few. Hers is an imaginative and playful literary world where humans and plants experience reciprocal capture and share emotions like love and depression. Like Ishimure and Hayashi, Osaki also wrote of the transformative potential held by the shimmer. From a cramped attic apartment in Tokyo (where she moved in 1919), Osaki wrote of city dwellers like herself who looked to alleviate the anxiety permeating the air of interwar Japan by opening up to the life so easily overlooked in the urban landscape. This anxiety, which is thematized in many of her stories, ultimately cut her writing career short—after struggling with shinkeibyō (or nervous disorder), Osaki returned to her native Tottori prefecture in 1932 and ceased writing. Her collected works barely fill two volumes. Osaki is not predominantly remembered as an environmental writer. She is remembered in English-language scholarship (if she is remembered at all) as a writer deeply connected to the technologies associated with Japanese literary modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. The advent of cinema was particularly influential on modernist writers, as cinematic techniques like superimposition and montage found their way into modernist works of literature. Not only can these techniques be found in Osaki’s fiction, as Livia Monnet has demonstrated, but she also holds the distinction of having written directly about film (Monnet 1999, 58). Her column Eiga mansō (Jottings on Film) ran for several months in Nyonin geijutsu (Woman’s arts) in 1930, and has been subsequently championed as a rare, early example of film criticism written by a woman writer in Japan. Typically, when critics have discussed Osaki’s engagement with the environment, they have done so through the lens of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical), a term used to denote literary modernism as politically disengaged and far more concerned with the aesthetics of sensual pleasure and the bizarre than with the growing political unrest surrounding the growth of the Japanese empire (Clerici 2017, 273). This is especially the case with Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Osaki’s 1931 novella that features a character who studies the “love lives” of mosses. This weird science has often been interpreted as a form of pseudoscience that fits well within the framework of ero-guro-nansensu, regardless of the fact that the use of the word “love” in reference to nonhuman life was relatively common in biological discourse at the time (Arakawa 2016, 86). One important exception to this dominant mode of reading Osaki’s work through the lens of modernist aesthetics comes in the form of an essay by influential Japanese literary

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critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–1974). In a 1973 essay, Hanada calls Osaki his “muse” and remarks how she has so “beautifully captured” something new in the plants she has written into Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense: “I have a feeling that within that novella so full of sunlight as to be abnormally bright, that the spirits of plants are beautifully captured. If so, those plants—so rare within our immediate surroundings—were plants of the 20th century” (Osaki 1980, 524). Hanada’s point is that Osaki’s writing was so unique in the way it discussed plant life that it marked a clean break from the influences of literary Romanticism, which dominated written representations of the natural world around the turn of the 20th century. Hanada’s claim demonstrates that he, too, was able to see the life teeming around the overlooked things of the world—which included Osaki’s story (Hanada’s praise of Osaki helped spur on a renewed interest in her works decades after she wrote them). The protagonist and narrator of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Ono Machiko, is a young woman with naturally frizzy red hair who moves from the countryside to live with her brothers and a male cousin in Tokyo. The majority of the narrative unfolds in the small, rundown house Machiko shares with her “odd family.” Her brothers and cousin are singularly devoted to a different area of study. Cousin Sangorō studies music, and irritates his housemates by practicing on an old, out of tune piano. Brother Ichisuke studies a type of abnormal psychology referred to as “split psychology” (bunretsu shinrigaku)—a diagnosis he is quick to apply to members of his family. Other brother Nisuke performs research on plants in the laboratory that is his bedroom. He grows daikon sprouts and tends to moss, encouraging it to fall in love by experimenting with different temperature fertilizers. Like the other male family members in the house, his work is prone to annoy his siblings and cousin—the putrid smell of fertilizer wafts throughout the cramped dwelling for the duration of the story. Much of the narrative consists of Ichisuke, Nisuke, and Sangorō engaging in lengthy and at times argumentative discussions, while Machiko cooks and cleans in the background, disappearing from the story for pages at a time. But Machiko considers herself a student too. She longs to be a poet and expresses frustration as her housemates overlook her creative desires, relegating her to the role of domestic help: “I was merely a girl with frizzy, terribly reddish hair, and my official work in the household was kitchen duty, as my status as resident of the north-facing room would suggest. But unbeknownst to the others, I had the following objective of my study: I would write poems that would reverberate in the human seventh sense” (Osaki 2015, 224). Machiko is unclear just what this “seventh sense” looks like, but she calls it a “vast, foggy psychological world”— an immeasurable realm that would fit right at home in Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven. This is her struggle throughout the story, as she attempts to transcend the mundane and claustrophobic day-to-day by honing her senses in on this vague state of mind. Ultimately, Machiko is unable to write of the seventh sense. Every time she tries, she unwittingly ends up writing about love. There is a joke at work here, as Machiko’s name resembles that of Ono no Komachi, the legendary female poet of the Heian period known for her love poetry. But it is in Machiko’s search for the seventh sense that Osaki’s story becomes environmental. For while Machiko never learns to properly write of the seventh sense, she does learn to see it as shimmer. She finds it in the life teeming around Nisuke’s desk. One day, Machiko brings Nisuke some chestnuts, newly arrived from her grandmother. She finds Nisuke hard at work, inspecting moss samples to determine when they will fall in love:

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Nisuke did not lift his eyes from the moss as he broke the chestnut shell between his teeth; shards of shell spilled and scattered on his notebook. Without thinking, I stretched my neck and gazed at the notebook. Then I realized—the moss pollen and the chestnut powder were the exact same color! They were even the same shape! I felt as if I had gained a vague but great piece of knowledge—Wasn’t the realm of poetry I sought precisely a world of this kind of fine powder? (Osaki 2015, 261) Machiko zooms in on the small world atop Nisuke’s notebook and is amazed at what she finds. In their visual similarity, the fine chestnut powder and minute moss pollen come together and shimmer, bringing Machiko into a reciprocal capture that fundamentally changes her and reminds her that things could be otherwise. This is vague but great knowledge for Machiko, who has been made to feel so small herself. Machiko, the aspiring poet, now understands that she and the moss are connected together through the shimmer, but Nisuke, the scientist, is oblivious to such aesthetic insight. Just when Machiko learns to see the life teeming up from the small green world, Nisuke wipes the chestnut powder away and the seventh sense evaporates before Machiko’s eyes. Nisuke, who spends all of his time carefully examining the moss, cannot see it for anything but a specimen, removed from its environmental context and devoid of life. Machiko, on the other hand, becomes engrossed in the shimmering world of moss with which she shares her immediate environment. She reads Nisuke’s research notebooks. She calls his thesis on moss her “secret favorite” and she reads his thesis about daikon radishes as if it were “a lyric poem of his own” (Osaki 2015, 240). In this way, she finds poetry in science. Throughout the story, Osaki explores the poetic potential of evolutionary science in particular. She writes of characters that learn how to reverse the course of evolution and inhabit a “moss-like disposition.” The ancestral power that Machiko sees teeming up from the shimmer comes from the moss itself—a botanical ancestor within deep evolutionary time. Machiko thus finds a way to resist a patriarchal order that turns the shimmer of life into scientific specimen. It is a patriarchal order embodied by Ichisuke, who simply cannot fathom that a female patient would resist his romantic advances and thus finds it necessary to deem her mentally unfit. It is a patriarchal order embodied by Nisuke, who attempts to turn the shimmering magic of love into quantifiable data. It is a patriarchal order embodied by Sangorō, who throws Machiko out of a window and cuts her hair against her will, leaving her feeling as if she “had been stripped of all (her) clothing” (Osaki 2015, 236). Like Tamae in “Borneo Diamond” and Masahiko in Lake of Heaven, Machiko learns how to survive by opening up to the life teeming around her and letting it change her. She learns from moss how to grow beyond a harsh environment, from out of the small, overlooked cracks. She fills in these cracks with a liveliness that can only be named by the incomprehensible, poetic “seventh sense.” Osaki elaborates on Machiko’s environmental awakening in her short story “Hokō” (1931, A Walk). The story belongs to the same narrative universe as Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, although it is unclear if it takes place before or after the events of Osaki’s best-known novella. Our protagonist is again a young woman, and although no one refers to her directly by name in the story, she is clearly Machiko. In “A Walk,” Machiko lives with her grandmother—so either the story predates her leaving for Tokyo or it takes place after she has, for some reason, returned home. In either case, “A Walk” shares many of the same 352

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themes as Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, although it is considerably shorter and even less known. The story opens with a poem attributed to an anonymous writer: When sorrow fills your heart Unable to forget someone’s countenance Take a walk all alone And cast their countenance away out into the fields When anguish fills your heart Unable to forget someone’s countenance Take a walk with the wind And give their countenance up to the wind. (Osaki 1980, 97) We then head into the narrative, where Machiko has been forced to move her bedroom into the attic. This is because her grandmother receives a letter from Ichisuke (whose name is mentioned) informing her that a colleague of his from the mental hospital, Kōta Tōhachi, will be visiting the area. Ichisuke asks that Kōta be allowed to stay at the family house. He also mentions that Kōta is studying “split psychology” and is in need of “models” to study. When Kōta arrives, he finds his model in Machiko. In typical Osaki fashion, the nature of the experiments he conducts on Machiko blur the lines between science and art. Kōta has brought with him a multi-volume collection of theatrical plays, and he and Machiko run lines together. Machiko notices that all of the lines Kōta has her read are “lines of love.” Osaki thus shows us a variation of Nisuke’s experiments with moss, where now literature has become the fertilizer intended to make a subject fall in love. And indeed, Machiko falls for Kōta. She is devastated when he leaves. She falls into a depression and rarely leaves her new attic room. Concerned that Machiko’s melancholic mood is due to a lack of physical exercise, her grandmother asks her to deliver some food to the home of a certain Mr. Matsuki. As she begins her walk, Machiko turns to the natural world in order to put memories of Kōta far from her mind. Following the poem that opens “A Walk,” she tries to cast his countenance out into the fields, entrusting it to wind and the clouds. Tamae does the same thing at the end of “Borneo Diamond,” as she releases the tragic countenance of her dead friend Sumiko up to the sky. But unlike Tamae, Machiko soon realizes: “The countenance of one you’re trying to forget becomes all the more difficult to get rid of amidst a landscape of clouds and wind” (Osaki 1980, 97). It seems the poetry found in the shimmer can lead one not only to a sense of wonder, but also a sense of longing. In Osaki’s world, such feelings are literally the stuff of the environment. Emotions like love and longing belong to humans and nonhumans equally through reciprocal capture. Mosses can fall in love, and in Osaki’s 1932 short story “Kōrogijō” (Miss Cricket*), both humans and paulownia trees are prone to depression and nervous disorders (Osaki 1980, 115). As soon as Machiko arrives at the Matsuki household, she is sent on yet another errand (it seems she is ordered around in her hometown as much as she is in Tokyo). This time, Matsuki has asked her to deliver a jar of tadpoles to his younger brother, Kyūsaku. Matsuki, a zoologist, is outraged by his brother’s poetry, in particular a poem that states that “birds are white.” Matsuki tells Machiko: “Everything (Kyūsaku) says is backwards. What the heck does Chapter 22: Teeming Up with Life

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he mean, ‘birds are white?’ It’s enough to anger the gods. I can guarantee you, as a zoologist, that there are birds that are completely black” (Osaki 1980, 105). Matsuki has learned that Kyūsaku plans on writing a poem about tadpoles and decides to send him a jar full of the real thing, which he has raised, out of season, in his lab. His hope is that seeing the scientific reality of tadpoles will somehow prevent Kyūsaku from finding the poetic potential they hold. Matsuki’s plan works. The life teeming around the jar of tadpoles does not shimmer for Kyūsaku. When Machiko delivers the tadpoles, he remarks: “I’ve finally given up trying to write a poem about tadpoles. Ever since looking at actual tadpoles I have become unable to write a poem about them” (Osaki 1980, 108). But Machiko does find the shimmer. She peers into the jar and instantly her memories of Kōta come rushing back. Kyūsaku sees Machiko sigh and warns her: “It’s bad for your spirit to look at small animals when you’re sad, so stop it. If you look at things like ants or tadpoles when you’re sad, your human spirit becomes that of an ant, and you fall into a tadpole state of mind. You completely lose the ability to tell the difference” (Osaki 1980, 108). But Machiko knows that what Kyūsaku is describing is the poetic realm she calls “the seventh sense.” It is the reciprocal capture that Masahiko experienced in Lake of Heaven, as he learned to think like an inchworm and stop measuring life. The story ends with Kyūsaku ripping a page from his poetry journal and handing it to Machiko. On the page is a poem that Kyūsaku did not write himself, but rather heard “somewhere, at some point.” It is the same poem that opened “A Walk.” As readers, we realize that Machiko was not familiar with the poem at the story’s beginning, as its insertion there suggested. This makes her attempts at the beginning of the story to free herself of Kōta’s memories by casting them to the wind (an act that follows the poem verbatim) uncanny. How did she anticipate, almost word for word, this poem that Kyūsaku has just handed her? “A Walk” suggests that Machiko’s attunement to the environment around her is itself a form of embodied, lived poetry. Like Kyūsaku, Machiko was unable to capture the shimmer in words in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. But neither that story nor A Walk are tragedies, because unlike Kyūsaku, Machiko experiences the shimmer in the fields, in the clouds, and in the tadpoles that bring her to a tadpole state of mind. Machiko knows embodying a nonhuman state of mind is not bad for her spirit, as Kyūsaku warns her, but is instead the reciprocal capture of the shimmer. It is the radical reorientation to the environment that allows her (and Tamae in Borneo Diamond and Masahiko in Lake of Heaven) to become anew, to survive and possibly even thrive in a harsh environment. And so while Machiko was never able to find the words to describe this lively, transformative experience of the shimmer, Osaki certainly was. And so was Hayashi, and Ishimure, as well. What possibilities for change (both personal and disciplinary) are opened up through reciprocal capture if we learn to read the life teeming up from the pages of their works?

Conclusion Near the end of Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven, the villagers of Amazoko decide to visit, en masse, the distant shrine of Oki no Miya. As Masahiko wonders just how far the shrine is from the village, the elders inform him that insects will be their guide: “It’s the insect that shows us the road to take through the mountains” (Ishimure 2008, 333). In other words, it is the tiny, seemingly insignificant manifestation of life that can point the way to something profound,

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if only one were to pay attention. In Lake of Heaven, this is what it means to learn to see the shimmer. In their own respective ways, Ishimure, Hayashi, and Osaki each focused in on the small details of the environment, be it insects, tadpoles, or clouds, and from this attention to detail crafted works of literature that revel in the profundity of the natural world. Their works express an environmental understanding that exceeds the qualitative confines of a scientific knowledge that informed colonialism and ecological degradation. Like the insects of Amazoko, these three writers can be our guides to the shimmering of life, if we are open to the “process of encounter and transformation” (to return to Rose’s words one last time) that their writings occasion.

Notes 1 Although Osaki’s family name is more commonly pronounced “Ozaki,” it is pronounced “Osaki” in her native Tottori prefecture.

References Arakawa, T. (2016). Kokegakusha ga yomitoku “Dainana kankai hōkō” [A bryologist’s reading of “Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense”]. In Osaki Midori o yomu: kōenhen II [Reading Osaki Midori: Compiled lectures II]. Tottori: Imai Insatsu. Clerici, N. (2017). Performance and Nonsense: Osaki Midori’s “Strange Love.” Japanese Language and Literature 51: 271–304. Hayashi, F. (1977). Hayashi Fumiko zenshū [The Collected Works of Hayashi Fumiko]. Tokyo: Bundendō Shuppan. ———. (1994). Borneo Diamond. (L. Dunlop, trans.). In Autumn Wind and Other Stories. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing. (Original work published 1946) ———. (2006). Floating Clouds. (L. Dunlop, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1951) ———. (2011). Ukigumo [Floating Clouds]. Tokyo: Shinchō Bunko. Horiguchi, N. (2011). Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ishimure, M. (2005). Ishimure Michiko zenshū [The Collected Works of Ishimure Michiko]. Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten. ———. (2008). Lake of Heaven. (B. Allen, trans.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. (Original work published 1997) Marran, C. (2017). Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Word. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mizuta, N. (1996). In Search of a Lost Paradise: The Wandering Woman in Hayashi Fumiko’s Drifting Clouds. In P.G. Schalow & J.A. Walker (eds.), The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2013). The Nature of Empire: Forest Ecology, Colonialism and Survival Politics in Japan’s Imperial Order. Japanese Studies 33: 225–42. Monnet, L. (1999). Montage, cinematic subjectivity and feminism in Ozaki Midori’s Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense. Japan Forum 11: 57–82. Osaki, M. (1980). Osaki Midori zenshū [The Collected Works of Osaki Midori]. Tokyo: Sōjusha. ———. (2004). Miss Cricket. (S.M. Lippit, trans.). Review of Japanese Culture and Society 16: 22–31. (Original work published 1932) ———. (2015). Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. (K. Selden & A. Freedman, trans.). Review of Japanese Culture and Society 27: 220–74. (Original work published 1931)

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Rose, D.B. (2017). Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed. In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan & N. Bubandt (eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (pp. G51–G61). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thornber, K. (2016). Ishimure Michiko and Global Ecocriticism. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 14 July. Accessed 1 February 2021. https://apjjf.org/-Karen-Thornber/4919/article.pdf.

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Part 9 Crossing Borders: Writing Transnationally

Chapter 23 Women and the Ethnic Body: Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil Christina Yi What does it mean to speak in the voice of a mother who cannot speak her “mother tongue”? To write of an ethnic body that has been forcibly de-ethnicized through the processes of assimilation? This chapter answers such questions by highlighting the works of three major Zainichi Korean women writers: Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil. Through close readings of Lee’s Nagune Taryon: Eien no tabibito (Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler), Yū’s Uo no matsuri (Festival for the Fish), and Che’s Jini no pazuru (Jini’s Puzzle), the chapter shows how these writers turn the contradictions and pluralities of the ethnic body into the source of cogent feminist critique.

Introduction What does it mean to speak in the voice of a mother who cannot speak her “mother tongue”? To write of an ethnic body that has been forcibly de-ethnicized through the processes of assimilation? In the writings of Zainichi (lit. residing in Japan) Korean authors Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil, the answers to such questions are necessarily plural, and necessarily dialogic: oriented not only to the Japanese body politic that comprises their primary readership, but also to the heavily male-dominated canon of Zainichi literature itself.1 Like other texts in that canon, the works highlighted in this chapter—Lee’s poetry collection Nagune Taryon: Eien no tabibito (1991, Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler*), Yū’s play Uo no matsuri (1992, Festival for the Fish*), and Che’s novella Jini no pazuru (2016, Jini’s Puzzle, 2016; translated as The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart*)—also feature fractured families, anxieties of linguistic/ethnic/national belonging, and the long shadow of Japan’s imperial past. But rather than discourses on mother tongues, we find literal mothers and their literal tongues; rather than the psyches of abusive fathers or husbands, we find the scars of abused women; rather than the troping of ethnic signifiers, we find the material signs of ethnicity. These writers’ emphasis on the materiality and historicity of the gendered, racialized body is especially significant given the intertwined nature of nationalism and family ideology in modern East Asia. As Anne McClintock has argued,

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the temporal anomaly within nationalism—veering between nostalgia for the past and the impatient, progressive sloughing off of the past—is typically resolved by figuring the contradiction in the representation of time as a natural division of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalism’s progressive, or revolutionary, principle of discontinuity. Nationalism’s anomalous relation to time is thus managed as a natural relation to gender. (McClintock 1995, 358) It is precisely this anomaly of time, however, that the word zainichi exposes and challenges. With their origins rooted in a “Korea” that no longer exists on the map and their “residing” status both a result and a condition of a colonialism that is anything but post, the very existence of Zainichi Koreans confounds the national narratives that were constructed in Japan and both Koreas in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat to the Allied Powers in 1945. In this context, how to maintain a sense of ethnonational identity has remained an urgent question for many Zainichi writers, with the answer all too often centering on the gendering of tradition as described by McClintock. At the same time, the workings of Japanese patrilineal law and citizenship have meant that the most pressing issues of assimilation—including intermarriage, the use of Korean “real names” (honmyō) versus Japanese “passing names” (tsūmei), and the wearing of ethnic clothes—carry particular weight for Zainichi women, who are expected to embody and preserve their imagined communities even as they are denied the right to act as their agents. In the three works examined below, we will see how the contradictions and pluralities engendered by this paradox are turned into the source of cogent feminist critique.

Incantations of the self: Lee Jungja Born in 1947 in Mie Prefecture, Lee Jungja was introduced to the practice of reading and writing tanka in middle school. Her first poetry collection, Ponsona no uta (Songs of the Balsam Flower), was published in 1984 by Gan Shokan, a small but influential publisher that specialized in poetry. The work was a critical success—some of her tanka were even featured in school textbooks throughout Japan—and it established her as both an important new literary voice and one of the first Zainichi women poets to achieve national recognition (Odani 2008, 74). Her second poetry collection, Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler, was published by the influential Japanese publisher Kawade Shobō in 1991. In her seminal monograph on Zainichi literature, Kim Huna argues that only in the 1970s did the category of “Zainichi woman writer” begin to gain any commercial recognition or force, while critical attention didn’t emerge until the 1980s (Kim H. 2004, 18). One major reason for this lag is that first-generation Zainichi women faced extraordinary barriers to accessing education. In colonial Korea (1910–1945), the percentage of eligible female children enrolled in public elementary school remained well under 20 percent until the 1930s, and never rose above 40 percent for the duration of the colonial period (Kim P. 2005, 62). The number of educated Korean females in Japan was even lower. In a 1934 survey conducted in Osaka, for example, less than 5 percent of the roughly 10,000 Korean women respondents

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had undergone some form of schooling (Song 2014, 52). As I have written elsewhere (Yi 2018), the ability to attend school was limited to children whose families could afford the school fees, who could be spared from the duties of the house or work, and who lived within walking proximity of a school. When women were encouraged to learn Japanese, it was often not for their own sakes but for the sakes of their future children—who, in the context of the Japanese empire, were expected to grow up to become loyal imperial subjects of Japan. The majority of the over two million Koreans in mainland Japan swiftly repatriated to Korea following Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945, but there were many who chose—or who were forced to choose—to stay in Japan for the time being, wary of the unstable political conditions on the peninsula and uncertain of what the future held. Because the majority of Koreans assumed that the division of the peninsula was only temporary, concern soon centered on how to best prepare families for eventual return to Korea. The pro-communist organization Chōren (League of Koreans in Japan, est. October 1945) became one of the most active organizations devoted to this purpose. Arguing that education was key to preserving ethnic self-determination and autonomy, the organization founded a number of schools throughout the country (now collectively referred to in Japanese as Chōsen gakkō, or in Korean as hakkyo) where classes were taught in Korean, by Korean teachers, for Korean pupils. However, the ability to attend such schools again depended upon one’s location and the parents’ willingness to spare their children from the duties of home or work—as well as their willingness to weather the immense political and social scrutiny that came from attending such schools.2 As Song Hyewon has documented, the curriculum for girls in Chōren-run hakkyo prioritized political allegiance to the “fatherland” and ethnonational loyalty above all else, leaving little room for other forms of self-expression. The majority of first generation Zainichi women, she concludes, “were unable to fully access either Korean or Japanese” (Song 2014, 81). Anxieties about language are on constant display in Nagune Taryong. Early in the collection, for instance, we find the following tanka: Hanguru o tsumazuki yomeba ushinaishi mi ni tomedo naku suzu no ne furuu As I read the Korean alphabet clumsily / the sound of the bell / trembles incessantly / within my body / that lost (Lee 2006, 260; 2018, 72) In the first part of the tanka, or kami no ku, the word tsumazuki (from tsumazuku; lit. to trip or to stumble) turns the act of reading into an embodied experience, where the printed marks on the page are physical barriers to the poet persona’s access to language and yet, paradoxically, also the very language itself. This duality of absence-in-presence is accentuated by the word ushinaishi (ushinau in the classical past tense; lit. to lose something) which, because of its placement at the end of the kami no ku, serves to literally and metaphorically link the Korean language to a body that is both lost and present. In the last part of the tanka, or shimo no ku, a double transformation of the senses takes place: the printed Korean script gives way to the wordless sound of a bell, which then “trembles” with material force within the poet persona’s body. Taken as a whole, the poem gestures to the ways in which language matters and is mattered—embodied, materialized, and given affective force—(on)to individuals that have lost the ability to fully claim it.

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Of course, there is another language we must consider. In the tanka, the poet persona’s fraught relationship to the Korean language stands in tense contrast to the smooth, flowing Japanese used to describe that relationship—a Japanese that is made to fit with seeming ease within the 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm of a singularly Japanese poetic form. This irony is not lost on the poet persona. For example, a later section of the collection entitled “Chichi no Chōsengo” (Father’s Korean Language) contains the following interlinked sequence: Isakaite kotoba ushinau toki chichi no tsune no jumon no gotoki Chōsengo Whenever my father / loses his words / during argument / his Korean tongue always / sounds like an incantation Sanagarani shinse taryon to naru chichi no Chōsengo yahari jumon ka shirenu As it were / my father’s speech transforms into / a life lamentation / his Korean might be / an incantation after all Shinse taryon to naru utsukushiki Chōsengo ware wa omou mama ni hanasezu Beautiful Korean language / that transforms into / a life lamentation / yet I can’t speak it / as I wish Yokuyō no awaki watashi no Nihongo o kasane shigure no yo o futari iru Overlaid over my faintly intoned Japanese / the chorus of a rainy night / with two people (Lee 2006, 269; 2018, 80)3 Here, linguistic loss is invoked again in the poet persona’s depiction of her father, whose angry Korean sounds like both an “incantation” and a shinse taryon (sinse t’aryŏng in the McCune-Reischauer system), or “a form of lamentation of life linked with both the Korean storytelling tradition and shamanism” (Wender 2000, 85). The repetition of the word Chōsengo (Korean) across the first three tanka becomes itself a kind of incantation, one that passes the language from father to daughter—but imperfectly, and with a profound sense of (dis)possession. The tanka form too starts to unravel and fray, as if mirroring the poet persona’s ambivalence towards her father’s Korean: the first two verses each feature a ji-amari, or units that exceed the typical mora count; while the third verse contains both ji-amari and ji-tatazu, or units that run short of the typical mora count. (Ironically, in the third verse, only the middle word Chōsengo fits neatly into the standard count.) With the utterance of Nihongo (Japanese) in the fourth verse, however, the rhythm smooths out again, and the incantation gives way to the sound of an all-encompassing rain shower that finally blurs the voices of both father and daughter. But the shinse taryon cannot be banished so easily. In the sections that follow, the poet persona slowly gains a stronger sense of her own hybrid Zainichi identity through participation in the anti-fingerprinting movement, in which Zainichi Koreans protested the requirement that “foreigners” be fingerprinted under Japan’s Alien Registration Law. After musing on such topics as the wearing of ethnic dress, the nature of Japanese nationalism, and the “Japan behind me” (furimukeba Nihon, Lee 2006, 270), the poet persona comes to the following conclusion:

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Kikiwakete iru “Yuhi” no koe ware no koe miushinaitaru mono no neiro to I am distinguishing / “Yuhi’s” voice / my voice / as the sounds of the people / who have gotten lost “Yuhi” wa towa no nagune yaburete watakushi wa hitori mite iru kono yo no himawari “Yuhi” / is the eternal traveler / defeated alone / I am watching the sunflowers of this world Kaerezaru hana wa chibusa ni uzumeoku shinse taryon wa nagune taryon yo Into the breast / I bury and leave the flowers / which cannot return / lamentation of life is / a sojourner’s lamentation (Lee 2006, 308; 2018, 118–19) “Yuhi” is a reference to Yi Yangji’s (1955–1992) novella Yuhi (1988), the first text by a Zainichi Korean woman to win the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. The story centers on the relationship between the South Korean narrator and the eponymous Yuhi, a Zainichi Korean woman who travels to Seoul for study but fails to fully adapt to life in South Korea. Given that the Japanese-language story is told in the first person by a South Korean woman who supposedly knows no Japanese, the poet persona’s reference to “voice” is a significant one. In Yi Yangji’s text, Yuhi’s actual voice is inaccessible to the reader; having already left Seoul by the start of the novella, Yuhi as a character is present only in the Korean narrator’s memories. The only physical thing that remains of Yuhi in Seoul is her diary, over 400 loosely bound sheets of dense, handwritten Japanese. Although the narrator cannot read the words that Yuhi has left behind, she feels like she can hear Yuhi’s voice just by looking at them. That voice, when speaking Japanese, had initially sounded like an “incantation” (jumon) to the Korean narrator (Yi 1993, 421). By reliving her memories of Yuhi, however, the Korean narrator finds herself able to conjure up a composite image of Yuhi in which the Japanese and Korean languages have merged together. While Nagune Taryon does not explicitly mention it, the reference to shinse taryon would also immediately alert savvy readers to another important literary work: “Kinuta o utsu onna” (1971, The Woman Who Fulled Clothes*) by Ri Kaisei (also known as Lee Hoesung), which was the first text by any Zainichi writer to win the Akutagawa Prize. In that story, an adult male narrator looks back on his childhood memories of his now-deceased mother Suri, and in doing so replicates in a way the shinse taryon his grandmother had wailed upon Suri’s death. Nagune Taryon roundly rejects the male perspective privileged in “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes,” choosing instead to find an alternative narrative mode in Yuhi. In invoking Yuhi’s name, the voice of the split “I” is finally able to encompass all the “sounds of the people / who have gotten lost” into a “sojourner’s lamentation” (nagune taryon), or the lamentation of a traveler who can neither go nor return to any one, originary place (Lee 2018, 118–19). But as the references to breasts and flowers suggest, this travel is not a purposeless one, and contains within it the seeds for rebirth, growth, and forward momentum within—and not necessarily despite—the bounds of Japan and Japanese (literary) language. In the afterword to her first poetry collection, Ponsona no uta, Lee Jungja would describe her introduction to the world of Japanese poetry as a mixed experience, marked by “a thrill that was almost like a sense of panic, and inexplicable tears, and a pleasure that surged and

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ebbed like the tides” (Lee 2003, 278). That painful ambivalence is captured in Nagune taryon in poems like the one below: “Tennō” no uta yomu shimon kyohisha nado narushisuto, mazohisuto, shimaguni no dorei Even you have refused to be fingerprinted / you still write the “emperor’s” poems / therefore, a narcissist, masochist / and / a slave of the island country (Lee 2006, 274; 2018, 85) It is only by linking her voice to that of her spiritual double Yuhi that the poet persona finally finds for herself a new literary heritage—one that is not simply hybrid, not simply Zainichi, and not simply female, but all three of these things intertwined together.

Returning to the cradle of the grave: Yū Miri Born just over two decades after Lee Jungja but making her literary debut at roughly the same time, Yū Miri (1968–) offers a very different understanding of the workings of (literary) language and ethnic (in)visibility. Many critics have pointed out how the majority of her stories feature characters who may or may not be Zainichi, and Yū’s own reluctance to be called a “Zainichi writer” is well documented (Wender 2005). Indeed, Yū may seem at first glance to have more in common with someone like the popular noir novelist Kirino Natsuo (1951–) than with Lee Jungja. However, it would be wrong to say that issues of diasporic selfidentification are of no concern to Yū, a writer who has, since the beginning of her career, written openly about her personal and professional life within the larger generational context of her Zainichi family. The complexities of Yū’s work cannot be reduced to a question of the simple presence or absence of ethnicity; rather, it is precisely the epistemology of “absence” itself that her writings interrogate. Yū began her writing career as a playwright. At age twenty, she had already formed her own theatrical company; at age twenty-four, she became the youngest person to win the Kishida Prize for Drama, for her play Festival for the Fish. The judges at the time all noted Yū’s use of language in the script, as exemplified in the strikingly abstract stage directions in every scene (Yū 1993). Yū would soon go on to develop her unique prose style—cool and unsentimental, but also marked by a stark lyricism—in essays and fiction centered on her own experiences. Her writings soon caught the attention of the literary world, and in 1996 she became the second Zainichi Korean woman to be awarded the Akutagawa Prize. In her early autobiographical novel Mizube no yurikago (1995–1996, Cradle at the Water’s Edge), which began serialization just before her Akutagawa win, Yū reveals that her preoccupation with writing about broken families arose out of a desire to “bury the past” and “escape far from my own self ” (Yū 2001, 217, 218). As the title of her autobiography suggests, however, her attempts to flee only led her more firmly back into the past, to “a cradle that is also my grave.” In Festival for the Fish, this repetition-with-a-difference is literalized through an actual death. The play centers around the estranged members of the Namiyama family, who are brought together again after the youngest child, Fuyuo, dies in a work accident. With the discovery of Fuyuo’s diary, the family learns the shocking fact that Fuyuo had been

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fantasizing about killing them all. Rather than a murder mystery, however, it is the genre of the family melodrama that gives structure to the play, as Fuyuo’s funeral finally brings the estranged family members together again; allows for the airing of old grievances; and even hints at the possibility of new beginnings, with the revelations that Fuyuo had a son with his girlfriend and that Fuyuo’s sister, Ruri, is pregnant. But the past continues to intrude into the present, mediating the characters’ relationships with each other, and the play ends with the dark suggestion that it is the fractures of the family, not the ties, that will persist into the future. These fractures are highlighted at the very start of the play, with the paratextual listing of the main characters’ names: NAMIYAMA TAKASHI, father SUGIMOTO SADAKO, mother NAMIYAMA YURI, the elder daughter NAMIYAMA FUYUKI, the elder son NAMIYAMA RURI, the younger daughter NAMIYAMA FUYUO, the younger son SASAKI KYŌKO, FUYUO’S girlfriend SASAKI NATSUO, KYŌKO’S son (Yū 2000, 121) Note how the characters are defined only through their familial relations in the cast descriptions. Because Japanese law stipulates that all members of a family unit must share a single surname, the introduction of “Sugimoto Sadako, mother” immediately suggests that a divorce has taken place, separating mother and father and mother and children. Later in the play, however, it’s revealed that the surnames do not capture the full complexity of the Namiyama/Sugimoto families: upon their parents’ divorce, Fuyuki went to live with his father, while the other children went with their mother. Meanwhile, because Fuyuo and his girlfriend Kyōko never married, their son Natsuo is identified as “Kyōko’s son”—even as his given name plays upon his connection to Fuyuo (natsu means summer in Japanese and fuyu means winter; they share the same o). Names, then, are shown to carry secret meanings that cannot be adequately contained within the state-sanctioned nuclear family unit, both connecting and belying the tenuous relations between the characters. Secret meanings, of course, are also significant in the context of the long history of ethnic passing in Japan. John Lie has characterized passing as not necessarily a transgression but the “default condition” imposed upon Zainichi Koreans in Japanese society, one primarily enabled by the practice of the so-called passing name, or tsūmei (Lie 2009, 20). It is quite possible to read the characters of Festival of the Fish as Zainichi and “Namiyama” as their tsūmei, especially given other details that the play provides (such as the fact that the father works at a pachinko parlor). Here, I follow Lisa Yoneyama and other scholars who see the ambiguity of ethnicity in Yū’s works as not a lack of concern but rather a pointed critique of the “normalization of bodies in modern national and bourgeois society” (Yoneyama 2000, 107), where what are normalized are not just the bodies themselves but the ways bodies are differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity/race, and other social relations.4 In Festival for the Fish, the body of Fuyuo serves as the aporetic center around which all the other characters gather, sometimes literally. This aporia is vividly highlighted by the first

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and last scenes of the play, which are nearly identical. Scene 1 opens with the following stage directions: The color of the sea wafts faintly in the air. You can’t see the color unless you strain your eyes. A blue that is almost like a sound and almost like a scent. The face of FUYUO inside the casket is the only thing floating vaguely within it. The expression of his bandage-swathed face is distorted, making it look like he might be smiling. Far off, the sound of waves. We hear the voice of FUYUO’s father, TAKASHI, unravelling itself from the tangled threads of the past. Summer, on top of a cliff, sixteen years ago. (Yū 1992, 151; translation by the author) The rest of Fuyuo’s family then join Fuyuo on stage for a re-enactment of an unhappy family outing from sixteen years ago. The scene ends with Takashi taking a photo of his wife and children on the cliff, with the stage directions indicating that “the waves wash the tangled threads of the past out to sea” (Yū 1992, 151; translation by the author). Scene 2 then moves to the diegetic present, with Sadako informing her daughter Ruri of Fuyuo’s death. The remainder of the play remains in the diegetic present—except for the very last scene, which repeats Scene 1 word for word but with different stage lighting and effects (which I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter). When Festival for the Fish was first performed under Yū’s direction in 1993, the actor who played Fuyuo freely moved around on stage for the duration of the play, invisible to the characters but not to the audience (Swain 2004, 180). In this way, Fuyuo’s material body serves to link the past to the present on the stage, but only through his paradoxical disembodiment as a corpse. As a corpse, Fuyuo is not outside history but of it, singular and yet also immanently reproducible. In a later scene, for example, the memory of the summer outing is revived when Yuri finds the torn remnants of the photograph—missing only Fuyuo’s face—in Fuyuo’s diary. As Fuyuki puts the pieces of the photograph back together, Yuri “looks at FUYUKI’s face with the image of FUYUO’s face in the coffin in her mind at the same time, and realizes there is a strange similarity between them” (Yū 2000, 130–31). It is not that Fuyuki has replaced Fuyuo but that Fuyuo’s absence has opened up a space that allows for Yuri to sense (if not articulate) a pattern that was previously obscured. Given all this, what does it mean that Sadako is the one who comes closest to articulating what the dead Fuyuo cannot? It is Sadako who first informs her family by telephone of Fuyuo’s tragic accident; Sadako who makes the arrangements for Fuyuo’s funeral, even as part of her still cannot believe her son is dead (in one memorable scene, she refuses to allow the undertakers to place dry ice in Fuyuo’s coffin, afraid that the dry ice will cause Fuyuo physical pain); and Sadako whose voice “raises conflict … between tension and relief, hatred and sweet memories” (Yū 2000, 138) when she speaks. But despite (or perhaps because of?) her proximity to her dead son, her other children dismiss her insights, with Fuyuki even going so far as to accuse her of Fuyuo’s death: FUYUKI: I knew that this would happen some day. … It’s you who killed Fuyuo.

(SADAKO’s mouth starts convulsing like a flying butterfly.)

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(SADAKO’S voice echoes drily inside her like the sound of broken egg shells. SADAKO looks straight up at her son.) SADAKO: You don’t know anything about how Fuyuo and I lived here. … You don’t know anything! I did the best I could. (Yū 2000, 129). Fuyuki’s accusation serves as a bitter reminder of the gender inequalities embedded in the family and the ways knowledge is shaped (or occluded) by those inequalities. By the end of the play, the family may have temporarily come together again, but Sadako’s accusation that her children “don’t know anything” casts a long shadow over the fragile truce, introducing a note of ambivalence in the characters’ seeming desire to reconnect with each other. At the same time, the play refuses to idealize Sadako or hold her up as some sort of liberated heroine; like the others, she too remains embedded “deep in the past” (Yū 2000, 128), mechanically going through the motions of her prescribed role as mother and wife. Whenever there are moments of disruption, as in the scene above, her expressions of protest or opposition inevitably turn inward, cutting her like a double-edged sword or the jagged edges of “broken egg shells” inadvertently consumed. At the end of the play, the repetition of the past is once again literalized: in the penultimate scene, Takashi calls for another family photograph (but one where Fuyuo’s urn now stands in for Fuyuo). As he takes the photo, “TAKASHI’s voice sixteen years ago overlaps his present voice” (Yū 2000, 160). The summer outing is then re-enacted once more, only this time when Takashi-in-the-past takes the photo “the world turns stark white, like film that’s been mistakenly exposed to the sunlight for a moment [curtain].” That the play ends where it began only emphasizes the difficulty of untangling the complicated threads of the past. More than that, it reveals how memory is a (re)presentation of time and space that can reveal itself only after the fact, interpellating the remembering self as both subject and other. The only way out, Festival for the Fish suggests, is to go back in—back into the originary cradle of the grave. Whether this means uncovering buried histories or voicing a collective identity denied by the state or laying bare all the fractures of the family is a question that the play leaves open. Like film, the enacted memory is rendered inaccessible the moment it is exposed, leaving behind only a blank space for its viewers to fill in with their own repetitions.

Transnational (dis)placements: Che Sil Debates on how to define and understand the nebulous category of “Zainichi literature” rose again in 2016, when the third-generation Zainichi Korean author Che Sil (1985–; name also sometimes rendered as Chesil) won the 59th Gunzō Prize for New Writers in 2016 for her novella Jini’s Puzzle. Some lauded her for her attempts to go beyond the political orientations and concerns of prior generations; others read her as the fresh new voice of seishun bungaku (lit. literatures of youth); still others saw her as contributing to a globalizing trend in Japanese(-language) literature.5 The renewed attention on writings by Zainichi Koreans bespoke how there is nothing natural or self-evident about the word “Zainichi,” either as a literary genre or as a category of identity. Jini’s Puzzle is a novella that is concerned first and foremost with the question of ethnic identity. Moving back and forth between a diegetic present (set in Oregon in 2003) and a

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retrospective past (Tokyo in the late 1990s), the first-person narrative tells the story of Jini, a third-generation Zainichi Korean teenager who drops out of a Korean ethnic school, or hakkyo, and eventually enrolls at a high school in Oregon. Part of the “puzzle” of the novella is how and why Jini has ended up in Oregon. Towards the end of the novella, it is revealed that Jini was assaulted in public by a Japanese man who targeted her because of her chima chogori (a traditional Korean top and skirt) uniform, and that the assault was the catalyst that led to her leaving Japan. As I have detailed the transnational racial dynamics of the story in detail elsewhere (Yi 2022), this discussion will focus on the novella’s intersections of language and the ethnic, gendered body. In an early flashback, Jini tells us that that she attended a Japanese elementary school using a “Japanese name” (Nihonmei, Che 2016, 37). Although she didn’t deliberately try to hide her Zainichi origins from her schoolmates, she confesses that the anonymity of her Japanese school uniform gave her great comfort, especially whenever encountering demonstrating right-wingers in public: Every time I came across one of those right-winger vans, elementary school me hid my citizenship inside my school uniform … We [my Japanese school friends and I] all wore the same uniform. And we had the same kind of face—black hair, small noses. Some of us had single eyelids and some double eyelids, things like that, but no major differences at a glance. So I was able to easily disappear among my friends. (Che 2016, 37) Jini even comes to think of it as a game, silently daring the right-wingers in her head to “find the single mistake in this picture,” the hidden danger in the crowd. But her sense of self is badly shaken one day when her Japanese teacher singles her out during a patronizing history lesson on Japan’s colonization of Korea, prompting one of her classmates to accuse her of being “dirty” (kitanai, Che 2016, 38). In that moment, Jini realizes that while she had found a subversive power in her racial sameness, her Japanese peers had been viewing it with suspicion and even fear—as if she were a contagion, the more dangerous for being invisible. And so Jini decides to quarantine herself, as it were, within the bounded-off space of the hakkyo. Although the majority of hakkyo continue to operate through the North Korean-affiliated Chongryun (Jp. Sōren; General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), many parents who now choose to send their children to hakkyo do so not out of an ideological commitment to North Korea but due to “the lack of an acceptable alternative in the Japanese public education system” and its problems of prejudice, ignorance, and bullying (Ryang 2016, 10). As mentioned in the section on Lee Jungja, hakkyo classes are taught entirely in Korean, and female students typically wear a modified version of the chima chogori as a uniform. (Male students, in contrast, are allowed to don a blazer and pants set that are visually similar to school uniforms worn by their Japanese peers, neatly demonstrating Anne McClintock’s claims regarding the gendering of nationalism.) The chima chogori uniform is so recognizable and well known that it has come to serve as a metonym for hakkyo, and by extension a certain politicized discourse of Zainichi as the defiant other in and to Japan the nation. That one of Jini’s Japanese friends associates going to a Korean school first and foremost with “wearing a chima chogori” (Che 2016, 39) attests to the symbolic power of the gendered uniform. 368

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Jini finds the unfamiliar sensation of the chima chogori on her body itchy and uncomfortable at first, but soon comes to treat it as just another accoutrement for school rather than as anything intrinsically tied to her sense of individual identity. Language, however, is not so easily acquired or shed. On her first day at hakkyo, Jini’s homeroom teacher informs the class that lessons will be conducted in Japanese for the time being in order to accommodate Jini, who “cannot speak our language” (watashi-tachi no kotoba wa dekimasen, Che 2016, 28). In Korean, it is not uncommon to use the plural possessive pronoun uri (“our”) to refer to a singular object, particularly when it comes to a communal group or shared entities. Uri mal (lit. our language), for example, is a common way for a Korean person to refer to the Korean language. In the quoted scene, however, the homeroom teacher’s Korean dialogue is presented to the reader in Japanese, filtered as it is through the lens of Jini’s first-person narration. But this silent translation is anything but casual or neutral. The inclusive “you and I” presumed by uri mal is transformed into an exclusionary “we but not you” with watashitachi no kotoba. Jini’s alienation from the Korean (linguistic) community is also manifested by the hostile reactions of her fellow students, many of whom resent Jini and question her belonging in the school. In a paradigmatic chapter, Jini explains that she got into the habit of escaping to the unused music room—a space that, significantly, makes no linguistic demands of her— during lunch. But one day a male student named Jefan (or Chaehwan in romanized Korean) unexpectedly enters the room and confronts her with a question: “Nugu?” Because nugu, in Japanese, means “to take off (one’s clothes),” Jini runs out of the room in horror. It’s only later that she realizes that Jefan had been speaking to her in Korean, saying not Will you take off your clothes? but Who are you? Mortified, Jini wonders to herself, “How could I not even know the basic word for ‘who are you’?” (Che 2016, 33) Who, indeed, is Jini? The question takes on urgent new weight following the August 1998 “Taep’o-dong incident,” in which North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan.6 In the novella, Jini’s school swiftly becomes the target of vandalism after the missile launch. Uneasy about all the right-winger vitriol directed at the school, Jini decides to skip class. She goes to Ikebukuro, but there her hakkyo uniform attracts the attention of two Japanese men who declare themselves to be policemen. After questioning her about her teachers, one of the men physically assaults her and insults her as a “dirty thing” (kitanai mono, Che 2016, 55). The word “dirty,” of course, had come up before in the novella in the context of the Japanese elementary school, so its reintroduction alerts the reader to the larger systemic racism against Zainichi Koreans in Japan. But the violence of the word in this scene also emphasizes how race and racism are always inflected through gender, and how their mutual imbrications deeply structure the social relations that produce us as subjects. Although the traumatic incident had rendered Jini speechless at the time, she soon turns her rage and hurt onto the hakkyo, wrenching the portraits of Kim Ilsung and Kim Jong-il from where they hang in her classroom and throwing them off the veranda. After that, she’s sent to a mental institution, and then to school in Oregon. It is only in Oregon—a place where she’s seen as neither Japanese nor Korean but simply “Asian,” a place where the chima chogori means nothing more than “Korean traditional dress”—that Jini is finally able to reconcile the seeming contradictions that make up her ethnic identity. Towards the end of the novella, Jini comes to the following conclusion:

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Our history [watashi-tachi no rekishi] is not to be found in textbooks that no one willingly reads. Our history is inside music. The tears we’ve shed are inside poems. The spirit of our ancestors, who never once forgot to sing and dance and laugh even as they worried that their lives might silently end enshrouded in darkness and misery—that spirit is still with us, having transcended time and space … Do not be afraid. More than textbooks, it is art that fills our world. (Che 2016, 72) In this passage, Jini is finally able to inhabit a “we” that encompasses not only her and other Zainichi Koreans but also any person who has persevered despite a life of “darkness and misery,” as most powerfully demonstrated by Jini’s direct address to the reader (which can also simultaneously be understood as a direct address to her own self). It is only once she comes to see her ethnic identity not as an aberrant accident of history but as a piece of a larger puzzle made up of the entire world that Jini finds herself able to move forward. In this way, the novella suggests that true communality and belonging aren’t to be found in institutionalized forms of language—which can be all too easily coopted to support hegemony, as signified by the textbook—but in the transnational, transcendental language of art. This view of the world is underscored by the cast of characters Jini meets in America, including her host mother Stephanie, a children’s book illustrator; Maggie, a deaf student and Jini’s sole friend; and Jon, a neurodivergent classmate who cannot or will not verbalize his thoughts in the classroom. In emphasizing an interstitial positionality of (and amongst) language, nationality, and ethnicity/race, Jini’s Puzzle ultimately asks the reader to question the boundaries of her own self, and to understand the singular body as so much more than the sum of its (racialized, gendered, and linguistically divided) parts.7

Conclusion: Naming the ethnic body Soon after winning the Akutagawa Prize, Yū Miri gave a number of interviews in which she expressed unhappiness with the constrictive label of “Zainichi Korean writer,” even as she also acknowledged the expressive, imaginative power that comes with hybrid identities.8 In this chapter, I chose to focus on three very different women writers who have published in the three different literary forms of poetry, performance, and prose fiction in order to give the reader a glimpse of the great diversity of Zainichi literature. The very nature of that diversity may perhaps indeed prove Yū Miri’s point about the limited usefulness of “Zainichi literature” as an analytical category. Taken together, however, the three texts speak eloquently to the fact that while the category may be artificial, it is anything but arbitrary; and that the “nondisposable fictions” (Mitchell 2000,11) of ethnicity constitute us all, though in uneven and inequitable ways. As one final reminder of this unevenness, I end now with a brief consideration of Zai­ nichi names. When Lee Jungja first began publishing her tanka, she did so under a tsūmei which can be read in Japanese as “Kayama Masako” (among other possibilities). Bothered by a sense of disjunction between that name and her poetry, however, Lee soon switched to her honmyō. In doing so, Lee writes, both her poetry and her Korean name became “rejuvenated” (Kim H. 2004, 84). Yū Miri, in contrast, was a name deliberately chosen by Yū’s parents because it could be simultaneously read in Japanese as “Yanagi Miri” and in Korean as “Yu

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Miri.” The name that Yū chose for herself as a writer, however, is neither Yanagi Miri nor Yu Miri but Yū Miri, the hybridized, Sino-Japanese pronunciation of her name.9 Finally, Che Sil is an author who has always gone by her Korean name. Unlike Lee and Yū, Che has thus far rarely remarked upon her Zainichi identity in her author bios and interviews, choosing instead to emphasize her international experiences in America and her active participation in transnational feminist movements such as #MeToo (Che 2020). This has not stopped interviewers and critics from labelling her a “Zainichi writer,” however, and evaluating her work in terms of its perceived foreignness within or distance to “Japanese literature” writ large.10 In sketching out these differences in naming practices, I do not mean to imply that Japan has reached some kind of teleological, postcolonial state or that generational change can be neatly mapped or contained. Rather, I wish to highlight how all three women’s names are intimately and inextricably tied to their writing, and by extension to their positionalities as writers of Japanese-language (but not necessarily “Japanese”?) literature. That these positionalities continue to be deeply mediated by American Cold War hegemony is borne out by the commercial spelling of their names, which are all Anglicized versions that privilege an imagined North American reader. For example, both the Japanese and English covers of Yū Miri’s books list her name as “Yu Miri,” dropping the macron; “Che” and “Lee Jungja” are both non-standard Anglicized spellings; and the English translation of Jini no pazuru goes so far as to combine Che Sil’s surname and given name together, as Chesil. For this chapter, I chose to adopt the author’s preferred romanization when known (as is the case with Yū Miri); and, when not (as is the case with Lee Jungja and Che Sil), to draw upon previously established conventions in order to connect my analysis to the wider body of scholarship to which I am indebted. If the dizzying multiplicity of Zainichi naming practices tells us anything, though, it is that the “ethnic body” is always already circumscribed by the language we use to identify it. To the various protagonists of the works explored here, that language is a curse, a trap, a lamentation, a lie. But it is also, above all, an incantation— something that enacts the very thing it describes, conjuring up possibilities of being beyond the binding spells of nation and home.

Notes 1

In this chapter, I romanize names and other proper nouns according to the Revised Hepburn system (Japanese) and McCune-Reischauer system (Korean). However, I make an exception when it is clear that the individual or organization had their stated preference of pronunciation or when that individual or organization has become known to an English-language audience under a different romanization, for example with Chongryon (McCune-Reischauer: Ch’ongnyŏn; Jp. Sōren). For Nagune Taryon and Uo no matsuri, I draw upon the published translations except in cases where my analysis depends upon a more transliteral rendering. Citations indicate the source text page number first, followed by the translation page number. 2 Fearing their possible Communist ties, in 1948 the Japanese Ministry of Education (acting on instructions from GHQ/SCAP) ordered that all Korean schools be closed down. Mass protest erupted, in what is now referred to as the Hanshin Education Conflict (Hanshin kyōiku tōsō). As a result, Korean schools were eventually allowed to resume operations, but in a much more limited fashion. See Inokuchi 2000. 3 The last tanka in this sequence was not translated by Chung; the translation provided is mine. 4 Melissa Wender has also argued that this ambiguity of ethnicity enables Yū “to suggest that Resident Korean family is not unique, but rather shares much with other families in Japan in the late twentieth century … a particular domestic pattern in which women face undue suffering” (Wender 2005, 160). The time period in which Yū Miri established herself as a writer is also significant. As Kume Yoriko notes, the majority of her

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early works are set in immediate post-bubble Japan, when the economic impact of the bubble burst dramatically changed the dynamics of the (idealized) middle-class family unit. See Kume 2011. 5 One only has to look at the comments from the judging panel of the Akutagawa and Gunzō prizes (published in September 2016 issue of Bungei Shunjū and June 2016 issue of Gunzō, respectively) to see how differently Che’s work has been received. See also Kang 2018 and Watanabe 2018 for summaries of the recent discursive shifts regarding “Zainichi literature.” 6 The test sparked a rise in anti-Korean hate speech and right-wing demonstrations in front of Korean ethnic schools. See Ryang 1997 for an extended discussion on the impact on the incident on the schools. 7 It could be argued that the story does fall into a rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism that privileges a kind of American exceptionalism, raising troubling questions about race, power, and Cold War hegemony. I write about this issue extensively in my chapter in Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. 8 Tracey Gannon provides a succinct, useful summary of Yū’s comments in Gannon 2008. 9 The sinograph for the author’s family name is pronounced with an elongated vowel (Yū) in Japanese, and with a short vowel (Yu) in Korean. 10 Tellingly, one major critique of the Akutagawa Prize judges was that the novella’s style felt too much like “translated American literature” (Amerika no honyaku bungaku-chō; Miyamoto 2016) or “overseas literature” (kaigai bungaku; Kawakami 2016).

References Che [Ch’oe], S. (2016). Jini no pazuru [Jini’s Puzzle]. Gunzō 71(6) (June): 8–77. ———. (2020). Koe o ageru yūki [The Courage to Raise One’s Voice]. Interview by Itō Seikō, Gunzō 75(10) (October): 276–87. ———. (2022). The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart. (T. Nieda, trans.). New York: Soho Teen. (Original work published 2016) Gannon, T. (2008). Controversy as Context: Yū Miri and the Critics. U.S. Japan Women’s Journal no. 34 (2008): 90–119. Inokuchi, H. (2000). Korean Ethnic Schools in Occupied Japan, 1945–52. In S. Ryang (ed.), Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (pp. 140–56). New York: Routledge. Kan [Kang], Y. (2018). Pīsu no gēmu: Che Sil Jini no pazuru ron [Piece games: On Che Sil’s Jini’s Puzzle]. Nihon bungaku 67(2) (February): 33–43. Kawakami, H. (2016). Namae o ataeru [Bestowing a name]. Bungei Shunjū 94(9) (September): 398–99. Kim, H. (2004). Zainichi Chōsenjin josei bungaku ron [On Zainichi Korean women’s literature]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Kim, P. (2005). Shokuminchiki Chōsen no kyōiku to jendā [Education and gender in colonial Korea]. Yokohama: Seori Shobō. Kume, Y. (2011). Dangai no ue kara hakobune e: “Uo no matsuri” no “kazoku” to Yū Miri no engeki taiken [From the precipice to the ark: On families in “Festival of the Fish” and Yū Miri’s theater experience]. In Hara H. (ed.), Yū Miri, 1991–2010 (pp 41–59). Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō. Lee, J. [I Chŏngja]. (2003). Ponsona no uta [Songs of the Balsam Flower]. Tokyo: Kage Shobō. (Original work published 1984) ———. (2006). Nagune taryon: eien no tabibito [The Traveler’s Lament: Eternal Traveler]. In Isogai J. & Kuroko K. (eds.), “Zainichi” bungaku zenshū [Collected works of “Zainichi” literature] (vol. 17, pp. 257–309). (Original work published 1991) ———. (2018). Selected Poems from Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler. (H. Chung, trans.). In J. Lie (ed.), Zainichi Literature: Japanese Writings by Ethnic Koreans (pp. 67–119). Berkeley: University of California Press. Lie, J. (2009). Zainichi (Koreans in Japan). Berkeley: University of California Press. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, T. (2000). The Stage of Modernity. In T. Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity (pp. 1–34). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miyamoto, T. (2016). Sakuhin-zoroi [The array of works]. Bungei Shunjū 94(9) (September): 397–98.

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Odani, K. (2008). Mukaikaze to kaeshikaze: Zainichi kajin I Chŏngja no “kaze’ o yomu” [Headwinds and reverse winds: Reading “wind” in Zainichi poet Lee Jungja’s works]. In Ikuta S., Murakami K. & Yūki M. (eds.), “Basho” no shigaku: kankyō bungaku to wa nani ka [The poetics of “place”: What is environmental literature?] (pp. 68–79). Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten. Ryang, S. (1997). North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. (2016). The Rise and Fall of Chongryun—From Chōsenjin to Zainichi and Beyond. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 14(15) (August): 1–16. Song, H. (2014). Zainichi Chōsenjin bungakushi” no tame ni: koe naki koe no porifonī [For the sake of “Zainichi Korean literary history”: The polyphony of voices without voice]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Swain, J.D. (2004). Nomads Still: Zainichi-Koreans and Contemporary Japanese Theatre. 3149824 [Doctoral dissertation, UCLA]. UMI. Watanabe, E. (2018). Keizai sensei to gurōbaru-ka jidai no Nihongo bungaku [Japanese-language literature in the era of globalization and economic autocracy]. Shōwa bungaku no. 76 (2018): 219–21. Wender, M.L. (2000). Mothers Write Ikaino. In S. Ryang (ed.), Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (pp. 74–102). New York: Routledge. ———. (2005). Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yi, C. (2018). Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (2022). Intersecting Korean Diasporas. In H. Cho (ed.), Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. New York: Routledge. Yi, Y. (1993). I Yanji [Yi Yangji] zenshū [Collected Works of Yi Yangji]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Yoneyama, L. (2000). Reading Against the Bourgeois and National Bodies: Transcultural Body-Politics in Yu Miri’s Textual Representations. In S. Ryang (ed.), Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (pp.103–18). New York: Routledge. Yū, M. (1992). Uo no matsuri [Festival for the Fish]. Teatoro 597 (November): 150–87. ———. (1993). Uo no matsuri. In Hinemi, Uo no matsuri [Hinemi, Festival of the Fish]. Tokyo: Hakusuisha. ———. (2000). Festival for the Fish (Yuasa M. trans.). In Japan Playwrights Association (eds.), Half a Century of Japanese Theater 2 (pp. 112–161). Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten. (Original work published 1992) ———. (2001). Mizube no yurikago [Cradle at the Water’s Edge]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Originally serialized in Shūkan Kadokawa from June 1995 through September 1996.

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Chapter 24 Transnational Narratives and Travel Writing: Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Takako, and Yi Yangji Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Takako, and Yi Yangji have all written travel narratives that describe the transnational lives of women from Japan who reside and travel in countries around the world, including Argentina, France, and South Korea. Their literature combines elements of autobiography, travel writing, and fiction in stories that exemplify the movements of the modern nomad, a figure described by Vilém Flusser as one who travels back and forth between international spaces, thereby establishing cultural networks that extend across national borders. Their stories interrogate distinctions between categories of belonging, such as homeland and exile, foreigner and native, resident and wanderer.

Introduction The transnational narrative as a literary category includes an immense variety of writings of disparate genres, ranging from practical travel guides to works of fiction set in foreign places, as exemplified by the array of texts presented in this chapter. It is a category that incorporates traditional travel writing, or first-person, non-fiction narratives, but is more capacious in its inclusion of works of fiction, third-person stories, and the wide variety of literature that generally describes travel and cross-border lives and identities in the modern age. It is a literature whose space is oriented along a network of simultaneous transversal movements across the globe in every direction, and which participates in the reshaping of transnational consciousness by dismantling borders, both national and conceptual (Edwards 2018, 29–30). As key theorists on travel writing and transnationalism have frequently noted, modern scholarship on travel writing originally grew out of an examination of the Anglophone tradition, and has largely been focused on critiquing colonial values and imperial agendas found in texts written from a European perspective (Pratt 2018, 221). As the paradigm of transnationalism reorients studies of both travel writing and postcolonialism, transnational narratives from Japan appear as a special case, one that throws spatial binaries for a loop, as

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they describe movements that originate from East Asia, from one of the world’s economic powerhouses (and thus the Global North), by travelers who set out in every direction (other Pacific islands, South Korea, South America, Europe, Africa, etc.), and whose cultural and ethnic allegiances are diverse, as demonstrated by the work of the writers surveyed in this chapter. Yoshimoto Banana (1964–), Takahashi Takako (1932–2013), and Yi Yangji (1955–1992) are all prominent authors of fiction who have been discussed extensively in literary scholarship, but not explicitly within the conceptual frameworks of “travel writing” or “transnational literature.” All three can be spoken of as transnational writers in multiple senses, whether this is due to factors such as global positioning and widespread availability of their work in translation, as is the case with Yoshimoto, or cross-border, transnational residency and cultural affiliation, as with Yi and Takahashi. All three have written, in some sense of the term, travel writing, although only Yoshimoto and Takahashi have produced works that might be thought of as travel books in their most conventional sense (i.e., they include maps, photographs, itineraries, etc.).1 Of all of the work discussed in this chapter, only Yoshimoto’s books fall into this latter category, although they are, at the same time, works of creative fiction, which weave traditional elements of travel writing, such as photography and descriptions of famous sites, into fictional narratives. Yi and Takahashi’s stories, on the other hand, fit more comfortably into the broader category of transnational narratives than travel writing per se. They might also be classified as diasporic literature, in that they describe long-term residency outside of Japan: France in the case of Takahashi and South Korea for Yi, a Zainichi Korean writer. Complicating the category of diasporic writing, however, is the reality of their movements, for rather than permanent residency abroad, both authors moved constantly back and forth between their respective places of residency, while spending extended periods of their lives in Japan. Based on the patterns of movement described in their texts (back-and-forth, between cities, around the globe), the work of all three writers discussed in this chapter might be thought of as exemplifying the figure of the modern nomad, as described by Vilém Flusser in The Freedom of the Migrant, whose movements between countries Flusser equates with a creative activity that dismantles national borders and enables the building of new networks of association between peoples and ideas. Flusser contrasts the movements of the migrant with the settled position of the inhabitant of the heimat—the homeland or home region—and privileges the insights offered by nomadic experience as essential to resisting global forces of nationalism and populism (Flusser 2003, 4). Flusser’s theory of the nomad is especially useful for considering the three writers in this chapter, as they each exemplify the kind of modern nomadism that he describes, one that, as with pastoral nomadism, entails cyclicality, or movement between settled spaces, and which requires various forms of temporary lodging (such as the hotel) in order to enable movement. Also, all three writers converge in suggesting that international travel, or otherwise prolonged residency in foreign countries, enables radical mental and cultural reorientation, thereby altering the individual’s relationship to “home” within a global context. The works of all three writers offer, as Justin D. Edwards says of the transnational paradigm, “insights into a postcolonial travel writer’s complex personal, textual, and geopolitical relationships to the places where she travels, and her links to multiple homelands or senses of belonging” (Edwards 2018, 29).

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Yoshimoto Banana: From the world to Argentina From the beginning of her career, Yoshimoto Banana has been discussed as a global literary phenomenon, starting with her mainstream debut, Kitchin (1988, Kitchen*), a novel whose very title (rendered into transliterated English) signals its transnational context (Treat 2018, 225–36). Since the early 1990’s, she has been one of Japan’s most famous writers, having been translated into dozens of languages and selling millions of copies of her novels and short stories in countries around the world. A quick search for translated editions of Yoshimoto’s literature on the WorldCat library search engine finds titles in 36 different languages, including commonly encountered languages of global influence, such as English, Chinese, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Russian, and Korean, several additional Asian languages, particularly Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Mongolian, many additional European languages, such as Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish, Albanian, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Slovak, and even two sub-national languages of Spain, Catalan and Galician. While many of Yoshimoto’s works are available in English, the languages with the most individual titles available, and also the newest works available in translation, are Chinese and Italian. Italy has arguably extended the warmest welcome to the author, beginning with the earliest translation of Kitchin into a foreign language (it was first translated into Italian by Giorgio Amitrano in 1991), and followed by over a dozen new translations, astounding book sales (2,500,000 copies sold as long ago as 2002), widespread critical recognition, and multiple literary awards (Gerevini 2002, 13–17).2 In addition to her massive global reach, one that is rivaled by extremely few contemporary Japanese novelists, Yoshimoto Banana is a transnational writer in the sense that her work is set in locations around the world. These frequently include popular travel destinations within the Pacific region, such as Hawaii, Bali, and Tahiti, as well as places visited by her characters for the purposes of study, travel, immigration, or spiritual inspiration, such as California, Boston, Australia, Argentina, China, India, Egypt, and South Korea. The cast of her literature is also international, as her stories feature transnational families, mixedrace characters, world travelers, immigrants, and returnees to Japan. The fluid borders of Yoshimoto’s work might be linked to one further transnational aspect of her writing: cultural references, which tend to be, by and large, to American popular culture, such as to TV shows like Maverick and Bewitched or to rock bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana.3 One of her most frequent literary references is to the American comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz, and particularly to the characters of Linus and Snoopy, whereas one of her most common spatial references is to Disneyland, and particularly Tokyo Disneyland, a Japanese branch of an American theme park in the Tokyo metropolitan region that encapsulates the meshing of Japanese and American culture on a global scale.4 While references to travel and global culture appear throughout Yoshimoto’s work, her most extensive engagement with travel writing can be found in her four-part series, Sekai no tabi (Global Journeys), published by Gentōsha between 1994 and 2002. The series consists of four volumes, each centered on a different location, which include: Marika no sofa / Bari yume nikki (1994, Marika’s Sofa / Bali Dream Diary) in Bali, SLY (1996) in Egypt,5 Furin to Nanbei (2000, Adultery and South America) in Argentina, and Niji (2002, Rainbow) in Tahiti. The Sekai no tabi series presents Yoshimoto’s entry into the world of travel writing, which she has returned to periodically in recent years with publications on Bali and Hawaii, while

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also demonstrating the creative possibilities of combining the practical form of the guidebook and the literary form of the novel into a single artistic unit. Each book is presented as a combination of travel fiction and guidebook, although the guidebook portion of any given work, which includes content such as photographs and travel itineraries, tends to be more aesthetic than functional. In other words, rather than facilitating physical travel, the addition of itineraries stimulates the anticipation of an imaginary journey, while the dozens of illustrations and photographs included in each volume heighten the illusion of visiting a faraway place.6 Adding to the exotic, guidebook-like appeal of the series are full color illustrations of distant lands by longtime Yoshimoto illustrator Hara Masumi, as well as cover art and photographs by Yamaguchi Masahiro, both of whom accompanied Yoshimoto on her travels. While each book in the Sekai no tabi series shares a hybrid novel-guidebook format, each also presents a variation on this combination, thereby functioning like four separate experiments in the blending of practical and creative literature. This section focuses on Furin to Nanbei, the work Yoshimoto describes as her greatest success in the series (Yoshimoto 2000, 183). As suggested by its title, Adultery and South America, each story in Furin to Nanbei features some reference to extramarital affairs, and all of the stories are set in South America, primarily in Argentina, with brief trips over the borders into Brazil and Paraguay. Despite the provocative title, however, only the opening story describes an adulterous affair as its central theme: in the short story “Denwa” (Telephone), a woman prays to the Virgin Mary for entrance of her lover, a married man, into heaven, after she receives news of his death from his lawfully wedded wife over the phone. In most of the stories, however, the reference to adultery is so slight that it becomes easily lost amidst the details of the narrator’s travels. Rather than adultery, the central unifying theme of Furin to Nanbei might be identified more precisely as tourist attractions, as all seven stories in the collection are centered on visits to famous locations, where the fictional traveler links events in her life to observations of monuments, nature, and important places in Argentinian history.7 In order, the stories describe a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Luján in the city of Luján, a cruise down the Paraná river in Tigre, a visit to the grave of Eva Perón in La Recoleta cemetery, a visit to the statue of General José de San Martin in the mountains of Mendoza, observation of a demonstration by mothers of kidnapped and murdered children in front of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, a visit to the ruins of the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranís in Argentina and Brazil, and a helicopter ride over Iguazú falls following stops at border towns in Brazil and Paraguay. The short stories are followed by a brief travel account and a detailed itinerary in which Yoshimoto traces her personal visit to the same places described in her narratives, thereby linking personal experience and fiction. In addition to information on specific sites, Furin to Nanbei provides a particular vision of travel that is framed by references to popular culture, in this case movies. The two movies that Yoshimoto references in Furin to Nanbei, however, could hardly be less alike, especially in terms of their popular appeal. One, Evita, a 1996 musical staring Madonna as Argentine national icon Eva Perón, and co-starring Antonio Banderas as a narrator named Ché, is an English-language Hollywood production that presents Argentine history and culture through a lens of campiness and glamour. The other, La Noche de los Lápices (1986, Night of the Pencils), is a Spanish-language Argentine historical drama that depicts events from the eponymous event in 1976, in which several high school students were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in response to political demonstrations. As a film focused on delivering an incisive political message, the movie does not shy away from depicting violent content and Chapter 24: Transnational Narratives and Travel Writing

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includes scenes of students being beaten, electrocuted, and sexually assaulted by prison guards. Yoshimoto references Evita in two stories, “Chiisana yami” (Small Darkness) and “Hachi hanī” (Bee Honey), but only mentions La Noche de los Lápices in the travelogue section of the book, where she explains that it served as a partial inspiration for the latter story. In “Chiisana yami,” the narrator introduces Evita as a pre-travel reference source for gathering information on Argentina. She remarks, “I did some pre-study [yoshū] before coming to this country by watching the Madonna movie,” a film that inspires her to visit Perón’s grave in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires (Yoshimoto 2000, 66). Yoshimoto references Evita once again, while simultaneously drawing on the unnamed La Noche de los Lápices, in “Hachi hanī.” In the story, the narrator visits the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential office, where she goes to observe a demonstration by the “white scarf women,” aged mothers whose children disappeared during the Dirty War (1976–1983). Yoshimoto’s treatment of a political demonstration prompts a reflection on global politics, including the relative wealth and security of nations. While witnessing the demonstration, the narrator compares her own life to that of the disappeared children: For someone who was a high school student at around the same time, it was all too distant from me. This wasn’t something that happened in ancient Inca times, or even during World War II. No, it happened while I was rebelling against my parents and getting back home early mornings in Japan. How is it possible that, at nearly the same time, on this same planet, something like this could occur? (Yoshimoto 2000, 124) Faced with the shocking reality of politically motivated torture and murder of children, Yoshimoto’s narrator turns away from the political and towards a distant, familiar homeland in her memory as she explains the title of the story: Whenever I had a cold, my mother would mix boiling water, honey, and lemon with a little bit of whiskey for me… On the same night that these children were being tortured, their blood pouring from their bodies, my mother was spoiling me. I guess that’s what you call the world. For some reason my mother called that drink “Hachi hanī.” No matter how many times I told her it should be called “Honey Lemon,” she would always say it like that. I could feel that hot, sweet taste spreading through my mouth. It’s the same all over the world. A mother’s smell. (Yoshimoto 2000, 124–25) Yoshimoto ends her story by suggesting that the narrator is not alone in her feelings of levity: she witnesses the mothers of the disappeared children laughing and idly chit-chatting, recalling fond memories of their own, despite their purpose of gathering to remember the suffering of the dead. Unlike popular travel destinations described in her other guidebooks, the overall impression that Yoshimoto gives of Argentina is of a country best avoided. It is a place that the narrator of “Mado no soto” (2000, Outside the Window) tells the reader is “absolutely not a safe country,” one whose very atmosphere is suffused with a “barbaric vitality,” a “murderous power,” a “spiritual ecstasy approaching madness,” and whose “earth has a power that cannot be understood by human reason, which the men and women of Argentina suck up into their 378

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bodies, and which causes poisonous flowers to bloom” (Yoshimoto 2000, 154–59). Thus, it may come as some surprise that Yoshimoto writes in the afterword to the first edition that she is supplying an itinerary for those who would follow in her footsteps and visit Argentina. This welcome is reversed, however, in the second afterword to the bunkobon (paperback) edition, in which Yoshimoto expresses gratitude at having been able to visit Argentina before the country “collapsed,” once again, into political chaos, which leads her to remark that “it’s not really the kind of place that you can visit any longer” (Yoshimoto 2003, 199). Thus, Furin to Nanbei appears as a peculiar work of travel literature, a collection of short stories featuring the themes of adultery and popular tourist sites in Argentina, combined with a guidebook to a country that the reader is warned against visiting. In a sense, it is a particularly honest travel guide, in that it suggests that the reader may never, in fact, follow in the author’s footsteps and travel to the country described within, just like so many other countries featured on the covers of travel guides that line the shelves of bookstores around the world.

Takahashi Takako: At home in France In the epilogue of Watashi no tōtta michi (1999, The Path I Traveled), Takahashi Takako’s autobiographical account of her experience of living abroad in France as a Catholic nun from 1980–1988, Takahashi states that, although she has at last returned to Japan to stay, she was pleased to find during the process of writing her memoirs that France— her “most beloved France” (saiai no Furansu)—was no longer a place somewhere out there in the world, but had come to reside within her. Moreover, she writes that her very existence has been imprinted with an “identity change stamp” (aidentitī henkō no sutanpu) (Takahashi 1999, 289), a reference to both her religious conversion and her experience of living in France for nearly a decade, both experiences that had affected her identity so profoundly that she no longer felt like the same person. For Takahashi, as the writer makes clear on so many occasions, the path to Catholicism began with France, first French language and literature, then a series of trips to France, and finally an extended stretch of living abroad, during which she sought to “assimilate to the French manner of existence” (Takahashi 1999, 37). In Watashi no tōtta michi, Takahashi refers to France as her motherland, her native land, literally her ancestral country (sokoku), which she contrasts with Japan, “her land of exile” (bōmeichi), and to Kyoto, the city where she was born, which she refers to as her “most hated land on earth” (Takahashi 1999, 88; 118).8 In Takahashi’s transnational literature, based largely in France but written mostly during periods of return to Japan, the author makes extensive use of the figure of the exilé(e) (bōmeisha), a symbol that combines the image of the exiled national with that of humanity exiled from the garden of Eden, who are thereby condemned to wander the earth in search of a spiritual home. As scholar Yamauchi Yukihito discusses in his book on Takahashi’s relationship to Catholicism and France, the author’s image of the exilé(e), which she uses as the title of her 1995 novel, Bōmeisha (The Exile), is in part a reference to the Salve Regina, a traditional Catholic prayer in which the “banished children of Eve” implore the Virgin Mary for merciful intercession during their time of “exile” (bōmei) on earth (Yamauchi 2002, 211). In this section, I examine the traveler type of the exilé(e) in both its secular and religious temporalities, along with the related types of the wanderer and the nomad, in relation to Takahashi’s literature set in France, with a focus on her debut work of transnational fiction, Yosooi seyo, waga tamashii yo (1982, Array Yourself in Joy, My Soul).

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Takahashi’s transnational orientation can be traced to the very beginning of her career, which is framed in its entirety by her relationship to France. In fact, France and French literature are so intimately intertwined with Takahashi’s writing that one might not be remiss in referring to her as a French-Japanese writer, or a Japanese-French writer, even though she wrote primarily in Japanese. Before launching her career as a novelist, Takahashi studied French literature at Kyoto University, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on the decadent poetry of Charles Baudelaire and later earned a Master’s Degree with a thesis on Catholic writer and Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac, whose representative novel, Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), Takahashi translated in 1963 (Mori 2018, 11–14). Other connections to France are abundant: Takahashi made her first visit to Paris toward the beginning of her literary career in 1967 (her earliest short stories began to appear in the coterie magazine Hakubyō in 1965), she translated French literature throughout her life, she spent most of the 1980’s living in Paris, and the last three decades of her career were focused on producing writings either set in France or in some way related to her practice and experience of Catholicism, which permanently tied her to France. As a writer, Takahashi was inspired by a preponderance of French authors, including Mauriac, Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, André Gide, the Marquis de Sade, Rachilde, André Breton, and American-French writer Julien Green (another wanderer in Paris), although some of her favorite writers were also Japanese, particularly fellow Catholic writer Endō Shūsaku, who was a lifelong mentor and friend, as well as decadent writers such as Mishima Yukio and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (Takahashi 1980).9 In addition to the French connection, Takahashi’s literary ties to Europe extend to Spain, and particularly 16th-century Spain, as two of her biggest influences include Christian mystic writers of the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro): Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. In Watashi no tōtta michi, Takahashi describes a daily regimen of reading passages from Teresa of Ávila’s The Inner Castle in French translation, an experience that she credits with leading her to embrace Christianity more fully, and whose central themes of mystical experience, sublimation of physical love, and bittersweet longing for God left a profound impact on her literary and spiritual development (Takahashi 1999, 103–4). Takahashi later wrote a book-length reflection on The Inner Castle, in addition to an essay on The Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross, in which she describes religious practice as an inward motion, or a movement into the depths of one’s soul (Takahashi 1992; 1994, 4: 529–52). In her literature, Takahashi frequently describes this space of interiority as an “inner ocean,” or a fathomless and pre-verbal inner vacuity that serves as a source of human creativity and inspiration, as well as a space for connecting directly with God (Sunami 1992, 135). When one considers the fact that Takahashi not only read but studied and wrote on the work of these two Christian mystics throughout her period of exile in France, all while attending daily mass in French, one is able to gain a deeper appreciation for the role of Christianity in her later work. Both France and Christianity play central roles in Yosooi seyo, Takahashi’s first transnational novel, which tells the story of Yamakawa Namiko, a professional piano player who is living a nomadic life in Paris for reasons that are never made entirely clear, although possibilities are suggested via gradual revelations of a history of divorce, alcoholism, and religious conversion to Catholicism. Rather than a travel narrative with a set destination, Takahashi presents Namiko’s journey diffusely, as a series of encounters with strangers while wandering the streets, train stations, and mountains of France. While in Paris, Namiko descends nightly into the basement of St. Sulpice Church, where she learns to play the pipe organ. Her nightly practice initiates a series of encounters that eventually leads her all the way to 380

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a silent religious retreat in a monastery on the Swiss-French border, where she encounters a priest who inspires her to commit fully to religious life by ordering her to embark on a new direction: “forward.” His imperative seems clear enough, as far as religious directives go, but it is followed by an even more mysterious direction, “vertically” (suichoku ni, desu) (Takahashi 1982, 297). In the context of Takahashi’s literature, the imperative to move vertically is an imperative to descend deep within oneself, into the inner ocean; in Yosooi seyo, this vertical direction is paralleled by Namiko’s nightly descent into the basement of the French church. Upon descending into her own soul, Namiko discovers a hidden room that she can access at any point in her journey, and which she carries with her wherever she goes. Toward the conclusion of the novel, Namiko is urged by the priest to embark on a new direction, one with no defined shape or destination: “from campsite to campsite” (yaeichi kara yaeichi e), thereby demanding that the narrator resume her wandering, while making use of her inner room as a station of rest along the way (Takahashi 1982, 325). As a transnational narrative, Yosooi seyo is set along the temporal-spatial axis of the nomad, one whom Flusser describes as gaining a measure of both intellectual and personal freedom by wandering between settled locations. Due to the primarily urban setting of Namiko’s nomadic journey, she has also been compared by scholars to the figure of the flâneur, or the type of urban wanderer described by Walter Benjamin in his essays on Baudelaire, in which Benjamin pictures Paris as a sprawling modern city that leads the wanderer to self-discovery via the process of alienation (Nakagawa 1999, 165–66). In Yosooi seyo, Namiko begins her journey as a literal wanderer, wandering through the backstreets of Paris in search of an apartment, a place to settle down in between journeys. Unable to find a suitable room, she returns on a nightly basis to the local hub of nomads: the hotel—a kind of caravanserai in the desert of the housing market. At the hotel, almost all of Namiko’s neighbors are also wanderers, or exiles, whose connections to Paris remain tenuous, as they are mostly passing through the city after leaving their homelands in places like Sweden, Italy, sub-Saharan Africa, and various other cities in France. It is only in this environment, one in which neighbors are all fellow nomads uprooted from their homelands, that Namiko is able to reorient her cultural affiliations, her social identity, and her life. Despite the general sense of freedom that Takahashi ascribes to the act of wandering in Yosooi seyo, at various points in the narrative, she also takes note of conflicts that arise when crossing borders, particularly in regard to issues of identity. Although Namiko identifies on a personal level with French culture, language, and religion, from the very first line of dialogue in the novel, she is recognized by a stranger in France as Japanese, a designation that combines the categories of ethnicity and nationality with an implicit observation of race. In the opening pages of the book, Namiko is greeted by a young woman showing an apartment in the backstreets of Paris with the remark, “So, then, you must be Japanese” (Nihonjin desu ne) (Takahashi 1999, 6). Throughout the rest of the narrative, she is greeted by people whom she meets for the first time in this same way, with variations of the refrains, “Where are you from?” and “Are you Japanese?” Thus, while France might initially appear to offer Takahashi’s narrators a space of racial neutrality, in which they are able to escape the cultural and territorial influences of their homeland in exchange for a new, tabula rasa identity, her stories simultaneously suggest that this process is complicated by the racialized gaze, which interferes with the exile’s ability to assimilate into the adopted culture.

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Toward the conclusion of Yosooi seyo, Takahashi pictures the culmination of a conflict between ethnic identity and cultural affiliation, one that supersedes Namiko’s position within the story, in a scene that explores the fraught history of the Christian West’s relationship with non-Christian peoples, both at home and abroad. At the religious retreat in the mountains, Namiko is greeted by a young man who uses a variation of the novel’s customary greeting: “What country are you from?” His response to learning that she is from Japan, however, is unusual: “When I think of Japan, I think of the atomic bomb.” Namiko has no response, she does not want to talk about Japan, or the atomic bomb. The French man continues, “What do you think about God and the atomic bomb?” Namiko responds, “I don’t know,” evading a question that she recognizes as a variation of one that she has been asked many times before. The question goes something like this: How can you be a Christian when the Crusades, the Inquisition, Hitler, and the atomic bomb all originated in Christian countries (Takahashi 1982, 310–15)? Namiko’s response remains the same, she does not know; it is not her responsibility to explain why a Japanese person would become Christian even with knowledge that the atomic bomb was dropped by a Western nation that professes Christian values. It is not her responsibility to explain anything about Japan, or Japanese Catholics, or why somebody of the Japanese ethnicity or nationality would become a Christian. This is because Namiko feels no sense of obligation to being Japanese, or to being a representative of Japan to the West. She feels, rather, a sense of obligation to her faith, and to her music, both of which extend not from her national background, but rather from her inner ocean. Both of these obligations tie her to France, even though France is only a “point of departure” for yet another border-crossing, one into the spiritual realm, or one that lies beyond the borders of the physical plane (Yamauchi 2002, 154). As Yamauchi has argued of Takahashi’s fiction, the key figure of the exilé(e) is both secular and religious in nature, or one who has been exiled from both a national and a spiritual homeland. A brief examination of Takahashi’s writings reveals that the exilé(e) is many things at once: one who feels alienated from one’s own country, one who adopts the customs and religion of a foreign land as one’s own, and, finally, one who is separated from the deep, inner ocean of life. Given the religious context of Takahashi’s fiction, the exilé(e) could also be said to represent the “banished children of Eve.” Of course, it is not necessary to interpret Takahashi’s fiction in an explicitly religious manner, and, indeed, previous writings on Yosooi seyo have featured little reference to the Christian content of the novel, precisely because the semiotic richness and thematic density of Takahashi’s work encourages diverse interpretations (Mizuta 2018). When considered as literature created in dialogue with the writings of Spanish Christian mystics and French Catholic novelists, however, bridges between their work and Takahashi’s become visible. While these bridges do not solve the global conflicts that Takahashi alludes to in her work, which she acknowledges even while depicting characters who attempt to ignore this history, the depth and sensitivity of her engagement with transnational spaces and meetings offers fertile ground for reconsidering relationships between race and religion, exile and belonging, homeland and foreign land, self and other.

Yi Yangji: Uli nala, between homeland and exile The transnational writings of Yi Yangji complicate the very categories of exile, homeland, and travel writing due to the identity of their author and the movement between countries

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that they describe. For Yi, a Zainichi Korean, or an ethnic Korean resident of Japan, homeland is a word enunciated in a specific language, Korean, in which it is known as uli nala, “our country.” The possessive pronoun “our” suggests joint ownership and belonging to a country, but whether or not Yi and her narrators actually belong to the homeland they seek to return to is the question on which all of Yi’s travel narratives are predicated. The question of homeland has been a particularly tangled one for the Zainichi Korean people, one of the largest minority populations in Japan, whose history was long one of statelessness in a country that was seen not as a place of permanent settlement, but rather as a place of temporary exile. The history of the Zainichi Koreans begins with Japanese colonialism, which brought millions of Koreans to Japan for work and resettlement. Following the end of World War II, those who remained in Japan, which included some 600,000 people out of a total of two million, became known as Zainichi (resident in Japan). The residency status of the Zainichi, however, immediately became a matter of contention, as the Japanese government moved quickly to revoke citizenship, which had previously been assigned to Koreans as colonial subjects, and the Zainichi were forced to choose between naturalizing as Japanese citizens, seeking citizenship in either South or North Korea, or remaining effectively stateless in Japan (Toole 2011, 1–2). The vast body of literary writings created by Zainichi Koreans in response to their experiences of displacement, dispossession, and discrimination holds, as scholar Melissa Wender puts it, “a symbolically prominent place in contemporary Japanese literature, as its most important ‘minority’ literature” (Wender 2016, 756). It is a literature that is, in the words of scholar John Lie, “perforce a colonial and postcolonial phenomenon,” one whose subject is “exilic or diasporic identity” (Lie 2018, 3, 16). Unlike the first two writers discussed in this chapter, Yi’s ethnic and national identity cannot be defined with a single, uncomplicated nominal, such as “Japanese.” In Japan, where Yi was born and raised to be “more Japanese than the Japanese,” resident Koreans are referred to as Chōsenjin, which differentiates them from the “native” Japanese (Nihonjin), whereas, in Korea, Yi’s narrators are treated as Panchoppari (half-Japanese, or Japanized Koreans) (Kim 2004, 103, 118). As Lie writes, to be a Zainichi Korean means to be “both Japanese and Korean, or being neither Korean nor Japanese,” a condition that necessitates acceptance of “a hybrid or in-between identity,” one that is not easily summarized or related in straightforward terms, and one that is framed by historical processes of colonization and decolonization, as well as by contested political frameworks of citizenship and belonging (Lie 2018, 14). Thus, Yi’s narrators are immediately met with the imperative of identifying a homeland, one which they search for, with various levels of success, in uli nala, “our country,” South Korea. Virtually all of Yi’s works of fiction, published between 1980 and 1992, deal with the theme of return to an “ancestral homeland” (sokoku), or a “motherland” (bokoku), to which the narrator seeks to establish closer ties, a process that involves a combination of traveling to Korea and learning its language, music, and literature. In both of the novels discussed in this chapter, Nabi Taryon (1982, The Lamenting Butterfly) and Yuhi (1988), Yi draws on her personal experience of studying abroad in Seoul, South Korea in the early 1980s in order to depict the aspirations, disappointments, and negotiations that connect the exiled national to the homeland. Although her stories depict the particular struggles faced by Zainichi Koreans, such as discrimination both in Japan and Korea, or the difficulty of mastering pronunciation in Korean after having spent one’s life speaking only in Japanese, Yi insists that her novels are not meant to capture a generalized Zainichi experience, but rather a personal experience that attains universality by relating a story of longing for home and acceptance—if not a Chapter 24: Transnational Narratives and Travel Writing

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longing for definition itself (Kawamura 2003, 291). In terms of particularities, the narrators of Yi’s novels share various elements of their background stories with the author’s personal experience. Yi was born in 1955 near the foot of Mt. Fuji in Yamanashi prefecture to Zainichi Korean parents who became naturalized Japanese citizens prior to her birth and who sought to raise her in a thoroughly Japanese manner. She was brought up without an explicit consciousness of being Zainichi or Korean, although she developed an interest in digging deeper into her ethnic roots after joining a Korean cultural club at Waseda University in Tokyo. Yi practiced koto, a zither-type instrument traditionally associated with the aristocracy in Japan, in high school, but later switched to the gayageum, a Korean instrument related to the koto, which she continued to practice during a period of study abroad in Korea. Like Yi herself, the narrators in Yi’s stories are second-generation Zainichi Koreans born and acculturated in Japan who travel to Korea for the first time as young adults for the purposes of study. The transnational narratives that they relate are complicated by their various acts of identification, which destabilize relationships between binaries such as traveler and foreign country, native and foreigner, exile and return. Yi’s narrators both travel and “return” to Korea via a transnational network whose geopolitical implications are deeply entangled. By traveling from Japan to Korea, Yi’s narrators move from the space of the former colonizer to that of the former colony, or from the former metropole to that of the periphery, but they do so as former colonial subjects who have never experienced colonial subjectivity in their own lifetimes, but whose own ethnic identities are predicated on prior colonial relations. As Yi repeatedly enunciates, they travel from a developed nation (senshinkoku) to a developing nation, one to which they trace their ethnic roots, but with which they are unable to reconcile cultural perspectives conditioned by their experiences of growing up in a Japanese environment (Kim 2004, 118). As international students from a “developed” nation, they derive freedom of movement from Japan’s economic strength, and are thus like the other Japanese travelers discussed in this chapter. However, unlike travelers who are assured a Japanese identity while abroad, Zainichi Korean travelers from Japan begin their journeys with hybrid identities that originate in a space of contested national allegiance. Both Nabi taryon and Yuhi detail the narrator’s endeavor to reconnect with the uli nala via the media of music and language. In Nabi taryon, Yi’s mainstream debut, the musical element of this reconnection takes center stage, as the novel tells the story of Aiko, a Zainichi Korean who learns to play the gayageum and to sing the pansori, a form of narrative folk song—activities that strengthen her emotional bonds with the ethnic homeland. As a sign of her commitment to embracing her rediscovered roots, Aiko changes her name to Aeja, thereby paralleling a decision made by Yi herself, who publicly reclaimed her Korean name with the novel’s debut (Kim 2004, 102). Other details drawn from Yi’s own life provide an in-depth look at the individualized and fully lived experience of a single Zainichi Korean in Japan, one whose life shares common features with other Zainichi Koreans, but whose personal experience is differentiated by details of family background, education, and encounter with the homeland. The result is a work set in the mode of the shishōsetsu (I-novel), a semiautobiographical form of writing central to the modern Japanese literary tradition, as well as to the canon of Zainichi Korean literature (Lie 2018, 12; Wender 2016, 756). Like Yi, Aeja in Nabi taryon witnesses a protracted and messy divorce between her parents, which leads her to run away to Kyoto, where she lives and works in a ryokan (Kim 2004, 104). Later, as a university student, she has her first encounter with a gayageum, which redirects the trajectory of her life toward Korea. The novel ends with Aeja living in South Korea, which she has 384

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decided to make her home, with no desire to return to Japan. Written while Yi was studying at Seoul National University, Nabi taryon could be seen as a declaration that she had found her true homeland, and that she never intended to return to that other home, if such could be said of her natal land, Japan. Scholar Kim Hun-a describes Nabi taryon as the beginning of a two-part narrative arc, one whose optimistic outlook on the possibility of reintegration into Korean culture is called into question by its spiritual successor, Yuhi (Kim 2004, 119). Yuhi cemented Yi’s position in literary history by winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, making it the second work by a Zainichi Korean author to receive the award following Lee Hoesung (Ri Kaisei) with Kinuta o utsu onna (The Woman who Fulled Clothes*) in 1971.10 It was also a work that highlighted the experience of a Zainichi Korean woman, thereby signaling a shift away from “the pervasive masculinist and patriarchal outlook” that had permeated the literature of the first-generation of Zainichi writers (Lie 2018, 9). Yuhi also signaled a turn from the second to third generation of Zainichi Korean literature by moving away from an explicitly political perspective—even though Zainichi literature, as any minor literature, is by nature entrenched in the political realm, as argued by Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 17)—and highlighted instead interiority and personal experience with writing that took on a more “existentialist flavor” (Wender 2016, 759). The third generation was one for whom, as Lie writes, “the very notion of exile [had been] overtaken by the reality of in-betweenness,” and for whom issues pertaining to belonging and assimilation had become increasingly complex, while experiences and responses to cultural imperatives to declare allegiance, emanating from both Japanese and Korean spaces, had become increasingly diverse (Lie 2018, 17). While Nabi taryon relates the story of finding home, Yuhi tells a story of losing home, or otherwise of exchanging an idealistic relationship to the homeland for something far more ambiguous. The former novel ends with the narrator declaring her intention to remain in Korea for good, whereas Yuhi ends with the eponymous protagonist, a Zainichi exchange student studying Korean literature in Seoul, returning to Japan, even while assuring her Korean friends that she will be back. Yuhi’s movements parallel those of the author (Yuhi’s last name in the novel is also given as Yi), who similarly traveled back and forth from Japan to Korea throughout much of her life, but Yuhi as a novel breaks out of the conventions of the shishōsetsu by featuring a narrative that is delivered from a viewpoint not identifiable with that of the author: a South Korean host sister who describes a Zainichi Korean visitor to her country. The story that she tells is of Yuhi’s struggles to adapt to Korean culture, as well as her failure to master the Korean language, which leads to disenchantment and an increasingly ambivalent identification with Japanese culture, a reality that causes painful friction between host and traveler, who are ethnically related but linguistically separate. It is a novel that centers on the question of language, and which uses the medium of language as a visual representation of the in-betweenness of the Zainichi Korean subject’s experience by including both Japanese and Korean scripts. The eponymous character Yuhi, as related by her host sister, experiences cognitive dissonance in many facets of her life in Korea. She is a student of Korean literature, but she has hardly read any Korean novels, as she mostly reads books by Japanese writers, which pack her bookshelf (Yi 1997, 284–96). She can write hundreds of pages in fluid Japanese while listening to the daegeum (Korean flute), but makes “basic grammatical errors” when speaking in Korean, is unable to shake her Japanese accent, and sometimes her speech is so confused that the average Korean person is unlikely to comprehend her at all (Yi 1997, 287–88). She feels Chapter 24: Transnational Narratives and Travel Writing

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increasingly alienated from her ethnic compatriots as she comes to identify with Japanese ways of expressing oneself, including through spoken and written language, body language, and behavior. Embodying the tripartite types of the wanderer, the nomad, and the exile, Yuhi wanders from boarding house to boarding house, and from neighborhood to neighborhood, never finding a place where she can settle down and feel at home in the homeland. Rather than a liberating experience, this form of wandering leads to anxiety, alcoholism, and mental distress as the wanderer grows increasingly homesick for a home that is not home. As a clear symbol that the ideal of a “homeland” has been lost, at one point in the novel Yuhi writes in Hangul that she is unable to love the uli nala. Not everything, however, has been lost. Yuhi adds, “I like the daegeum. The sound of the daegeum is our language [ulimal]” (Yi 1997, 320). Unlike Aeja in Nabi taryon, Yuhi does not learn to play the Korean instrument that enchants her, but through its sound she establishes a connection to Korea that supersedes semantic boundaries. Moreover, in exchange for an ideal Korea, Yuhi gains a real Korea in the form of her host aunt and older sister. Even when she begins to lose her patience with the Korean language in general, she remains linguistically and emotionally connected to Korea via her hosts, whom she tells, “I like the Korean language the way you use it. When you speak Korean, every word enters softly into my body.” (Yi 1997, 353). In a sense, what Yuhi loses by her linguistic failure in Korea is not so much a homeland, but rather a feeling that home is only in one place. What she encounters is hybridity, an in-betweenness that was not available to her parents’ generation, but one that had yet to present itself as a satisfactory substitution for a singular home. Like the writers of transnational fiction discussed throughout this chapter, she discovers that there is no easy answer to the question, “Where are you from?” or to the related question, “Where is your home?”

Conclusion As demonstrated throughout this chapter, transnational narratives by Japanese women writers incorporate diverse perspectives and identities in the exploration of a world that is increasingly interconnected in complex ways. For Yoshimoto, Japan serves as a base for continuous travel to other countries, as related in accounts that reach audiences around the world via global networks of translation. Takahashi’s writings on French culture, literature, and religion join a venerable lineage of Franco-Japanese literary exchange, while presenting a powerful account of a personal journey beyond national borders, and toward the inner ocean of life. Finally, Yi relates an account of homesickness for a home that is simultaneously doubled and erased, as her narratives question the possibility of belonging to any single country when one’s identity is split along national and ethnic lines.

Notes 1

Takahashi’s most conventional work of travel writing is Junreichi ni tatsu: Furansu nite (2004, Departing to the Land of Pilgrimage: In France), which describes routes and sites of Christian pilgrimage in France. She has also written briefly on travels to Spain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Greece, as described in her essay collection, Odoroita hana (1980, Surprised Flower).

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2 Yoshimoto is close friends with Italian translator Alessandro Giovanni Gerevini. She has co-authored a book with him on her reception in Italy titled Itarian Banana (2002, Italian Banana) and frequently travels with him around the world, including on her trip to Argentina described in this chapter. 3 The reference to Bewitched appears in Kitchin and the reference to Maverick in SLY (1996). The references to both Nirvana and Sonic Youth appear in the English language version of Tokage (Lizard*), in the afterwords to both the Japanese and American editions included in the translation by Ann Sherif (Yoshimoto 1995, 167, 170). 4 References to Peanuts appear in Kitchin, Mizuumi (2005, The Lake*), and Moshi moshi Shimokitazawa (2010, Hello Shimokitazawa; translated as Moshi Moshi: A Novel*). References to Disneyland appear in Kitchin, Shirakawa yofune (1989, Asleep*), Amurita (1994a, Amrita*), and SLY. 5 This volume is named after a track from British electronic band Massive Attack’s second album, Protection. 6 I am inspired to see Yoshimoto’s guidebooks in this way following my reading of Robert Goree’s Printing Landmarks (2020), in which Goree refers extensively to gayū (“to lie down and go out”) as a traditional method of reading Japanese topographic literature (chishi). 7 Brazilian scholars Joy Nascimento Afonso and Gabriela Kvacek Betella argue that Yoshimoto brings a traditionally feminine perspective to travel writing by embedding the personal world of diary literature (nikki bungaku) into the public-facing literary form of the travel account (kikōbun), a process that they describe as creating a link between personal and historical memory (Afonso and Betella, 2019). 8 By contrast, Takahashi expresses fondness for her chosen long-term place of residence in Japan, Kamakura, a city in the Tokyo region that she refers to as “my town” (wagamachi) (Takahashi 1994, 288–90) 9 Other influences mentioned by Takahashi in her essays include writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, August Strindberg, and Graham Greene, as well as artists Edvard Munch and Caspar David Friedrich. Yamauchi discusses Takahashi’s friendship with Shibusawa, whom he describes as a major influence on her work (Yamauchi 2002, 18–19). 10 Since Yi, two further Zainichi Korean authors have won the Akutagawa Prize: Yū Miri (1996) and Gen Getsu (1999). Numerous others have one the Naoki Prize, awarded for popular fiction, in addition to other prestigious literary awards (Lie 2018, 1–2).

References Afonso, J.N. & Betella, G.K. (2019). Entre memória e viagem, tradição e contemporaneidade: proposta de leitura para América do Sul: Traição e outras viagens (Furin to Nanbei, Sekai no tabi 3) de Banana Yoshimoto [Between memory and travel, tradition and contemporaneity: A reading proposal for South America: Betrayal and other travels (adultery and South America, global journeys 3) by Banana Yoshimoto]. Ipotesi–Revista de Estudos Literários 23(1): 22–89. https://periodicos.ufjf.br/index.php/ipotesi/article​ /view/28907. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Dana Polan, trans., foreword by R. Bensmaïa). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edwards, J.D. (2018). Postcolonial Travel Writing and Postcolonial Theory. In R. Clarke (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flusser, V. (2003). The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (A.K. Finger, ed.; K. Kronenberg, trans.). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gerevini, A.G. & Yoshimoto, B. (2002). Itarian Banana [Italian Banana]. Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai. Goree, R. (2020). Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in late Tokugawa Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press. Kawamura, M. (2003). Kankoku, Chōsen, Zainichi o yomu [Reading Kankoku, Chōsen, and Zainichi as Korea]. Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai. Kim, H. (2004). Zainichi Chōsenjin josei bungaku ron [Essays on literature by Zainichi Korean women writers). Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Lie, J. (2018). Zainichi Literature: Japanese Writings by Ethnic Koreans. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press. Mizuta, N. (2018). The Desolate Self and Its Circular Search for the Absolute Other: Transgression and Dream in the Work of Takahashi Takako. (Alessandro Castellini, trans.). Review of Japanese Culture and Society 30: 156–65.

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Mori, M.T. (2018). Mirror, Gems, and Veil: The Life and Writings of Takahashi Takako (1932–2013). Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Nakagawa, S. (1999). Tamashii no furanūru: “Yosooi seyo, waga tamashii yo’ ron” [Flâneur of the soul: An essay on Array Yourself in Joy, My Soul]. In Nakagawa S. & Hasegawa K. (eds.), Takahashi Takako no fūkei [The Landscape of Takahashi Takako]. Tokyo: Sairyūsha. Pratt, M.L. (2018). Afterword. In R. Clarke (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ri, K. (1986). The Woman Who Fulled Clothes. (Beverly Nelson, trans.). In P. Lee (ed.), Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories, revised edition (pp 344–72). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Sunami, T. (1992). Takahashi Takako ron [Essays on Takahashi Takako]. Tokyo: Ōfūsha. Takahashi, T. (1980). Odoroita hana [Surprised Flower]. Tokyo: Jinbun Shoin. ———. (1982). Yosooi seyo, waga tamashii yo [Array Yourself in Joy, My Soul]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. (1992). “Uchinaru shiro” ni tsuite omou koto [Thoughts on The Interior Castle]. Tokyo: Joshi Pauro Kai. ———. (1994). An’ya o tōtte [Through the Dark Night]. In Jisen shōsetsu shū. Tokyo: Kōdansha, ———. (1999). Watashi no tōtta michi [The Path I Took]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2004). Junreichi ni tatsu: Furansu nite [Departing to the Land of Pilgrimage: In France]. Tokyo: Joshi Pauro Kai. Toole, M. (2011). Towards the Borderlands: An Investigation into the Works of Yi Yang-ji. All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 541. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/541 https://doi.org/10.7936/K7NS0RX8 Treat, J.W. (2018). The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wender, M.L. (2016). Postwar Zainichi Writings: Politics, Language, and Identity. In H. Shirane & T. Suzuki with David Lurie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yamauchi, Y. (2002). Kami to deau: Takahashi Takako ron [Meeting God: Essays on Takahashi Takako]. Tokyo: Soshi Yamada. Yi, Y. (1997). Yuhi, Nabi taryon [Yuhi, The Lamenting Butterfly]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Yoshimoto, Banana. (1988). Kitchin [Kitchen]. Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten. ———. (1989). Shirakawa Yofune [Asleep]. Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten. ———. (1994a). Amurita [Amrita]. Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten. ———. (1994b). SLY. Tokyo: Gentōsha. ———. (1995). Lizard. (Ann Sherif, trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work, Tokage, published 1993) ———. (2000). Furin to Nanbei [Adultery and South America] [hardcover edition]. Tokyo: Gentōsha. ———. (2003). Afterword. In Furin to Nanbei [Adultery and South America] [paperback edition]. Tokyo: Gentōsha. ———. (2005). Mizuumi [The Lake]. Tokyo: Foiru. ———. (2010). Moshi moshi Shimokitazawa [Hello Shimokitazawa]. Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha.

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Index A 1.57 crisis 131 aging: as literary theme, 23–24, 25, 116, 243–254 passim, 257–268 passim; in society, 31, 131, 177, 316; and women, 242, 243 airin shisō (forest-loving thought), 346, 347 Akutagawa Prize, xix, 38, 57, 64, 69, 113, 118, 132, 133, 135, 149, 152, 185, 214, 217, 249, 257, 269 n6, 328, 339 n1, 363, 364, 370, 372 n5, 372 n10, 385, 387 n10 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 257 Ame no Uzume, 256, 261–263 passim American Occupation, 23, 24–25, 31, 161, 312, 318; and women’s equality, 173, 286, 320 andokan (a sense of relief), 40 appakusuru yōna (oppressive), 99, 100 Araki Iku: “Tegami” (1912, The Letter*), 102 Arikawa Hiro: Tabi neko repōto (2012, translated as The Travelling Cat Chronicles*), 81 Ariyoshi Sawako, xxii, xxiv, 3, 4, 5, 332; Amerika ni sode wa nurasaji (1970, On Not Dampening My Kimono Sleeves with American Rain), 118, 119–21; Aya no tsutsumi (The Drum of Twill, translated as The Damask Drum*), 118; common themes in her works, 9; Fukugō osen (1975, Cumulative Pollution), 332; Hanaoka Seishū no tsuma (1967, Hanaoka Seishū’s Wife; translated as The Doctor’s Wife*), 9, 10–11; Izumo no Okuni (1969, Okuni of Izumo; translated as Kabuki Dancer*), 9, 11–12; “Jiuta” (Ballad*), 118; Katonzubiru jiken no kunin (1972, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine), 119; Kinogawa (1959, The River Ki*), 9–10; Kōkotsu no hito (1972, The Twilight Years*), 119; nominated for Akutagawa Prize, 118; refusal to comply with the mainstream, 118; study-exchange in the US (Hawai’i and New York), 119; teaching Donald Keene, 119; writing about women,

Index

9; Yuki wa konkon sugata no mizu’umi (The Hunter and the Female Fox), 118 atomic bombings, 382; hibakusha (atomic bombing victims), 328, 329, 330; Hiroshima, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 77, 330; Nagasaki, 295, 296, 297, 298, 307, 327, 328 autobiography, xxi, xxvii; as lens, 101; and colonial experiences, 294–95; and Fujino Chiya, 214; and Hayashi Kyōko, 296–99; and Hayashi Mariko, 135–39, 235–39; and the “I-novel”, 268, 384; and Ishimure Michiko, 331; and Kometani Foumiko, 132–35; and Miyao Tomiko, 302–7; rejected by Kanai Mieko, 268; and Sata Ineko, 103–9, 110 n20; and Sawachi Hisae, 299–302; and Sylvia Plath, 189 n5; and Takahashi Takako, 379–82; and Tamura Toshiko, 101; and Tanabe Seiko, 232–35; and transnational narratives, 374; and Yi Yangji, 384; and Yoshiya Nobuko, 228–31; and Yū Miri, 364 ayamachi (mistake; a common euphemism for forbidden sex, such as an affair), 108 Ayukawa Tetsuya, 18

B Bakhtinian carnival theory, 258 Bandō Tamasaburō, 120; discusses the work of Ariyoshi Sawako, 121 Banzai (Long Live the Emperor), 122, 123, 298 Barthes, Roland, 265 Basic Act for Measures to Cope with a Society of Declining Birthrate, The (Shōshika shakai taisaku kihon hō), 41 Berrigan, Daniel (S.J), and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, 119 Best Science Fiction award, 35 birth rate: declining / dropping in Japan, xxi, 28, 38, 41, 42, 131, 148, 177, 196, 207; government

389

policies concerning, 34, 46 n15; high prewar rate, 279 biwa hōshi (itinerate lute players), 4 bokoku (motherland), 383 bubble economy, 6, 19, 26, 28, 129, 143, 144 n5, 154, 209, 220, 236, 238, 239, 372 n4 bundan (literary establishment), 118, 168, 229 Bungakkai (magazine), 132, 217 Bungakukai Prize for Emerging Writers, 210 Bungei (journal), 211 bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment), 24 bunretsu shinri (schizo-psychology), 179 bunretsu shinrigaku (split psychology), 351, 353 Bunshō sekai (Writing world; journal), 99 buyō (Japanese dance), 118

C canine-centric novels / “canine classics”: Canidae family as focus of works, 81; human-animal relationships, 80–81; images of domesticity and wilderness, 81–82; literary animals as lens, 80; and women writers, 81 care / care-work, xxvi, 129–144 passim Che Sil (sometimes Chesil), 359, 367; Jini no pazuru (2016, Jini’s Puzzle, 2016; translated as The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart*), 367–70; participation in transnational feminist movements, 371; third generation Zainichi, 367; transnational themes, 368; winner of Gunzō Prize for New Writers, 367 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 15 n1, 315 chima chogori (traditional Korean top and skirt), 368, 369 Chisso Corporation, 327, 331–334 passim Chongryun (Jp. Sōren; General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), 368 Chōren (League of Koreans in Japan), 361 Chōsen gakkō (Korean, hakkyo; schools for Korean residents where classes are taught in Korean), 361, 368, 369 chūkan bungaku (“in-between” literature), 249 Chūō kōron (Central review; journal), 100, 104 cyberpunk fiction, 34, 46 n4

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D daisan no sekai (literally “a third world”), 70 Dakemoto Ayumi, xxiv, 113, 114; depiction of women in the licensed quarter, 124–26; Kano sō no musume (2016, Daughter of a Wellknown Priest), 123, 124–26; profiling women in late-Meiji Japan, 122; Taiheiyō shokudō (2013, Pacific Refreshment Room), 122–24 Dazai Osamu, 68, 257, 260, 269 n4, 270 n20 doku (poison), 257, 269 n4 dokufu (poison woman), 19

E Edogawa Ranpo, 18 Edogawa Ranpo Prize, 23 Ekuni Kaori: Kira kira hikaru (1991, Twinkle, twinkle) 219 Enchi Fumiko, xxi, xxv, xxvi, 162; characters challenging male dominance, 163; education of, 162; “Hanakui uba” (1974, The Old Woman Who Eats Flowers), 243, 244–48; Himojii tsukihi (1953, Days of Hunger), 244; “Kinuta” (1980, The Fulling Block), 244; “Neko no sōshi” (1974, The Cat Scroll), 244; Onnamen (1958, Woman’s Masks; translated as Masks*), 162, 163–67, 244; Onnazaka (1957, The Woman’s Hill; translated as The Waiting Years*), 244; references to classical texts, 163; and translation of Tale of Genji 162–63, 244; Ueda Kazutoshi (father), 162, 244; winner of the Noma literary prize, 244; winner of the Tanizaki Prize, 244; winner of Women’s Literature Prize, 244; works in translaton and scholarly criticism, 163; “Yūkon” (1971, Wandering Souls), 244 Engeki kai (Theater world; journal), 118 environmental literature, 327–39 passim; as part fiction, part fact, 328; includes nonhuman beings, 345–46; nature and culture, 343, 344; and “the shimmer”, 341, 342 ero-guro literature (erotic and grotesque), 20 ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesquenonsensical), 350 esu-efu (SF, science fiction), 33, 34, 41

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F feminist / feminist writing, 60, 82, 101, 106, 109, 161, 204, 211, 220, 239, 240; and greater freedom for women from societal restrictions, 162, 163, 165, 177, 276, 279; and significance of food, 176, 177, 181, 188 fertility rate, 42, 131, 203 Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary, 264, 265, 266; Flaubertian, 266 food: literary depictions of, 176–89 passim fugu (pufferfish), 68 Fujin gahō (Women’s illustrated; journal), 9 Fujin kōron (journal), 104, 279 Fujino Chiya, 210; as transgender author, 214; experience of discrimination, 214; Henshū domo atsumare! (2017, Let’s Get Together, Editors!), 214; Natsu no yakusoku (2000, A Promise of Summer), 214–16; winner of Akutagawa Prize, 214 Fukushima nuclear accident, 71, 327, 328, 330, 332, 334–338 passim furiwakegami (a child’s hairstyle, for both boys and girls, in the Heian period), 53 Furute tsuma shina tamatebako (1795, The old wife and the jeweled box), 68

G genbun itchi (unification of the spoken and written language), 51 Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji*), 52, 54, 163, 166, 244, 249 good life: as defined by / related to happiness, 131, 156–57 Gotō Meisei, 265, 266 Great East Japan Triple Disaster (2011), 71, 327, 328, 330, 332, 334–35, 337, 338 Great Hanshin Earthquake, 41, 148 gunki-mono (warrior tales), 4 Gunzō Prize for New Writers, 367

H Hagiwara Sakutarō and “poetic smell”, 177; Tsuki ni hoeru (1917, Howling at the Moon*), 177 Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize, 260 Hakubyō (coterie magazine), 380

Index

Hanada Kiyoteru (literary critic), 351 hanshoku suru (to breed), 38, 39 Hasegawa Shigure, xxiv, 113; early life, 114; as editor of Kagayaku (Radiant), 114; illness as literary theme, 116; impact in kabuki theater and collaboration with Onoe Kikugorō VI, 115; Ko’ori no ame (1926, Rain of Ice*), 115, 116–17; Sakura fubuki (1910, Cherry Blossom Tempest), 115–16, 118 Hayashi Fumiko, 195, 207 n1, 239, 275, 276, 290 n4, 341; as a war correspondent, 285, 347; as women who transcend the borders of the nation, 286; “Boruneo daiya” (1946, Borneo Diamond*), 347; Hatō (1939, Rough Seas), 285; Hokugan butai (1939, Northern Bank Platoon), 285–86; Hōrōki (1928–1930, Diary of a Vagabond*), 106, 283–84, 347; member of the “Pen Squadron”, 285; Sensen (1939, Battlefront), 285; travels overseas, 283; Ukigumo (1951, Floating Clouds*), 286–88; writings seen as apolitical, proletarian, or even anarchist, 283 Hayashi Kyōko, xxvii, 294, 307, 327; atomic bombing and exposure to radiation, 296, 328; condemnation of all forms of nuclear power, 330; depiction of Shanghai alleys as feminine space, 296; double identity of: atomic bomb survivor and colonizer, 297, 298; early life in Shanghai, return to Nagasaki, 295, 296; “Futatabi Rui e” (2013, To Rui, Once Again*), 328, 335; Giyaman biidoro (1988, Cut Glass, Blown Glass), 297; “Hibiki” (1988, Echoes), 298; “Kōsa” (1977, Yellow Sand*), 297; “Matsuri no ba” (1975, Ritual of Death*), 328; “Rōtaibo no Roji” (2001, The Alley of the Old Lady), 296–97; “Shūkaku” (2002, Harvest), 339 n4; “Torinitī kara Torinitī e” (2000, From Trinity to Trinity*), 328; use of Nagasaki dialect, 328; winner of Akutagawa Prize, 328; writings inclusive of reported facts and fiction, 328, 329 Hayashi Mariko, 129, 131, 227, 239–40; achieving happiness through success, 136, 137; and postfeminism, 135, 136; Budō ga me ni shimiru (1984, Grapes Stinging My Eyes), 236–39; early life and education, 235; employment as theme, 135, 136, 236; Hoshi ni negai o (1986, Wish upon a Star), 135–39; job as copywriter,

391

136, 235; Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerou (1982, Buy Happiness and Go Home), 235; stories of young professional women in Tokyo, 238, 239; winner of Naoki Prize, 135; winner of Newcomer’s Prize at the Tokyo Copywriter’s Club competition, 136, 235 henshin (metamorphosis), 90 hibakusha (atomic bombing victims), 328, 329, 330 Higashi Kume, 126 Higashi Mineo: “Okinawa no shōnen” (1971, Child of Okinawa*) 315, 316 Higuchi Ichiyō, xxiii, xxix, 51, 276; connections between Child’s Play and Breasts and Eggs, 60–61; death from tuberculosis, 54; early life and education, 54; Higuchi Noriyoshi (father), 54; life as a writer, 54; “Nigori-e” (1895, Troubled Waters*), 316; “Takekurabe” (Child’s Play*), 51, 54–57; use of classical works, 51 hikiage (repatriation), 294 Hiranuma Ki’ichirō, 124 Hiratsuka Raichō, 195, 204, 230, 275, 279 Hiruma Hisao: Yes-Yes-Yes (1989), 211 hisabetsu buraku community (community of discriminated people), 121, 122, 123, 339 n8 historical fiction, 3–15 passim; as catalyst for discussion, 5; as magazine serializations, 5; as recited material (katarimono), 4; as taishū bungaku, 5; as written text (yomimono), 4; and biwa hōshi, 4; entertainment value of, 5; the genre, 4–5; and gunki-mono, 4; and kōdan, 4; providing heroes and role models, 5; women-authored, 5 honkaku tantei shōsetsu (detective fiction), 19 honmyō (real name), 360, 370 Hotoke-sama (the Buddha), 125 Hototogisu (1898-1899, The Cuckoo, also Namiko*), 117

I ibasho (place of comfort / security), xvi, xxv, xxviii, 148–49, 151, 152, 155, 157, 219 Ichikawa Fusae, 119, 275 ichinin mae no shakaijin (a fully adult social being), 215 ie system (system of patriarchal lineage), 164, 167

392

Ihara Saikaku Prize, 249 ikiba no nasa (placelessness), 148 ikigai (a life worth living), 157 ikizurasa (angst / the pain of living), 148, 152, 155, 157 inari (fried bean curd), 86 I-novels, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 168, 174 n2, 258, 259, 269 n4, 347, 384, 385 inu (dog), 81, 82, 86 Irving, Washington: and “Rip Van Winkle”, 73, 75 Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise*), 51–64 passim, 69 iseiai dansei chūshin shugi (heterosexual malecentrism), 211 Ishimure Michiko, xxvii, xxviii, 260, 263, 327, 329, 335, 336, 341 as key activist and spokesperson for sufferers of Minamata Disease, 331; autobiographical writing, 331; concern for the loss of language, 338; Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (1969, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease*), 331–34, 338, 339, 343; personal and historical narratives, 332; “Rachel Carson of Japan”, 331; Tenko (1997, Lake of Heaven*), 341, 343–47; treatment of non-human beings, 346, 354; victim discrimination, 332, 339 n8; vision of harmonious relationship with nature, 346; wide-ranging genre of writings, 331, 343; writings inclusive of reported facts and fiction, 328 itazura (mischief), 108 Itō Hiromi, xxvi, 91, 256; as shamaness of poetry / goddess of poetry (shi no miko / shi no megami), 259; at the forefront of exploring matters that concern women’s lives, 259; “borrowing voices” as technique, 260; humor as source of light and warmth, 261; move to the US, 259; Togenuki (2007, The Thorn Puller*), 260–63; “Watashi wa Chitō deshita” (2007, translated as I Am Chito*), 91; winner of Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize, 260; winner of Murasaki Shikibu Award, 260; Itō Noe: “Dōyō” (1913, Shock), 102 iwakan (a sense of incongruity), 216, 217, 219 Iwaya Sazanami: Nihon mukashi banashi (1894–1896, Japanese fairy tales,) 67, 68 iyamisu (disgusting mystery), xxii, 18, 28, 30 Izanami and Izanagi, 68, 75 Izumi Kyōka Prize, 249

Handbook of Japanese Women Writers

Izutsu (The Well Cradle*), 52, 58, 59, 60, 64

J jiyu kekkon (free marriage), 55 jorō women traded for sex, 114 jōruri (puppet plays), 4 joryū sakka (woman writer), xx Josei or Nü shēng (Women’s voice; Chineselanguage magazine), 98 josō (cross-dressing), 214 jun bungaku (pure literature), 249 junia shōsetsu (junior fiction): and purity education, 235 junketsu kyōiku (purity education), 235

K kabuki, 4, 9, 11, 89, 114–16, 118, 120, 246, 247, 260 Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize, 139, 149 kaigo bungaku (aged-care literature), 257 kaimami (the act of watching in secret), 53, 55, 56, 57 Kakuta Mitsuyo, xvi, xxv, 147; Kōfuku na yūgi (1990, Blissful Pastime), 147; nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, 147; Taigan no kanojo (2007, Woman on the Other Shore*), 147–52; winner of the Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize, 147; winner of the Naoki Prize, 147; women and employment, 147; kami-age (putting up a young woman’s hair), 53 Kanai Mieko, xxv, xxvi, 176, 256; “Ai no seikatsu” (1967, Love Life), 181, 182–85; Bunshō kyōshitsu (1985, Creative Writing Class), 266; and critique of the social institutions of marriage and family, 182; Dōkeshi no koi (1990, A Clown’s Love), 270 n22; Kaiteki seikatsu kenkyū (2006, A Study of Comfortable Life), 266; Kanojo(tachi) ni tsuite watashi no shitte iru ni, san no kotogara (2000, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (and Her Friends)), 270 n22; Kasutoro no shiri (2017, The Ass of Castro), 264–66; Koharu-biyori (1988, Indian Summer*), 267, 270 n22; Okatte taiheiki (2014, The Chronicle of Great Peace in the Kitchen), 266; old age as theme, 267; and the “perpetual orgy” of reading-writing-reading, 264, 265, 268;

Index

rejection of autobiography, 268; Ren’ai taiheiki (1995, The Chronicle of Love), 270 n19; Tama ya (1982, Oh, Tama!*), 270 n22; “Usagi” (1972, Rabbits*), 182; use of essays in fiction, 264; works which reveal the feminist movement of the 1960s, 176–77 Kanehara Hitomi, xvi, xxv; Hebi ni piasu (2006, Snakes and Earrings*), 147, 152–56; ibasho as theme / concern, 152; and “lateral agency”, 156; nihilism and self-destruction as themes, 154, 155; winner of the Akutagawa Prize, 152 kantsūzai (crime of adultery), 97, 101 katarimono (recited material), 4 Kawabata Yasunari, 257 Kawakami Hiromi, xxvii, 71, 327; as high school biology teacher, 334; double victimization, 335; “Kamisama” (1993, Gods; translated as God Bless You*), 334; “Kamisama 2011” (2011, Gods 2011; translated as God Bless You, 2011*), 334–35; known for fantastical twists in everyday stories, 334; Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō (2016, Don’t Get Carried away by a Giant Bird), 334, 335–37 Kawakami Mieko, xxiii; connections between Breasts and Eggs and Child’s Play, 60–61; jobs held, 60; Natsu monogatari (2019, Breasts and Eggs*), 51; shortlisted for International Booker Prize, xix keishū sakka (“lady” writer), xxii–xxiii Kikuchi Kan Prize, 249 Kikugorō (Onoe Kikugorō VI), 115, 116 kinships: definition of, 209, 210, 220 Kipling, Rudyard: The Jungle Books, 80, 82, 83, 84 Kishida Prize for Drama, 364 Kōda Aya, xxix Kōda Rohan, 68, 78 n9 kōdan (oral storytelling), 4 koe (voice), 260 Kokutai no hongi (1937, The Essence of the National Body), 280 Komashaku Kimi (critic), xxix Komatsu Sakyō, Nihon chinbotsu (1973, Japan Sinks*), 338 Kometani Foumiko, xxiv, xxv, 129, 131–32; as mother of a disabled child, 132, 134; life in the US / marriage with Josh Greenfeld, 132; Passover as autobiography, 132; Passover criticized as antisemitic, 133; Sugikoshi no

393

Matsuri (1985, Passover*), 132–35; Tōrai no Kyaku (1985, A Guest from Afar), 132; winner of Akutagawa Prize, 132 Kōno Taeko, xxvi, 195; depiction of children in works, 196; early life and education, 196; fascination with masochism, 198; Yōji-gari” (1961, Toddler Hunting), 196–98 Koza (military base town in Okinawa), 309–22 passim Kubokawa Tsurujirō: husband of Sata Ineko 98, 103, 104, 105 Kurahashi Yumiko, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxix, 66; “Dokuyaku to shite no bungaku” (1966, Literature as a Poison), 77; early life and education, 57, 167; fiction inspired by classical tradition, 162; food and cannibalism, 77 n10; Fulbright Scholarship in the US and post-Fulbright works, 57–58, 72–73, 168–69; and good literature containing a “poison”, 73; Hanhigeki (1971, Anti-tragedies), 73; interest in folktales, 66; “Kyōsei” (1966, Symbiosis), 162, 167, 168–70; literary works criticized, 57; and logical storylines to illogical conclusions, 167; “Natsu no owari” (1960, The End of Summer*) 57; “Otona no dōwa” (1982, Fairy Tales for Adults), 73 Otona no tame no zankoku dōwa (1984, Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults), 73–74, 77 n9; “Parutai” (1960, The Party, translated as Partei*), 57, 72, 168; and a poisonous “foreign body” (ibutsu) made of words, 77; and retelling of Western fairy tales, 78 n7; Rōjin no tame no zankoku dōwa (2003, Cruel Fairy Tales for Old Folks), 73; “Shin Urashima” (1984, The New Urashima), 67; shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize, 57; “Tenkyo no oshirase” (1966, Notification of an Address Change), 77; “Tonsei” (Seclusion), 51, 57–60; use of “masculine” discursive constructs, 168; use of fiction as weapon of resistance, 162; Watashi no ‘daisan no sei,’” (1970, My Third Sex), 171; work as parody, 74, 168; Yōjo no yō ni (1966, Like a Witch), 169; Yomotsu hirasaka ōkan (Back and Forth to Yomotsuhira Slope, 2005), 67, 73, 75–76; Yume no ukihashi (1971, A Floating Bridge of Dreams), 73; Zankokuna dōwa” (1985, Cruel Fairy Tales), 73;

394

Kyokutei Bakin: Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan of Southern Fusa), 88

L language: anxiety about, 361; descriptive, 198; dialect, 233, 234, 249, 254 n6, 269 n6, 328; and the ethnic, gendered body, 368; and immigration, 69; imperial, 233; loss of, 312, 338; masculine / feminine, 8, 171, 228, 233; mother tongue, 359; of Okinawa, 312, 316–17; of oppresors, xxviii; of science and mathematics, 168, 187; poetic / in poetry, 276, 332, 333, 361, 362; reader’s awareness of, xx; Takahashi Takako and French, 379–80; Tawada Yōko and German, 86; and transnational writing, xxviii; use of colloquial, 5; and Zainichi Koreans, 360–64 passim, 369, 370, 371, 383, 384, 385, 386 Lee Jungja, xxviii, 359; as “Kayama Masako”, 370; Japanese / Korean language voices, 363; Nagune Taryon: Eien no tabibito (1991, Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler*), 359, 360, 361–63; Ponsona no uta (1984, Songs of the Balsam Flower), 360; reading and writing tanka, 360 Li Kotomi: Higanbana ga saku shima (2021, The island where the red spider lilies bloom), 220 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP): and “reverse course” policies, 161, 167 lost decade, xvi, 26, 148 lost generation, 148

M mai-hōmu-shugi (my home-ism), 149 Malot, Hector: Sans Famille 80, 82, 83 Manga Life (manga magazine), 250 manzai (comic exchange), 122 masochism: femaile, xii; and Kōno Taeko, 196, 198; and Lee Jungja, 364; and Tamura Toshiko, 101, 102, 103 Matayoshi Eiki: “Jōji ga shasatsu shita inoshishi” (1978, The Wild Boar that George Gunned Down*), 315 Matsuda Aoko, 203; World Fantasy Awards, xix Matsumoto Seichō, 18

Handbook of Japanese Women Writers

Matsuura Rieko, xxi, xxiii, xxvi, 88, 209, 210; education and early writing, 210; Hikari bunshū (2022, A Collection of Writing on Hikari), 210; Kenshin (2007, The Dog’s Body), 80, 90–91; metamorphosis as theme, 90, 91; Nachuraru ūman (1987, Natural Woman), 210; Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (1993, translated as The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P: A Novel*), 90, 211–13; penis vs. phallus, 211; and rejection of label of “lesbian or homosexual writer”, 210, 211; Sōgi no hi (1978, The Day of the Funeral), 210; winner of Bungakukai Prize for Emerging Writers, 210; “Yasashii kyosei no tame ni” (1987, For a Gentle Castration*), 211 michiyuki (traveling), 260, 263, 268 Minamata Disease, 331–39 passim, 343 Minato Kanae, xxii, 18, 28, 30; iyamisu (disgusting mystery), 28; Kokuhaku (2008, Confessions*), 28; Shokuzai (2009, Atonement; translated as Penance*), 19, 28–31; themes of education and relationship between mothers and daughters, 28 Mishima Yukio, 8, 12, 257, 270 n20, 380 Miura Ayako, 3 Miyabe Miyuki, xxii, 18, 28, 30; Kasha (1992, Fire Cart; translated as All She Was Worth*), 26; R.P.G. (2001, translated as Shadow Family*), 19, 26–28; writing simultaneously across several literary genres, 26 Miyano Murako, xxii, 18, 19; “Buchi no kieta inu” (The Dog with Vanishing Spots), 21–23; and female “otherness”, 22; use of anonymous third-person narrative style, 22 Miyao Tomiko, xxvii, 3, 294; detailed account of life in Manchuria, 295; and female subjectivity, 295; Shuka (1985, Red Summer), 302–6; writing criticized as “feminine”, 306 Mizumura Minae: Shinbun shōsetsu: Haha no isan (2012, Inheritance from Mother*), 268 Mizuta Noriko (critic), 287 Mobu Norio: Kaigo nyūmon (2004, An Introduction to Aged-Care), 257 Mori Ōgai: Tamakushige futari Urashima (1902, The jeweled comb box and the two Urashima Taros), 74 muen shakai (relationless society), 148 Murakami Haruki, 203, 270 n20

Index

Murasaki Shikibu, xxiii, 52, 162 Murasaki Shikibu Award, 260 Murata Sayaka, xxi, xxii, xxvi, 195, 210; Convenience Store Woman and international audiences, 217; Convenience Store Woman as rōdō shōsetsu (labor novel), 217; Hakobune (2010, The Ark), 217; and imagined futures, 34, 38; and iwakan (sense of incongruity) as theme of writings, 216; Junyū (2003, Breastfeeding), 217; Konbini ningen (2016, Convenience Store Woman*), 217–20; “Satsujin shussan” (2014, Birth Murder, short story), 38, 217; Satsujin shussan (2014, Birth Murder; short story collection), 203; “Seiketsu na kekkon” (2014, A Clean Marriage,* in Satsujin shussan), 196, 203–6, 207; Seimeishiki (2013, Ceremony of Life; translated Life Ceremony: Stories*), 217; Shōmetsu sekai (2015, Dwindling World), 38–41, 203, 217; theme of uncomfortable relationships between men and women, 96; translations and overseas fans, 203; winner of Akutagawa Prize, 38, 217 musei (sexless), 169 museisha (asexual), 218 Myōjō (Bright star; journal), 122 mystery fiction, xxii, 18–31 passim; appeal and popularity of, 18; basic structure of, 18–19; and censorship during WWII, 23; and engagement with ideological concerns, 19; honkaku tantei shōsetsu (detective fiction), 19; and iyamisu (disgusting mystery), xxii, 18, 28, 30; women writers urged to patriotism during WWI, 23

N Nagai Michiko, xxii, 4, 5; and importance of “background” women in history, 13; influence of loss of WWII, 12–13; “Nihon ichi no ‘okamisan’: Kita no Mandokoro” (The Best Wife in Japan: Kita no Mandokoro), 13; Ōja no tsuma: Hideyoshi no tsuma Onene (The Monarch’s Wife: Hideyoshi’s Wife Onene), 13, 14, 15; research , 5, 12, 13; winner of Naoki Prize, 13; writing from women’s perspective, 12, 14 Nakagami Kenji, 121

395

Nakajima Kyōko: FUTON (2003), 268 Nakajima Utako, 54 Nakamura Mitsuo, 265 Nakayama Kaho: Sagurada famiria: sei kazoku (1998, La sagrada familia), 211 Namu Amida Butsu (Praise Be to the Enlightened Buddha), 125 Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan of Southern Fusa), 80, 82, 88, 90–91 Naoki Prize, 13, 135, 239, 387 n10, Natsume Sōseki: Wagahai wa neko de aru (1905–1906; translated as I Am A Cat*), 81 nawatobi (jump-rope), 126 neoliberal / neoliberalism, 34, 129, 131, 136, 137, 141, 143 New Okinawan Literature Prize, 313 Nihon mukashi banashi (1894–1896, Japanese fairy tales), 68 Nihon shoki (720, Chronicles of Japan), 67 ningenkankei (human relationships), 157 Nishino Kōji: Shinjuku ni-chōme de kimi ni attara (1993, If I meet you in Shinjunku nichōme), 211 Nogami Yaeko, xxii, 3, 4; Hideyoshi to Rikyū (1962-1963, Hideyoshi and Rikyū), 5–8; and importance of historical research, 5; and subverting expectations of women writers, 5, 8 Nogi Maresuke, 126 Noma Hiroshi, 71, 72 Noma Prize, xix, 244 Nyonin geijutsu (Woman’s arts; journal), 283, 350

O Ōba Minako, xxiii, xxvi; compared with Kurahashi Yumiko, 66; early life and life in the US, 68–69; and ecocritical trends, 71; “Miyakojima: Ryūgū o kou hitobito” (Miyakojima: The People who Love the Dragon Palace), 69; Mukashi onna ga ita (1994, Once There Was a Woman), 69; notions of remembering and telling, 71; Ōba Minako no Taketori monogatari, Ise Monogatari (1968, Ōba Minako’s Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Tales of Ise), 69; Ōba Minako no Ugetsu monogatari (1987, Ōba

396

Minako’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain), 69; Sabita kotoba (1971, Tarnished Words*), 69; “Sanbiki no kani” (1968, Three Crabs*), 69; Shima no kuni no shima (1982, The Islands of the Island-country), 69; and Tōgenkyō (The Peach Blossom Spring), 70; Urashimasō (1977, Urashima Grass; translated as Urashimaso*), 67, 69–72; winner of the Akutagawa Prize, 69; Yamauba no bisho (1976, The Smile of a Mountain Witch*), 69 obasute (the abandoned granny), 243, 252, 253, 254–55 n9 obatarian (exaggerated and derogatory manga of a middle-aged woman), 250–51, 254 n8 Oda Makoto: Hiroshima (1981, translated as The Bomb*), 330 Ogawa Yōko, xix, xxv, 176; food and medical imagery, 185; Ninshin karendā (1991, Pregnancy Calendar; translated as Pregnancy Diary*), 185; shortlisted for International Booker Prize, xix; winner of the Akutagawa Prize, 185–88 Ogino Anna, xxvi, 256; and Bakhtinian carnival theory, 258; as a Rabelais scholar 258, 269 n3; Kashisu-gawa (2017, The River Cassis), 258–59; Momo monogatari (1994, Tales of Peaches), 257; mother-daughter conflicts, 258; parody from a woman’s perspective, 257; “Uchi no okan ga ocha o nomu” (1989, My Mum Drinks Tea) 269 n6; Watashi no aidokusho (1991, My Love-Hate Affair with Books), 257 Ōhara Mariko, xxii, 33, 34; forerunner of cyberpunk fiction, 34; Haiburido chairudo (1990, Hybrid Child*), 35, 36–37; interest in psychoanalysis, 35; and “maternal fascism”, 35; mother-daughter conflicts, 35, 36; and performance of gender, 35; use of cyborg bodies, 35; use of interruptions and repetitions, 35, 37; winner of Best Science Fiction award, 35; winner of Seiun Award, 35 okama (male-assigned but feminine presenting), 215, 216 Okinawa, xxvii; and Kadena Air Force Base (KAB), 313; and Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma, 311–12; occupation and reversion to Japan, 310, 312; Ryūkyū

Handbook of Japanese Women Writers

Kingdom, 312; US military presence on, 309–22 passim Ōkura Teruko, xxii, 18, 19; and dokufu (poison woman), 19; and “refinement” of female criminality, 21; women and foreigners as threats, 19; “Yōei” (The Enchantress) a.k.a. “Odoru supai,” or “The Dancing Spy”, 19–21 omiai (arranged marriage), 235 onna no jidai (women’s decade, referencing the 1980s): characterized by concern over questions of reproduction and caregiving, public employment, and marriage, 130; Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL, 1986), 130; Eugenics Protection Law (1982, later Maternity Protection Law in 1992), 130; and women’s life and lifestyle choices, 129; onnagata (actor playing women’s roles), 115, 116, 120 Ōoka Shōhei (critic), 4, 8, 265 Osaki Midori, xxv, xxviii, 341; “Appurupai no gogo” (1929, Apple Pie Afternoon), 177; as environmental writer, 350; Dainana kankai hōkō (1931, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense*), 178–81, 350, 351–52; Eiga mansō (Jottings on Film), 350; female characters represented lacking corporeality, 178; “Hokō” (1931, A Walk), 352–54; illness and cessation of writing, 350; and Japanese literary modernism, 350; “Kōrogijō” (1932, Miss Cricket*), 353; “Mokusei” (1929, Osmanthus*), 178; “Nioi—shikōchō no ni-san pēji” (1928, On Smell: Some Pages from the Preference Notebook), 177–78; and parody / comedic style, 177; translations and transnational connections, 176; use of food to show females and resistance, 177; works full of images of non-human life, 350 osanajimi (childhood sweethearts), 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64 oyaji gyagu (dad’s [pathetic] jokes), 259 Oyamada Hiroko, 203 Ozaki Kōyō: Konjiki yasha (1897–1902, The golden demon), 268

P pansori (Korean; narrative folksong), 384

Index

parody, xxvi; imitation and transformation, 258, 260; in Itō Hiromi, 259–64 passim; in Kanai Mieko, 264–67 passim; in Kyokutei Bakin, 88; in Ogino Anna, 257–59 passim; in Osaki Midori, 177–81 passim; requirement of text (hypotext), 256; and Urashima Tarō, 75 Pen Squadron, 285 postfeminism / postfeminist writings, 131–37 passim, 139, 143 prostitution / sex-work, 116, 125, 288, 297; as forced labor, 284; licensed quarters / red-light districts, 54, 55, 114, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 284, 316, 319, 320; oiran (prostitute of highest rank), 120; and Okinawa, 313–16, 320

Q queer, xxvi; companions, relationships, families, 140, 210, 212–20 passim; challenges to genderbinary system, 210; futurity, 34, 42–45; within the socio-cultural framework, 210 queer studies / queer literature, xxvi, 114; and “chick-lit”, 214; definition and history of, 209, 210; exclusion of all mainstream representations, 214, 220; in Japan, 209, 211, 212; and queer individuals’ desire to find a place, 220

R rankatsu (egg freezing), 42 ranshin (unpatriotic), 278 recessionary era (Japan’s), xxv, 148 ren’ai (modern romantic love), 55, 181 ren’ai kekkon (love marriage), 235 Ri Kaisei (also known as Lee Hoesung): first Zainichi writer to win Akutagawa Prize, 363; “Kinuta o utsu onna” (1971, The Woman Who Fulled Clothes*), 363 Roba (Donkey; journal), 103 rōdō shōsetsu (labor novels), 217 rōjo (old woman), xxvi, 244–48, 253 rōrō kaigo (literally, old-old caring, i.e., an elderly person looking after another elderly person), 257 ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), 23, 123, 161, 228, 284

397

S sadomasochism: and Kanehara Hitomi (Snakes and Earrings), 154; and Matsuura Rieko, 210 Sakiyama Tami, xxvii; “Akoukurou genshikō” (2017, Passing into Twilight Alley,* in Kuja genshikō), 319–20; “Kōtōmu dochuimuni” (2017, Solitary Island Dream Soliloquy; in Kuja genshikō), 316–18; Koza as a hybrid community, 317; Kuja genshikō (2017, Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja), 309, 316; “Kuja kisō kyokuhensō” (2017, Variations on Phantasmic Kuja; in Kuja genshikō), 321–22; “Mienai machi kara shonkaneega” (2017, Such is Life in an Invisible Town; in Kuja genshikō), 318–19; “Pingihirazaka yakkō” (2017, Night Passage from Pingihira Slope; in Kuja genshikō), 320–21; use of Okinawa’s dying languages, 316 Sakuraba Kazuki, xxiii; Fuse: Gansaku Satomi hakkenden (2010, Fuse: A Counterfeit Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan), 80, 89–90; notions of gender and childhood, 89; Watashi no otoko (2007, My Man), 89 sankyū papa project (paternal leave initiatives), 42 Sanreikyō (Three Spirit Faith; fictional religion), 24 Sata Ineko, xxiv, xxix, 97, 98; as proletarian writer, 104; censorship, 106, 107, 108, 109; early life, 103; Haiiro no gogo (1959-1960, Grey Afternoon), 104, 105; jailed for activism, 103; joined Japan Communist Party, 103; known for works based on personal experience, 106; Kurenai (1936–1938, Crimson*), 98, 104; “Kyarameru kōjō kara” (1928, From the Caramel Factory), 103; marriage with / divorce from Kubokawa Tsurujirō, 103; regret over works complicit with imperialism, 103; Suashi no musume (1940, Barefoot Girl), 98; and “tenkō jidai” (age of conversion), 105; Watashi no Tokyo chizu (1946-1948, My Map of Tokyo), 104 Sawachi Hisae, xxvii, 294; 14-sai “fōtīn”: Manshū kaitakumura kara no kikan (Fourteen Years Old: Return from a Japanese Pioneer Village), 299, 300–2; early life, 295, 299; pacifist

398

message of, 295, 302; and the reality of Japanese colonialism, 299–300; recollection of childhood and meaning of experience in the present, 300; science fiction (see speculative fiction) Sei Shōnagon, xxiii seiki ketsugō shugi (genital unionism, in Matsuura Rieko), 211 seishun bungaku (literatures of youth), 367 seiteki kankei (sexual relations), 108 Seitō (Bluestocking; journal), 98, 230 Seiun Award, 35 sekkyō-bushi (medieval Buddhist storytelling art), 260, 262, 263, 268 sen’nyo (an immortal female sage), 70, 72 sengyō shufu (full-time housewives), 210 Setouchi Harumi, xx shaguma (girl’s hairstyle), 56 Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, 380, 387 n9 Shiga Naoya, 257 shimada (a fashionable coiffure reserved for adult women and courtesans), 56 Shimazaki Tōson, 68 Shinchō Prize for New Writers, 132 shingeki (new theater), 118 shinpa (new drama), 118 Shintō shirei (Shintō Directive; dismantlement of state Shintō), 24 shishōsetsu or watakushi shōsetsu (I-novels), 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 168, 174 n2, 258, 259, 269 n4, 347, 384, 385 shōjo (adolescent girl): fantasy / dream, xxvi, 227–40 passim; and girls’ magazine culture, 228 Shōjo gahō (Girls’ illustrated; magazine), 228 shōjo manga (girls’ comics), 33 Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ friend; magazine), 231 Shōjo sekai (Girls’ world; magazine), 228 Shōjokai (Girls’ sphere; magazine), 228 Shōshika shakai taisaku kihon hō (The Basic Act for Measures to Cope with a Society of Declining Birthrate), 41 Shūgen Urashima dai (1831, Urashima’s wedding ceremony), 68 Shūkan bunshun (magazine), 89 sokoku (ancestral country), 379, 383 Soshiren (women’s activist group), 130

Handbook of Japanese Women Writers

speculative fiction, xxi, xxii, 33; as evolved from western science fiction, 33; linear narratives of futures, 34, 35; narrative techniques of, 33; relationship of futures to present and past 34; and reproductive futures, 34 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), 313 Sugimoto Akiko, 3 Sugimoto Sonoko, 3 Sugimura Haruko, 119 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), and Civil Censorship Detachment, 25; and the closure of Korean schools, 371 n2; and detective fiction, 23, 25; and Shintō shirei (dismantlement of state Shintō), 24

T taiga dorama (serialized TV history dramas), 4 taishū bungaku (mass / popular literature), 5, 249 Takahashi Takako, xxvi, xxviii, 195, 375; Bōmeisha (1995, The Exile), 379; “Byōbo” (1971, A Boundless Void*; in Kanata no mizu oto) 199–202; education, 198–99, 380; friendship with Endō Shūsaku, 380; influence of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, 380; inspiration of French writers, 380; Junreichi ni tatsu: Furansu nite (2004, Departing to the Land of Pilgrimage: In France), 386 n1; Kanata no mizu oto (1971, The Far-off Sound of Water), 199; “Kodomo-sama” (Honorable Child; translated as Holy Terror*; in Kanata no mizu oto), 199; marriage, and death of husband, Kazumi, 198–99; Odoroita hana (1980, Surprised Flower), 386 n1; protagonists’ focus on children, 199; relationship to France and French language, 379–80; religious conversion of, 379; “Sōjikei” (1971, Congruent Figures*; in Kanata no mizu oto), 199; use of image of “exile”, 379, 382; Watashi no tōtta michi (1999, The Path I Traveled), 379; Yosooi seyo, waga tamashii yo (1982, Array Yourself in Joy, My Soul), 380–82 Takamure Itsue, 195, 275 Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter*), 258 Takeuchi Naoko: Bishōjo senshi sērā mūn (1990s manga, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon*) 213, 221 n3

Index

tamakushige (a jeweled comb box), 68 tamatebako (a jeweled box), 67 Tamura Toshiko, xxiv, 97; Akirame (1911, Resignation), 98; “Hōraku no kei” (1914, Punishment by Fire), 100–3; “Ikichi” (1911, Lifeblood*), 98; and Josei or Nü shēng (Women’s voice; Chinese-language magazine), 98; “Kanojo no seikatsu” (2011, Her Life, 1915; translated as Her Daily Life*), 104; and key concepts: sensuality, malefemale conflict and gender performance, 98; “Kuko no mi no yūwaku” (1914, Temptation of the Wolfberries), 99–100; life in Canada and the US, 98; marriage, divorce and remarriage, 98; works from the 1910s, 98 Tanabe Seiko, xxi, xxvi, 243; as feminist writer, 234–35; challenges negative images of elderly women, 250, 253; early life, education and attraction to girls’ magazines, 231–32, 249; few translations of works into other languages, 249; Hanagari (1957, Flower Gathering) 254 n4; Hoshigarimasen katsu made wa (1977, We Want Nothing till We Win), 232; influenced by Yoshiya Nobuko, 231, 234; inspired by Enchi Fumiko, 243; Mukashi akebono (1979, Once Upon a Time at Dawn) 254 n4; Senchimentaru jānī (1964, Sentimental Journey), 234; Sensuji no kurokami (1972, A Thousand Strands of Black Hair) 254 n4; Shin Genji monogatari (1979, New Tale of Genji), 249; Tanabe Seiko no Kojiki (1986, Tanabe Seiko’s Record of Ancient Matters), 249; Uba katte (1993, Old Woman Does it Her Way), 249; Uba tokimeki (1984, Old Woman’s Butterfly), 249, 250–53; Uba ukare (1987, Old Woman in a Frenzy), 249; Uba zakari (1981, Old Woman in Full Bloom), 249; Uba zakari series (Old Woman in Full Bloom series), 234, 249; use of dialect, 249; Watashi no Ōsaka hakkei (1965, My Eight Views of Osaka), 232–34; winner of Akutagawa Prize and others, 249; and yumemi shōsetsu (dream like stories), 234 Tanabe Tatsuko, “Yabu no uguisu” (1888, Warbler in the Grove*) 54 Tango no kuni fudōki (The records of Tango Province), 68, 74

399

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 264; Chijin no ai (1924, Naomi*), 264; Daidokoro taiheiki (1963, translated as The Maids*) 270 n19; Fūten rōjin nikki (1961, Diary of a Mad Old Man*), 264; Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna (1936, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women*), 264; Sasameyuki (1936-1941, The Makioka Sisters*), 270 n19 tanka: 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm, 362; ji-amari and jitatazu (units), 362; kami no ku (first part) and shimo no ku (last part), 361 Tawada Yōko, xxiii, 80; and the German language, 86; “Higan” (2015, The Far Shore*), 338; idea of children as “animallike”, 87; Inumukoiri (1993, translated as The Bridegroom Was A Dog*), 80, 86–88; Kentōshi (2014, The Lantern Messenger; translated as The Emissary* [US] and The Last Children of Tokyo*[UK]), 220, 268; and oral storytelling traditions, 86; use of canines to insist on the corporeality of female bodies, 85; use of dogs to write about yearning for “wilderness”, 88; Tayama Katai: Futon (1907, The Quilt*) 268 teijo (chaste woman), 252 temari (handball), 126 Thompson-Seton, Ernest: Lives of the Hunted, 91 Three Children and Childrearing Related Acts (Kodomo/kosodate bijon), 41–42 Togawa Masako, xxii, 19; aging and interracial children as context for crime, 23, 25; Ōinaru gen’ei (1962, The Master Key*), 23–26; winner of Edogawa Ranpo Prize, 23 Tōgenkyō (The Peach Blossom Spring), 70 Tokaimura nuclear accident, 330, 339 n4 Tokkō keisatsu (Special Higher Police), 124, 125, 126 tokoyo no kuni (a faraway land recurring in Japanese mythology and literature), 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), 328, 330, 334 Tokyo subway sarin attack, 148 Tōma Hiroko, xxvii, 309; and the “Age of America”, 312–13; depiction of US army helicopter crash (2004), 311–12; poem as history of Okinawa, 310, 311; “Senaka” (2005, Backbone*), 309, 310–11

400

transnational narratives, 375; as diasporic literature, 375, 383; as “travel writing”, 374; and reshaping of transnational consciousness, 374; variety of writing; disparate genres, 374; trauma: as memory / painful history, xxvii, 36, 72, 147; caused by familial roles, 34, 36, 37, 45; caused by violence, 35, 37; and discrimination, xxviii; linked to social dislocation, 147–58 passim; sexual, xxiv, xxv tsūmei (passing name), 360, 365, 370 Tsushima Yūko, xxiii, 80; animal histories as part of human histories, 85; “Fuse-hime” (1984, Princess Fuse), 82; “Inu to hei ni tsuite” (2014, Of Dogs and Walls*), 82; Ōma monogatari (1984, Twilight Tales), 89; “Rekuiemu—inu to otona no tame ni” (1969, Requiem: For Dogs and Adults), 82; and the sociocultural importance of “real” canines, 84; Warai ōkami (2000, Laughing Wolf), 80, 82–85

U uba (old woman), 243, 249–51 Uchida Shungiku: Watashitachi wa hanshoku shite iru (We are breeding), 203 Ueda Akinari, 162 Ueda Kazutoshi: father of Enchi Fumiko, 244 Ueda Sayuri, xxii; and the Great Hanshin Earthquake, 41; humans as one species, 41; Karyū no miya, (2010, The Palace of Flower Dragons), 41, 44; and non-conformist reproductive futurism, 41, 42, 43; and nonhumans in science fiction, 41; The Ocean Chronicles, 34, 41, 42, 43; and queer futurity, 34, 43, 44; Shinku no hibun (2013, Deep Crimson Epitaphs), 41, 43 uli nala (Korean, our country), 383–84, 386 Uno Chiyo, xxix Urashima Tarō: as told in Nihon shoki (720, Chronicles of Japan), 67; as told in Tango no kuni fudōki (c.a. 713, The records of Tango Province), 68; in Kojidan (c.a. 1212, Talks about ancient matters), 74; in Mizukagami (c.a. 1195, The water mirror), 74; storyline, 67 Uri mal (Korean; our language), 369 US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, 312, 313 uta monogatari (poem tales), 52

Handbook of Japanese Women Writers

V Vargas Llosa, Mario, 264

W waka (the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable verse of elite Heian society), 52, 55, 56 wakame (dried seaweed), 181, 333 watakushi shōsetsu or shishōsetsu (I-novels), 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 168, 174 n2, 258, 259, 269 n4, 347, 384, 385 women writers: and 19th-century publishers, xxii; and autobiography, xxvii; censorship of, 97, 100, 102, 106–9 passim; and the classical tradition, xxiii, 51–92 passim; and colonial history / war, xxvii, 275–322 passim; and early literary aesthetics, xix; and English-language scholarship, xxix, 113, 350; and folktales, xxiii, 66–77 passim; and gender-specific styles, xv, xx, xxi; and girlhood, xxvi, 227–40 passim; giving voice to those who have been silenced, 5, 127, 338; and history / historical fiction, xxii, 3–15 passim; and literary prizes, xix; and mystery fiction, ix, xxii, 18; and narratives about sexuality, xxiv, 97–109 passim, 209–20 passim; and the patriarchal family system, xxv, xxvi, 195–220 passim; and resistance strategies, xxiii; and science fiction, xi, xxii, 33, 203, 334, 336; and “womanliness” xx, xxiii Women’s Literature Prize (Joryū bungakushō), 211, 249

Y Yamada Eimi: “Beddo taimu aizu” (1985, Bedtime Eyes*), 313 Yamashita Hiroka: Kurosu (2020, Cross), 220 Yi Yangji, xxviii, 375; early life and education, 384; Nabi Taryon (1982, The Lamenting Butterfly), 383, 384–85; and narrators of works, 384; personal experience as inspiration for works as universal theme, 383; theme of returning to ancestral homeland, 383, 384, 386; winner of Akutagawa Prize, 363; Yuhi (1988), 363, 383, 385–86 yōkan (sweet bean paste), 181 Yokomizo Seishi, 18

Index

Yomi no kuni (the underworld), 68 yomimono (written text), 4 Yomiuri Literary Prize, 249 Yosano Akiko, xxvii, xxix, 276; as anti-war, personal and apolitical, 277; as poet, rebel and individualist, 276; celebrates Japanese women’s fertility, 279, 280, 283; change from resistance to support, 281, 282, 283; “Kimi shini tamōkoto nakare” (1904, Brother, Do Not Give Your Life*), 122, 277–78; “Kōgan no shi” (1932, Rosy-Cheeked Death), 282; Manmō yūki (1928, Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia*), 278, 281–82; “Nihon kokumin asa no uta” (1931, Citizens of Japan, A Morning Song), 282; “Sensō” (1914, War), 279–80; Ubuya monogatari” (1909, Tales of the Delivery Room), 279 Yosano Hiroshi/Tekkan: “Seinosuke no shi” (1911, The Death of Seinosuke) 124 Yoshida Sueko, xxvii, 309; author of first fictional story set in Koza, 309, 313; “Kamaara shinjū” (1984, Love Suicide at Kamaara*), 309, 313–16; winner of New Okinawan Literature Prize, 313 Yoshikawa Eiji Prize, 249 Yoshimoto Banana, xxiv, xxviii, 129, 375; “Chiisana yami” (2000, Small Darkness; in Furin to Nanbei), 377, 378; cultural references to American popular culture. 376; “Denwa” (2000, Telephone; in Furin to Nanbei), 377; Furin to Nanbei (2000, Adultery and South America), 376, 377–78; “Hachi hanī” (2000, Bee Honey; in Furin to Nanbei), 377, 378; hybrid novel-guidebook format of Sekai no tabi series, 377; Kitchin (1987, Kitchen*), 132, 139–43, 211; Kitchen as global bestseller, 139 the “kitchen” as space of domestic happiness, 140 labor and happiness, 131, 141 “Mado no soto” (2000, Outside the Window; in Furin to Nanbei), 378–79; Marika no sofa / Bari yume nikki (1994, Marika’s Sofa / Bali Dream Diary), 376; Niji (2002, Rainbow), 376; Sekai no tabi (1994-2002, Global Journeys), 376; shokuen-kazoku (family that is related through eating), 140; SLY (1996), 376; and transnational characters, 376; varied languages of translations, 139, 376; writings set in global locations, 376

401

Yoshiya Nobuko, xxvi; Chi no hate made (1920, To the Furthest End of the Land), 228–29; early life and attraction to girls’ magazines, 228; early submissions to Shōjokai (Girls’ sphere) and Shōjo sekai (Girls’ world), 228; Hana monogatari (Flower Stories), 228; “Suzuran” (1916, Lily of the Valley), 228; winner of first prize in the Osaka Asahi Newspaper competition, 228–29; Yaneura no nishojo (1920, Two Virgins in the Attic), 229–31; Yū Miri, xix, xxviii, 359; and limited usefulness of “Zainichi literature” as a category, 370; Mizube no yurikago (1995–1996, Cradle at the Water’s Edge), 364; reluctance to be identified as a Zainichi writer, 364; unique style of prose, 364; Uo no matsuri (1992, Festival for the Fish*), 359, 364–67; use of hybridized, Sino-Japanese pronunciation of her name, 371; winner of Akutagawa Prize, 364; winner of Kishida Prize for Drama, 364; winner of National Book Award, xix; writing about personal and professional life, 364 yukar (Ainu epic chants), 82 yūwaku (temptation or seduction), 100

Z Zainichi Koreans, xxviii, 359, 383; and diasporic writing, 375, 384, 385; and discrimination, 383; and education, 360–61; history of, 360, 383; and hybrid identity, 384; Japan as place of temporary exile, 383; and the question of “homeland”, 383; real names” (honmyō) versus Japanese “passing names” (tsūmei), 360; repatriation to Korea after WWII, 361; women writers, 360 Zeami (Noh playwright), 58 zokushi (traitor), 278

402

Handbook of Japanese Women Writers

T

he Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers offers a comprehensive overview of women writers in Japan, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Featuring 24 newly written contributions from scholars in the field—representing expertise from North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia—the Handbook introduces and analyzes works by modern and contemporary women writers that coalesce loosely around common themes, tropes, and genres. Putting writers from different generations in conversation with one another reveals the diverse ways they have responded to similar subjects. Whereas women writers may have shared concerns—the pressure to conform to gendered expectation, the tension between family responsibility and individual interests, the quest for self-affirmation—each writer invents her own approach. As readers will see, we have writers who turn to memoir and autobiography, while others prefer to imagine fabulous fictional worlds. Some engage with the literary classics—whether Japanese, Chinese, or European—and invest their works with rich intertextual allusions. Other writers grapple with colonialism, militarism, nationalism, and industrialization. This Handbook builds a foundation which invites readers to launch their own investigations into women’s writing in Japan.

Rebecca Copeland, professor of modern Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), editor of Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), and co-editor with Melek Ortabasi of The Modern Murasaki: Selected Works by Women Writers of Meiji Japan 1885–1912 (Columbia University Press, 2006), among other works. She has also translated the works of Uno Chiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, and Kirino Natsuo and has recently completed the novel The Kimono Tattoo (Brother Mockingbird, 2021).

ISBN: 978-90-4855-835-3

Asian Studies / Japan Studies / Literature

9 789048 558353