Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this presentation is to reconsider, through the voices of "minor" modernists, the situation of Japanese literature in the era of an "emergency" after the Manchurian Incident and the suppression of proletarian literature.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese literary revival (bungei fukko) movement since 1933 coincides with the period of controversy over land, such as "hometown" or "region." This confirms the connection with nationalism, and leads to the fact that Yojuro Yasuda, a Japan Romantic School critic, published “Literature of the Lost Land” (1934), responded to Hideo Kobayashi's famous critique "Literature of the Lost Home" (1933), to develop his idea that is linked to "Japanese lineage.” At the same time, modernists, whose decline was pointed out by Kobayashi, also pursued literary possibilities over the land. For example, Yukio Haruyama published "New Regionalist Novel Theory" (1934) in the magazine Action. The "regionalism" here is not only deeply related to peasant literature, but also the problem of the center and the provinces, based on the introduction of Provençal literature in France. Besides, this issue is connected to the framework of the "local color" in imperial Japan, and "regionalism" was also being explored by Japanese writers living in Taiwan. It was also during this period that Taku Oshika, who would come to prominence with his novel The Savage (1935), published his writings on Taiwanese aborigines in Action. These trends, which can be said to have differentiated into nationalism and colonialism, have a very similar character when viewed from the perspective of exoticism based on the longing for and beautification of the primitive. While the former goes back in time to empathize with the ancient ancestors and listen to their voices, the latter yearns for a spatially distant place and listens to the voice of the wild within. Based on the above, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, which was serialized in 1935, can be considered as a kind of exoticism and Japanese taste obtained by passing through a Western perspective, as well as "local" literature set in Echigo-Yuzawa, and as one of the problems faced by modernist literature in the mid-1930s. The purpose of this presentation is to reconsider, through the voices of "minor" modernists, the situation of Japanese literature in the era of an "emergency" after the Manchurian Incident and the suppression of proletarian literature.

Paper short abstract:

In the late 1930s, prominent Japanese male authors published several texts narrated in a young woman’s voice. The paper analyzes the literary performance of the opposite gender within the changing landscape of colonialism, militarism, censorship, and the redefinition of masculinity that followed.

Paper long abstract:

Performing femininity has been one expectation of Japanese female writing since the re-definition of literature under Western influences during the Meiji Restoration. Major women writers such as Higuchi Ichiyō crafted a modern literary language perceived as distinctively “female,” as opposed to the neutrality associated with the masculine voice of the new genbun itchi-style. Seki Reiko defines such literary forms as josō buntai, “writing in female drag,” underlining how female voices emerge following “normative feminine expressions created [...] to represent femaleness” (1997: 144). This paper addresses the shift in gender performance that happens when male writers perform femininity through the use of josō buntai. With Kawabata Yasunari’s articles in the female magazine Fujin kōron in the late 1930s and Dazai Osamu’s Schoolgirl (1939) as starting points, it examines the role female voices played in the literary rivalry between the two men in the context of a changing discursive regime. The Mukden Incident and the Literary and Artistic Renaissance (bungei fukkō) of the mid-1930s had transformed social and literary discourses under the influence of colonial expansion, militarism, censorship, and the redefinition of masculinity that followed. The paper analyzes how the literary re-enactment of an immature type of femininity became a criterion of success for two already established male writers. It asks two main questions: can the appropriation of female voices by male writers be understood as an act of silencing women or giving them exposure? And how does this gender performance fit within the changing political and literary landscape of 1930s Japan?

Seki Reiko. Kataru onna-tachi no jidai: Ichiyō to Meiji josei hyōgen (The Times of Narrating Women: Ichiyō and Female Expression During Meiji). Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1997.

Paper short abstract:

Portraits of male writers in their studios are very common in modern literature, while those of female writers in a room of their own are rare. This paper studies the appearance of modern women writers’ self-representation in the studio with a focus on Hayashi Fumiko’s works.

Paper long abstract:

In the Meiji period the shosai (studio) was a male gendered space, mainly set up in the upper-class houses of writers and intellectuals. Used for reading, writing or limited social interactions, the studio was a private room that ensured privacy and quietness. In their studio writers could carry out artistic experiments undisturbed. Given the importance of the studio and its association with the identity and creativity of the owner, not surprisingly many modern novelists chose to portray themselves as writers in their private and intimate workplaces. Natsume Sōseki, for example, used his shosai as a medium for representing himself. In fact, despite the variety of styles, subjects and moods, a common feature of his semiautobiographical works is the presence of an ironic and self-deprecatory narrator in his studio cluttered with books. We see him at work pressed to meet a deadline, interrupted by inopportune visits, reflecting upon whatever comes to his mind or trying to warm up over a hibachi in a winter day.

It was only in the second decade of the twelfth century, during the Taishō period, that women started to argue that wives and female writers too should have a space of their own within the domestic milieu. Changes in ideas about the roles of women within the family and the society contribute to degender the study that slowly became available for use by women also. At the same time, the transformation of physical space contributed to the consolidation of new patterns of behaviours.

This paper will study the emergence of the image of a female writer in her private and intimate workplace with a focus on Fumiko Hayashi’s self-portrait in her short essay Seikatsu.