Paper short abstract:

Lesbian writer Yoshiya Nobuko's Toki's Voice (1964) is a history of the Japanese Salvation Army's anti-prostitution movement. The paper considers her diverse rhetorical styles for recovering the voices of prostitutes given the limited documentation available to her.

Paper long abstract:

Just after the close of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, popular lesbian writer Yoshiya Nobuko began to serialize in the Yomiuri her historical novel Toki no koe about figures, in the Japanese Salvation Army and the modern anti-prostitution movement. While Toki no koe (lit. Voices of our Times) was the Japanese name of the Salvation Army newspaper The Salvationist, Yoshiya also found the name "Toki" in the logs at the Jokanji Temple, among the records of Yoshiwara corpses abandoned there. "Toki" died in 1888, so her "voice" was not recoverable. But through Yoshiya's novelistic account of this history, she revived women like her. She could have created a novel with dialogue and the fictionalized voices that the title seemed to promise, but I argue that Yoshiya instead tried to depict the social and political framework that had silenced them and rely on the empathy and imagination of readers to bring to life what women like Toki might have thought and said even as they were cast aside. In order to produce these "voices" that are under-documented, she turns actively to literary works, ranging from Higuchi Ichiyo's fiction from the Yoshiwara to poetry by women of the area to lesser known short stories that depicted comfort stations during the Pacific War, an institution that she witnessed during her time as a war reporter in 1941 Cambodia, and to which she ties the temporary silencing of the anti-prostitution movement during the war. She called also on her own fictional practices in serialized fiction of depicting the inner thoughts of women experiencing unwanted sexual contact, including young women in arranged marriages who preferred the company of their women friends. At the same time, she ran up against limits of access and needed to rely largely on men activists writing in The Salvationist for her information. The paper considers the diverse rhetorical methods for eliciting the voices of those silenced through anonymity, and the ways that modern media and shifting sexual identities created spaces and challenges for reviving them.