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.