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- Convenor:
-
Nozomi Uematsu
(The University of Sheffield)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
- Location:
- Lokaal 2.24
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the significance of translation to the formation of feminist ideas, women’s socio-cultural roles and women’s writing from 1953 to the present in the Japanese context, developing a genealogy of women writers’ work in translation and thereby opening the way for further research.
Long Abstract:
Translation has played a significant role in the formation of modern Japanese literature, in relation to national and individual identities. As Seiji Lippit argues, Japanese modernist writers such as Futabatei Shimei re-fashioned Japanese writing though ‘the literal translation of American, European, and Russian writings’. Similarly, women writers in modern and contemporary Japanese literature make translation a space to negotiate their identities and their socio-cultural situation for equality. This panel will examine such feminist textual engagements through translation from the postwar period up to the present. It traces how women writers and translators build better futures through the international and intercultural connections that their works hold the potential to create. Kathy Davis posits, “I see translation as essential to feminist activism—in other words, there can be no successful feminist politics without translation”. Our panel seeks to situate these concepts of translation and feminism in a Japanese context, developing a genealogy of women writers’ work in translation from the past seventy years.
Our first paper analyses the impact of the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on Japanese literature in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when gender politics involved actively and critically negotiating the stereotypes around women’s lives. It further explores how the translation of this canonical work helped shape concepts of feminism in the early postwar era. A second paper discusses Kanai Mieko’s attempt to deconstruct the gender binary in her work, reflecting on the analogy of the text as a body, and consequently the challenges of translating this work, not only for its words and meaning, but for this corporeality. Our third paper examines the recent literary landscape of widespread English translations of contemporary Japanese women’s writing and the translators’ agency, discussing the challenges and possibilities of English translations in the context of World Literature.
The panel will thus propose that an intersectional feminist approach to translation of Japanese women’s writing has the potential to build on advances in translation studies, closely connecting the futures of feminism with the act of translation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Nozomi Uematsu (The University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the recent trend of translation of contemporary Japanese women’s writing from the viewpoint of care and labour. Situating the trend in World Literature, I explore the challenges and possibilities of intersectional solidarity through paying attention to the agency of translators.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the recent and on-going trend of translation and publication of contemporary Japanese women’s writing. The translation of contemporary Japanese women’s writing has received significant recognition through numerous awards and nominations of international literary prizes in recent years: Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated 2018), Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary (translated 2018), Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (translated 2019), Miri Yu’s Tokyo Ueno Station (translated 2019), Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Things as An Easy Job (translated 2020), Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are (translated 2020), Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs (translated 2020), and her Heaven (translated 2021). These works deal consistently with issues of care and labour, including through attention to social, economic and gender inequality.
This paper sees the two issues from this trend as potential contact points that people in the Anglophone world and beyond are drawn into, and find engaging in contemporary Japanese women’s writing in translation: the challenges of balancing care work and employment, and the ways that capitalist and neoliberalist societies render care work and labour invisible. Through this framework, this paper analyses the translators’ care and labour in creating such a literary landscape from the viewpoint of translators’ studies (Vassallo 2022), which recognises the agency of translators in creating this emerging landscape.
Second, this paper considers the ways in which such a literary trend situates itself in the field of World Literature. Francesca Orsini (2016) criticises World Literature giants Damrosch and Moretti’s universalising approaches for the ways they erase or flatten the elements that make literary cultures unique and distinct in diverse places around the world, and proposes instead the literary phenomenon that she terms “situated geographies.” While diversifying the literary and translation works through contemporary women’s writing, it is also imperative to consider the challenges that this trend poses to accessibility, and be cautious not to equate translation into English as the main marker of a work’s “success” as literature.
In summary, this paper examines the recent trend of translations of Japanese women’s writing through the lens of feminist translators’ study, to explore and question its possibilities towards intersectional solidarity.
Julia Bullock (Emory University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the influence of the 1953 Japanese translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on Japanese women writers, who imagined new feminist futures through fiction and essays, ranging from homage to parody, that grappled with the philosophical implications of her arguments.
Paper long abstract:
Japan’s defeat in World War II produced an exhilarating and confusing landscape of opportunity for Japanese women. On one hand, postwar legal reforms granted women an unprecedented array of new rights. But prewar stereotypes of women as “good wives and wise mothers” (actual or potential) continued to dominate the cultural imagination, and sexual discrimination persisted in spite of legal guarantees of equality. And the consolidation of conservative rule under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 1955 threatened to roll back the Occupation-era reforms.
Japanese women spent the first few postwar decades struggling to process these changes and chart a path forward that would reconcile their own ambitions with the reality of this new cultural and political landscape. This paper explores the various ways that female Japanese authors negotiated this new landscape toward the creation of a postwar Japanese feminism that reconciled past and present with foreign and domestic models of liberation for women.
Translation of foreign works provided one source of inspiration in imagining such feminist futures. The appearance of Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic manifesto The Second Sex in Japanese, in five volumes published from 1953 to 1955, was a watershed moment. The text quickly became a bestseller, and its unflinching account of female subordination across human history and culture and bold pronouncements about the possibilities of liberation from patriarchy were hotly debated. Her visit to Japan with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1966 gave her Japanese fans the opportunity to observe the famous pair up close, and further sparked debates about the desirability or feasibility of Beauvoir’s own brand of feminism in the Japanese context. Women writers explored the feminist potential of her arguments in literature, from fictional appropriation of her ideas by writers such as Asabuki Tomiko and Kurahashi Yumiko that ranged from homage to parody, to essays by Takenishi Hiroko and Saegusa Kazuko that critiqued Beauvoir’s thought. As I will demonstrate, these various forms of engagement with Beauvoir’s life and works sparked the creation of new strands of feminist philosophy inspired by foreign antecedents yet embedded in the lived experience of Japanese women.
Hannah Osborne (University of East Anglia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the discussion on the body as an origin of writing that was ongoing between women writers of the late 1960s and 1970s, drawing on my practice of translation to examine how the early short stories of Kanai Mieko work to both deconstruct and re-inscribe such a notion.
Paper long abstract:
In the late 1960s and 1970s women writers in Japan produced fiction that radically questioned what it meant to be a woman: inscribing protagonists with abject sexual, criminal and murderous desires that overturned their gender’s assigned conventional social roles as good wives and wise mothers. These texts appropriated the body as an origin for their own creativity, thereby carving out a distinctive literary mode which has served as a model of literary resistance for future generations of writers. Yet, despite their significance, much of these writers’ fiction has suffered, and continues to suffer, from a dearth of translation and scholarship, even while Japanese women writers of the present day are experiencing a boom in translation.
However, I wish to argue the act of translating these texts, not only offers insight into their own historical moment, but also can serve to illuminate contemporary discussions of translation, literature, and gender. In particular, I examine how the early short fiction of Kanai Mieko (b.1947) repeatedly constructs and operates through a paradox that lies at the very heart of the impulse to inscribe active female protagonists. This paradox manifests itself in the fact that text can be understood both an abstract composite space, where ideas and concepts – including those that inform the categorisation of genders – play out; and as a physical/material being or entity, which operates metonymically as a manifestation of the writer’s physical being – including the specificities that make up that being, such as sex and gender assignment.
In discussing several examples drawn from Kanai’s early short stories, such as ‘Rabbits’, ‘Rotting Meat’, ‘Homecoming’ and ‘The Story of the Inflated Man’, I will examine how this paradox manifests itself in Kanai’s texts, what problems it poses for the translator and possible solutions to these. Finally, in examining the gap between the meanings generated by Kanai’s corporeal texts and their translation, I will show how they, and the various acts of translation they encourage, allow us to rethink both our understanding of literature, translation and gender today.