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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines translations of Victor and Paul Margueritte by Yoshiya Nobuko (Zette: Histoire d'une petite fille 1903; Shōjo Zette 1930) and Mochizuki Yuriko (La garçonne 1922; Michizure, 1928) with attention to how the translations explored the performativity of gender and sexual autonomy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the translations of French brothers, Victor and Paul Margueritte by Yoshiya Nobuko (Zette: Histoire d'une petite fille 1903 translated as Shōjo Zette 1930) and Mochizuki Yuriko (La garçonne, The Bachelor Girl, 1922 translated as Michizure, 1928). Amidst more well-known translations of canonical works as key to narratives of modern Japanese literary history, this paper considers instead these less well-known translations of works of literature that explored the performativity of gender and sexual autonomy.

La garçonne's frank exploration of the bisexual relationships of a single mother lost Victor Margueritte the Légion d'honneur. Mochizuki found surprising that "even in supposedly advanced countries, a woman loses her power and inheritance if she marries" and translated the work to convey story of this young woman who refuses to marry in order maintain her sexual autonomy and legal status as mother of her child. Yoshiya Nobuko writes that she chose Zette: Histoire d'une petite fille to translate when asking people in Paris for recommendations for fiction depicting girlhood in France. However, it is also likely that she read Mochizuki's translation depicting bisexuality, and as a woman in a same-sex relationship herself, she may have been looking for additional works by the same writer.

As discussed by Michiko Suzuki and Sarah Frederick, translations and references to Edward Carpenter by Yoshiya Nobuko, Yamada Waka, and Yamakawa Kikue reappropriated his work focused on relationships among men to consider girls' same-sex relationships and feminist possibilities of his thought. Ikuta Shungetsu (assistant to Ikuta Chōkō and spouse of Seitō member Ikuta Hanayo), co-translated George Sand with teenager Nakamura Chiyoko in 1919. These figures all overlapped in the feminist and leftist magazines of the 1910s and 1920s.

This paper considers the translations of the Margueritte brothers in the context of this milieu of queer cosmopolitanism in the Japanese feminist community. It will also consider stylistic elements, including the role these translations may have played in developing new language for girls' fiction and political fiction.