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.