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.