Paper short abstract:

Through a performance-based analysis of Yosano Akiko’s autobiographical texts, this paper lays bare a friction between autobiographical text and biographical representation in the current scholarship on Yosano Akiko and attempts to diversify the ways in which we narrativize Yosano Akiko.

Paper long abstract:

During her life Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) wrote an astonishing amount of texts in an equally astonishing variety of genres, among which many autobiographical texts. Although there exists no detailed analysis of her autobiographical text as a group, previous scholarship has instrumentalized fragments of these texts as “evidence” to prove specific theories about Yosano Akiko, her life, and her work. This paper suggests that relegating these texts to such a supporting role does them insufficient justice, because it leaves the text, its workings, and its context unexplored.

Instead, I will analyze these texts through the framework of life writing, a field in Literary Studies that applies the notion of performative (gender) identity to the reading and understanding of autobiographical texts. The focus on performance entails focusing on the contextuality and gendered aspects of self-representation. Both are especially interesting when looking at autobiographical texts in prewar Japan: in a field where the author was gendered male, how did women writers textually construct their identities as both women and writers? In addition, contextualization calls attention to the performance’s audience—the implied reader—and in doing so examines what is at stake in self-representation, how the text conveys this to its reader, and how a particular self-representation can be situated within various discourses on gender and authorship. In other words, in this paper I move from an approach that instrumentalizes autobiographical texts to construct larger narratives about her life and work, to one in which individual instances of self-representation through autobiographical texts are instrumental to our understanding of Yosano Akiko as a writer.

By exploring the friction between self-representation and biographical representation, this paper aims to rethink the status of autobiographical texts in current scholarly practices. It asks: when bits and pieces of different autobiographical texts are put together to tell a single story, whose story does this narrative tell? This paper proposes that in such heavily mediated accounts we invariably hear the voice of the scholar/biographer, and that a return to the text will allow us a glimpse of Yosano Akiko—how she wrote about herself and why.