Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the symbolic usage of the “witches” in Kawaguchi Harumi's award-winning book, Yagate majo no mori ni naru (May it Be a Witchforest, 2021), the presenter analyses how poetry can help to verbalize the difficult experiences women face and how it helps to deconstruct a social structure.

Paper long abstract:

Kawaguchi Harumi has been consistently challenging the male-dominated elitist (Japanese) poetry world by publishing BL (Boys Love) poetry anthology (2014), including anime and manga in her poetry, and using a bold BL manga illustration for her 2015 collection, Tiger is Here (the 46th Takami Jun Prize recipient), but Kawaguchi’s latest book, Yagate majo no mori ni naru (May it Be a Witchforest, 2021), which received the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize in 2022, is more noticeably political and boldly feminist. Kawaguchi recalls that her turning point was being part of the International Poetry Festival in Canberra and being a co-translator and co-editor of a poetry translation project with Anglophone poets in 2017 and 2018. It suggests her engagements outside Japan helped to probe entrenched notions of gender and identity in Japanese society.

The presenter will examine how Kawaguchi gives words to the struggles, anxieties, unfair treatments at school/home/work, vulnerabilities, sexual assaults, and violence that women face in their everyday life but cannot verbalize; how verbalization can help women to share their burdens and feelings, to be able to be more connected, to support each other, and hence to work together to make a fairer and more inclusive society.

Focusing on the women’s body depicted in this 2021 collection, the presenter will analyse how the images of fairy tales such as (evil) witches, women’s beauty and body, and naivety in women are twisted, and how the book proves that women do not need a prince to wake them up for they can awake themselves by their own will. The women’s body has been always seen and consumed as a sexual object and often considered as a “cause” of sexual violence, but the symbolic usage of a sleeping woman in a busy intersection in the poem, “Shindai (a bed)”, for instance, shows that women have the power to demolish the whole structure of such society by awakening themselves. The book suggests women do not need to wait for a prince or a fairly godmother to save them because all women are already witches whose beings are magical enough to deconstruct and renew the world.