- Convenor:
-
Shweta Arora
(Yamaguchi University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel examines women’s voices in modern Japanese literature across prose, poetry, and adaptation. Through polyphony, collective authorship, and remediation, the papers show how women’s voices emerge through tension, collaboration, and reinterpretation within male-dominated literary systems.
Long Abstract
This panel examines how women’s voices are articulated, constrained, and reconfigured in modern Japanese literature across genres, periods, and media. Focusing on narrative polyphony, collective authorship, and adaptation, the papers explore how female perspectives emerge not as unified positions but through tension, fragmentation, and relational practices within male-dominated literary systems.
The first paper revisits Yosano Akiko’s Imōto (1910), a Meiji-period prose fiction frequently read as endorsing the patriarchal inheritance system of yōshi. Challenging this interpretation, the paper reads the text through the lens of narrative polyphony, drawing on Bakhtin to show how Akiko stages competing voices that move beyond a monophonic patriarchal logic. By tracing shifts between socially sanctioned discourse and women’s subjective responses, the analysis demonstrates how the story ultimately destabilizes inheritance norms through narrative disharmony, foregrounding the constraints faced by women writers in a patriarchal cultural context.
The second paper turns to postwar poetry by examining Nyonin Tanka (1949–1997), a women-only tanka journal that functioned as a gendered literary community. Situating the journal within a lineage that includes Seitō while emphasizing its distinct programmatic aims, the paper analyzes how collective editorial practice, circulation, and imitation produced a shared poetic space. Drawing on theories of lyric communities, historical consciousness, relational networks, and rhythm, it argues that women’s poetic voices here emerge through collaboration rather than individual expression, reshaping participation in Japan’s modern poetic field.
The third paper addresses voice through adaptation, focusing on representations of female characters in adaptations of Dazai Osamu’s Ningen Shikkaku. While the original novel marginalizes women’s speech within a male narrative perspective, later animated and live-action adaptations reintroduce and reinterpret female voices. By comparing these versions, the paper demonstrates how adaptation functions as a site where suppressed perspectives are negotiated and partially restored.
Together, these papers reveal how women’s voices in modern Japanese literature are produced through polyphony, collectivity, and remediation. The panel contributes to modern literary and gender studies by showing that voice is not simply granted or denied but is continuously reshaped through narrative form, institutional practice, and media transformation.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Imōto (Younger Sister, 1910) by Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), often read as endorsing the patriarchal yōshi system, instead stages competing male and female voices. Drawing on Bakhtin, this paper reads its polyphonic tension and narrative disharmony as a critique of patriarchy.
Paper long abstract
Yosano Akiko’s Imōto (Younger Sister, 1910) addresses a central concern of Meiji-period fiction: inheritance and family succession in modern Japan. Critical reception of the short story has largely framed it as supporting the patriarchal inheritance system of yōshi. This paper challenges that reading, arguing instead that Akiko’s narrative voice shifts from a socially sanctioned, monophonic patriarchal form to a polyphonic structure that foregrounds women’s responses to inheritance and marriage, inviting a gendered interpretation that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.
To develop this argument, the paper draws on the concept of polyphony, originally a musical term referring to the coexistence of multiple independent voices or melodies, and later adapted to literary theory by Mikhail Bakhtin in his analysis of Dostoevsky. I argue that polyphony offers a productive framework for reading Imōto, as Akiko constructs a narrative in which multiple viewpoints coexist and interact rather than being subordinated to a single authoritative perspective. Through this structure, the story articulates tensions between patriarchal norms and women’s subjective experiences.
The analysis focuses on how Akiko distributes narrative attention across the central characters involved in the yōshi system, revealing divergent emotional and ethical responses to its demands. While male perspectives remain present, the text increasingly foregrounds women’s voices, exposing the constraints placed on them within a patriarchal family system. These voices do not resolve into harmony; instead, the narrative culminates in a state of disharmony that disrupts the apparent stability of inheritance and succession.
The paper has two aims. First, it clarifies how polyphonic narration can illuminate the formal strategies used by Japanese women writers working within restrictive cultural and literary contexts. Second, it identifies the specific modes of polyphony at work in Imōto, demonstrating how ambiguity and narrative tension function as a critique of patriarchy, particularly of the yōshi inheritance system. By ending in narrative dissonance rather than resolution, Imōto underscores the importance of a gendered reading for understanding both its form and its social critique.
Paper short abstract
Ningen Shikkaku (1948) by Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), despite the author’s frequent use of female narrators, largely silences its female characters. This paper examines how animated and live-action adaptations reinterpret and reintroduce these women’s voices.
Paper long abstract
Dazai Osamu (1909–1948) is well known for adapting the female voice in his works. For example, in Joseito (1939) the female narrator gives a description of her day, or the post-war hit Shayō (1947) is also fully narrated by Kazuko, a female narrator. However, in his final work Ningen Shikkaku (1948), the female characters have very few spoken lines. This work is narrated by the male protagonist, Yōzō, completely from his perspective; however, many of the female characters that he interacts with throughout the work have their “voice” either completely removed or filtered into his narrative.
In this presentation I will examine how the female characters in Ningen Shikkaku are given voices in adaptations. In particular, I would like to focus on the characters Tsuneko and Yoshiko by comparing their lack of voice in the original work and how their voices appear in the 2009 animation and 2010 live action film. By looking at how these characters are depicted in adaptation, we can see how the voices of these important female characters have been interpreted from the source work and further understand the depth of the characters.
Paper short abstract
Nyonin Tanka (1949–1997) was a women-led poetic journal in postwar Japan. Drawing on feminist approaches, this paper examines it as a gendered lyric community in which women’s voices emerged collectively through editorial practice, circulatory networks and engagement with the tanka tradition.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines Nyonin Tanka (1949–1997), a women-led tanka journal, as a gendered lyric community that reshaped how women’s voices were articulated within Japan’s modern poetic field. Building on scholarship that has shown how women’s poetry has historically been positioned as joryū (women-stream), structurally separate from the literary mainstream (Kikuchi 2019), the paper situates Nyonin Tanka within a longer genealogy of women’s collective literary practices. Rather than treating this separation as marginal, it argues that women-only poetic spaces functioned as structurally significant sites for producing alternative modes of voice, authorship, and literary participation.
In contrast to earlier women-edited periodicals such as Seitō (1911–1916) and Josei Nihonjin (1920–1923), which framed women’s participation through ideological critique, education, or reformist engagement with nationalism (Talibi 2025), Nyonin Tanka articulated a distinctly literary project. It foregrounded poetry as a shared practice, treating tanka as a collective medium through which women engaged tradition, responded to one another’s work, and sustained a continuous poetic presence within a male-dominated field.
Drawing on the concept of lyric communities (Fantappiè, Giusti, Scuriatti 2024), T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “historical sense” (Eliot 1919), and Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of rhythm and subjectivity in "Revolution in Poetic Language" (1974), the paper analyses how Nyonin Tanka functioned through collective editorial mediation and circulation. Attention to patterns of repetition, resonance, and rhythmic alignment across poems reveals how individual voices were shaped relationally, in dialogue with a shared sense of tradition and contemporaneity. These practices allowed contributors to position themselves simultaneously within and against established tanka lineages.
By reframing Nyonin Tanka as part of a broader history of women’s poetic collectivities, this paper argues that women’s voices in modern Japanese literature are not simply excluded from the mainstream but are continuously reconfigured through alternative institutional forms. In doing so, it foregrounds collective authorship as a fundamental, rather than marginal, mechanism in the formation of modern Japanese poetry.