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Paper short abstract

The paper shows how Hasegawa Shigure uses life writing in magazine essays to negotiate her position in the theatrical field and her engagement with kabuki, drawing on experiences of creative work and domestic pressures to assert cultural authority for women in early twentieth century Japan.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines selected life writing by Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941), the first Japanese woman to achieve public recognition as a kabuki playwright, framing these texts as both personal testimony and deliberate cultural intervention. Particular attention is given to Kasei o tori nagara kyakuhon o kaku tanoshimi (The pleasure of writing scripts while managing the household), published in 1909 in the women’s magazine Fujin Sekai, and to Shibai to kyakuhon (Theatre and scriptwriting), which appeared in Kabuki magazine in May 1909. The paper also considers Watari kiranu hashi (A bridge that cannot be crossed), part of a collection of zuihitsu that first appeared in 1929 in Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s art, 1928–1932), a magazine edited by Shigure herself, where these writings were published intermittently until the journal’s cessation. Thus, these writings appeared in both women’s magazines and theatre-focused periodicals. Across these and other texts, Shigure reflects on her early engagement with theatre, the daily negotiations between creative work and domestic demands, and the structural disadvantages faced by women writers. Her discourse repeatedly presents dramaturgy as contingent, shaped by deference to male predecessors and constrained by household responsibilities; yet these same reflections function as a means of asserting her authority within a sphere conventionally closed to women. By analysing how Shigure mobilises life writing, this paper argues that she transforms self-narration into a site of authorial negotiation, using personal experience to claim cultural agency and to articulate a position for women within the kabuki and broader theatrical world of early twentieth century Japan.