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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Yosano Akiko—the first woman to write hyōron for Waseda bungaku—positioned herself in this masculine literary field and argues that as a woman Akiko could not simply write a critique but had to strategically embed it in an autobiographical narrative framework.

Paper long abstract

Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) was one of Japan’s most famous modern women writers. When Myōjo, the poetry magazine published by Akiko and her husband, folded and the Yosano household faced financial strain, Akiko—until then known primarily as a poet—turned to a wide range of genres, writing for diverse venues and audiences to support her family. This paper focusses on the hyōron (critiques) she wrote in this period for Waseda bungaku, one of the period’s most prestigious literary journals. Although the magazine published work by numerous women writers, their contributions were limited to fiction, drama, and poetry; Akiko was the only woman recognized as a critic in its pages. Her hyōron for this male-dominated readership are notable for their extensive autobiographical passages. These passages have long led scholars to treat the essays primarily as biographical data, neglecting both these texts’ context (Waseda bungaku) and genre (hyōron).

By taking both context and genre into account in my analysis, I show that these autobiographical passages provided Akiko with a legitimizing framework—a strategic pretext that enabled a woman writer to enter the domain of critique. I propose that as Akiko’s first forays into the genre of critique, these early hyōron present us with an important example of how Akiko, as a woman writer, positioned herself in the literary field. Further, they show how her texts strove to construct both authority and legitimacy for Akiko’s identity as a critic. Reinterpreting these essays as acts of literary positioning rather than biographical testimony reveals how Akiko navigated gendered constraints in the early twentieth-century literary field and, more broadly, illuminates the instrumental uses of life writing in this period. This analysis shows that treating these texts merely as biographical data—as is common in scholarship—does not do justice either to the intricate positioning that takes place in these texts or to the difficult position of Akiko as a woman hyōronka in a masculine space. Thus, this paper aims to broaden our understanding of the position of women in the late Meiji literary field and critically examines practices of life writing in this period.