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Paper short abstract

This paper situates transgender literary characters within their historical and socio-political contexts. Preliminary findings show that their portrayals have diversified over the past quarter-century, reflecting Japan’s real-world policy changes and public discourse.

Paper long abstract

Literary fiction is never completely detached from reality. It explores various topics and issues, introducing readers to a multitude of imaginable social realities. Based on this understanding of literature, this paper examines the interactions between socio-cultural views and the portrayals of transgender characters in contemporary Japanese literature.

Since the turn of the millennium, the number of Japanese literary works featuring fictional transgender characters has increased, even more notably after 2018, coinciding with socio-political developments such as the ban on forced sterilisation of transgender individuals, backlash from the anti-gender movement, and growing public interest in the topic. Despite increased media coverage surrounding these issues, the portrayal of transgender literary characters remains largely understudied – globally, but especially within the Japanese context. My contribution addresses this gap by demonstrating how the development and diversification in the portrayal of fictional transgender characters reflect changes in Japanese laws and attitudes.

This paper is part of a larger research project in which I employ a multidisciplinary framework to identify emerging patterns in the portrayals of transgender characters in contemporary Japanese literature. For analytical purposes, I focus solely on prose works of fiction published after 1945. This paper aims to provide an insight into the corpus by situating the literary works within their historical, linguistic (e.g. identity labels, derogatory terms), and socio-political contexts. Preliminary results show that the characters’ occupations and social roles have become more diverse. Another finding is that, in recent years, transgender characters have shifted from being secondary characters to protagonists or narrators, indicating that it has become socially permissible for readers to experience the plot through the eyes of a transgender character. Additionally, the struggles of transfeminine and transmasculine characters are portrayed as being different, both in terms of their impact on daily life and whether they are related to gender identity. The observed developments in the portrayal of transgender characters reflect real-world Japanese policy changes and media coverage, further highlighting how socio-political issues are – sometimes more explicitly, sometimes less – explored within literary fiction.