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Paper short abstract

Hayashi Mariko (1965–) became an iconic woman writer in the 1980s, the so-called women’s decade (onna no jidai). This presentation analyses her early work as a proto-postfeminist novel, where women’s individual choices and freedom for employment and sexuality are in contest with collective change.

Paper long abstract

Winning the Naoki literary prize in 1985, Hayashi Mariko became an iconic writer of the 1980s, to the extent of being called “a prodigy of the decade” (Suzuki 2010). This presentation will analyse her autobiographical novel Hoshi ni negai o (1984, Wish upon a Star) in the contexts of the 1980s, in light of contemporary debates and issues in women’s employment, freedom and happiness. Considering Hayashi and her ambivalent positionality regarding feminism, reading her early work will help us to understand this proto-postfeminist novel as an account of women’s fraught choices, success and happiness. I will analyse the individualist stance the novel takes in relation to a critical reading of Downing’s contested concept of the ‘selfish woman’ (2019). Where Sanga (2019) engages with Hayashi’s later novels from a postfeminist lens, I trace these concepts back and elaborate further on them in her earlier work, which I consider here as proto-postfeminist.

The 1980s is the so-called women’s decade (onna no jidai), when the possibility of equal employment is legalised in principle (Equal Employment Opportunity Law), while, in contradiction, law and policy retained women at home as housewives, with the revision of pension protections (No.3 insured). I read Hayashi’s novel in such a context of the 1980s, with these legal contradictions and the polarisation in women’s lifestyles and their possibilities for ‘freedom’, ultimately highlighting the controversial nature of her Hoshi ni negai o. Writing in the bildungsroman form, the protagonist’s social mobility from working class to becoming a successful copy writer resonates with Hayashi’s life. Written at the peak of the Japanese economic bubble, Hayashi herself and her works controversially represent the desire to conduct her individual success, in employment and sexuality. In dialogue with Downing’s contentious valorisation of the ‘selfish woman’, I argue that Hayashi created a rather controversial icon of women’s freedom and happiness in this novel.