Abstract
The term joryû bungaku is used both popularly and critically as a single category, meaning “all writing by Japanese women of any historical period.” And yet it is critically empty; that is, it has no definitional characteristics: it does not describe a genre, a social program, a political stance. However, especially since the early 1960s some women writers have been producing fiction that seems to be so different from tilings that came before that it ought to be distinguished by its own separate designation. In my own work I have been using the term danrvû bungaku to refer to the “(largely male) canonical tradition of modern Japanese literature;” I have reserved jorvû bungaku for “(older) types of women’s writing that do not challenge received categories;” and have added a third term, shin-josei bungaku, to refer to the new kind of post-1960s Japanese women’s writing. Here I will bring several contemporary Japanese women writers into dialogue with some classic texts, to show how their work fits onto the classical templates. I compare Ariyoshi Sawako’s The Twilight Years and Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen as examples of jorvû bungaku in symmetry with the classical tradition, and Kurahashi Yumiko’s The Adventures of Sumivakist Q as a shin-josei bungaku example of asymmetry. I will suggest thereby some ways women writers have been maintaining and breaking apart the orders, patterns and symmetries that have governed both the practice of and critical discourse on contemporary Japanese fiction.
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References
D. Robins-Mowry. The Hidden Sun: Women of Modern Japan, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1983.
S. Ariyoshi. Käkotsu no hito, Shinchäsha, Tokyo, 1972; tr. M. Tahara, The Twilight Years, Peter Owen, London, 1984.
B. Yoshimoto. Kitchin, Fukutake Shoten, Tokyo, 1988; tr. M. Backus, Kitchen, Grove Press, New York, 1993 (paperback edition).
Y. Kurahashi. Sumiyakisuto Q no bäken, Kädansha, Tokyo, 1969; tr. D. Keene, The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1979.
Translated as “Partei,” by Y. Tanaka and E. Hansen, in This Kind of Woman, Perigee Books, Putnam Publishing Group, New York, 1982.
Taketori monogatari is, of course, the same “Tale of the Bamboo Cutter referred to above.
“Shäsetsu no meiro to hitaisei” (“Negativity and the Labyrinth of Fiction”), in Y. Kurahashi, Watashi no naka no kare e, Kädansha, Tokyo, 1970, p. 286; translation in H. Hibbett, Contemporary Japanese Literature, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977, p. 247.
In the classic form of the shi-shäsetsu, the narrator or protagonist is closely identified with the author; it is sometimes called the “I-novel.”
The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q, p. 133.
Ibid., p. 176-77.
Ibid., p. 205.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Tokyo
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Lyons, P.I. (1996). Women’s Narratives and Anti-narratives: Re-reading Japanese Traditions. In: Ogawa, T., Miura, K., Masunari, T., Nagy, D. (eds) Katachi ∪ Symmetry. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-68407-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-68407-7_10
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