Envisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early 20th Century Japan Hitomi Yoshio Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Hitomi Yoshio All rights reserved ABSTRACT Envisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early 20th Century Japan Hitomi Yoshio This dissertation examines the discourses surrounding women and writing in the rapidly commercialized publishing industry and media in early 20th-century Japan. While Japan has a rich history of women's writing from the 10th century onwards, it was in the 1910s that the journalistic category of "women's literature" (joryû bungaku) emerged within the dominant literary mode of Naturalism, as the field of literature itself achieved a respectable cultural status after the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Through a close textual analysis of fictional works, literary journals, and newspapers from the turn of the century to the 1930s, I explore how various women embraced, subverted, and negotiated the gendered identity of the "woman writer" (joryû sakka) while creating their own spheres of literary production through women's literary journals. Central to this investigation are issues of media, translation, canonization, and the creation of literary histories as Japanese literature became institutionalized within the new cosmopolitan notion of world literature. The first chapter explores how the image of the woman writer formed around the key figure of Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) within the interrelated discourses of Naturalism, the New Woman, and decadence in the 1910s. As the New Woman became a social phenomenon alongside ongoing debates about women's issues, feminist women inaugurated the journal Seitô (Bluestocking, 1911-16) as a venue for women's literature. While this category renders their writings marginal to mainstream literature, it was a progressive, political position that marked their place within the literary world. I examine Toshiko's ambivalent position within this feminist project, and the instability of the media image of the New Woman that was always on the verge of slipping into the decadent figure of femme fatale. The second chapter examines the canonization of the late 19th-century prominent writer Higuchi Ichiyô (1872-96) at the turn of the century as a model woman writer and an embodiment of Japan's past tradition, which cast a threatening shadow on the women of Seitô. Tamura Toshiko's rejection of the New Woman identity and increasing association with aesthetic decadence also came to be at odds with their feminist mission. Seitô women's rejection of both Ichiyô and Toshiko was thus a necessary act in self-proclaiming the birth of the New Woman. As the number of women writers gradually increased in the late 1910s, various types of literary expression emerged beyond gendered expectations, paving the way for the mass expansion of women's writing in the 1920s. As the notion of world literature formed alongside various national literatures during the vast expansion of the publishing industry and translation culture in the 1920s, women began to envision their own alternative genealogy alongside dominant literary histories. The third chapter explores the envisioning of women's literary history by the Seitô writer Ikuta Hanayo (1888- 1970) and the British modernist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whose feminist imaginations came together through the canonization of the English translation of The Tale of Genji, originally an 11th-century work written by a woman. As the growth of translations created a sense of global simultaneity, I further examine how the rhetoric of gender was central to Japanese literary modernism through the reception of two major British modernists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in Japan. The final chapter examines the writings of Osaki Midori (1896-1971), tracing her initial involvement with a community of women writers in the journal Nyonin geijutsu (Women's Arts, 1928-32), to her eventual adoption of a strategic outsider position as she began to publish in avant-garde journals. Midori's literary innovations and modernist aesthetics are closely connected to the feminist concerns of the period, offering a powerful critique of established views of gender, genre, authorship, and the nation, and showing increasing awareness of the position of women within literary history and vis-à-vis literary production. By reading her works alongside the works of Virginia Woolf, which were entering Japan's literary discourse contemporaneously, I show that Osaki Midori is an important modernist writer and a feminist thinker whose ideas are still illuminating to readers today. Envisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early 20th Century Japan Table of Contents i Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Reading/Writing Women: Education, Media, and the Emergence of Professional Writing Chapter One 58 The Rise of the Woman Writer: Tamura Toshiko and the Media 1. Tamura Toshiko's Emergence as a Woman Writer 2. New Woman Discourse and the Birth of Seitô 3. Performing the Decadent Woman Writer Chapter Two 125 Canonization and the Anxiety of Influence: Higuchi Ichiyô, Tamura Toshiko, and the Women of Seitô 1. Canonization of Ichiyô within the Naturalist Discourse 2. Overcoming Ichiyô: Seitô and the New Woman Discourse 3. Rejecting Tamura Toshiko 4. Constructing a Community of Women Writers i Chapter Three 176 Translation, World Literature, and Women's Literary History 1. Envisioning Women's Literary History in 1920s Japan 2. Issues of Gender in the Reception of British Modernism Chapter Four 211 Gender, Genre, and Global Imagination: The Modernist Writings of Osaki Midori 1. Naturalism and Midori's Early Years 2. Nyonin geijutsu and Beyond: Urban Print Culture, the Avant-Garde, and Film 3. Wandering In the World of the Seventh Sense 4. Imagining Literary Histories and Utopian Communities Epilogue 271 Women's Writing in Wartime and Postwar Japan Bibliography 277 ii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the extraordinary support from a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Professor Tomi Suzuki for her unending support, encouragement, constructive criticism, and dedicated mentorship throughout my years at Columbia University. She has gone above and beyond the duties of an advisor to guide me, not only when I sought out her help but also when I was not aware that I needed it. She has been essential to my growth as a scholar, and I could not have completed my dissertation without her mentorship and dedication to scholarship. Professor Haruo Shirane has also been invaluable to my growth as a scholar, not only through his various graduate seminars on premodern Japanese literature, but also through his mentorship regarding the various intricate processes of the graduate program, from grant applications to conference preparations to finally getting a job. I could not have successfully completed the graduate program without his generous encouragement and astute criticism from the day I entered the program. I would also like to thank Professor Paul Anderer for his warm encouragement and guidance, and for setting a model for excellent teaching. His eloquence and charismatic presence in the classroom have been an inspiration to me, and I hope to someday do the same for my future students. My research in Japan was made possible by the sponsorship of the Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University, and the generous fellowship of Waseda's 125th Anniversary Commemorative Junior Visiting Researcher Program. I would particularly like to thank Professor Toeda Hirokazu for his warm welcome and generous mentorship during my research stay at Waseda, through which the first chapters of my dissertation took shape. His iii scholarship on modern Japanese literature and media studies has fundamentally impacted the methodology of my dissertation. I also thank Professor Shibata Motoyuki for allowing me to continue to be a part of the vibrant community of scholars at the University of Tokyo. His seminars and workshops on literary translation and involvement with living authors have repeatedly inspired in me a fresh enthusiasm and love for literature. The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University have generously supported me throughout my graduate studies. I thank Professors Theodore Hughes, David Lurie, and Conrad Schirokauer for their mentorship in and outside of the classroom, as well as Professors Sarah Cole and Sharon Marcus in the English Department for their excellent graduate seminars. I am grateful to my undergraduate thesis advisor Professor Margaret Homans for making me aware of the hardships of graduate school, but nonetheless encouraging my interest in literary studies. Without my friends and colleagues who have supported me over the years, I would not be where I am today. I thank Steven Karl for his constant presence and for keeping me sane during the most isolating years of dissertation writing. His enthusiasm and active involvement in the contemporary poetry community in Brooklyn and beyond inspire me to keep my own scholarship alive and relevant. Lastly, I thank my family for their love, patience, and support throughout my life, and for encouraging me to read. iv 1 Introduction And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise, there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did. Ah! but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over her lest the pen might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928) In her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) presents a mock Künstlerroman of the protagonist Orlando who lives over three centuries and transforms from a man to a woman before finally completing the manuscript "The Oak Tree" in the 20th century.