The Other Women's Lib

The Other Women's Lib The Other Women's Lib Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction JULIA C. BULLO C K University of Hawai‘i Press HONOLULU © 2010 University of Hawai‘i Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bullock, Julia C. The other women’s lib : gender and body in Japanese women’s fiction / Julia C. Bullock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3387-9 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8248-3453-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Japanese fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Japanese fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Feminist literary criticism—Japan. 5. Gender identity in literature. 6. Human body in literature. 7. Women—Identity—Japan. I. Title. PL747.82.W64B85 2009 895.6'35093522—dc22 2009032034 Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBN for this book is 9780824882518 (PDF). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Contents Acknowledgments vii Note on Citation Format ix INTRODUCT I ON Bad Wives and Worse Mothers? Rewriting Femininity in Postwar Japan 1 CHAPTER 1 Party Crashers and Poison Pens: Women Writers in the Age of High Economic Growth 13 CHAPTER 2 The Masculine Gaze as Disciplinary Mechanism 53 CHAPTER 3 Feminist Misogyny? or How I Learned to Hate My Body 77 CHAPTER 4 Odd Bodies 97 CHAPTER 5 The Body of the Other Woman 127 CONCLUS I ON Power, Violence, and Language in the Age of High Economic Growth 153 Notes 169 Works Cited 185 Index 193 Acknowledgments It is impossible to thank all the people who should receive thanks for a project of this length. Personally and professionally, I’ve benefited from the guidance and support of far too many to acknowledge here. I only hope that they will see their imprint in my work and feel that it does them justice. I’ve been fortunate to have three intellectual homes during the course of my work on this project: Stanford University, where I earned my PhD; Jōsai International University, where I did my dissertation fieldwork; and Emory University, which has supported my academic career since. The Department of Asian Languages and the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford provided numerous sources of funding early on. A generous grant from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program allowed me to spend a year at Jōsai, in the company of brilliant feminist scholars of literature who helped me to clarify the contours of this project from its earliest stages. I am especially grateful for that opportu- nity. I’ve also benefited tremendously from the considerable financial support of Emory University, particularly the University Research Committee (URC), whose grant provided me with a semester of leave to work on this project when I needed it most, and the Emory College of Arts and Sci- ences and the Graduate School, whose subvention fund underwrote some of the costs of publication of this book. The Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS) also provided funding for two research trips to Japan to collect valuable materials unavailable to me in the United States. Finally, I must thank the Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory (SIRE) program for providing me with a wonderful student research assis- tant, Siobhain Rivera, who patiently combed through databases, made endless photocopies, organized files, and lugged books back and forth to the library more times than I can recall. I owe particular thanks and kudos to her. vii viii Acknowledgments I’ve also had the benefit of so many brilliant and supportive col- leagues that I’m almost afraid to list them for fear of leaving someone out, and yet conscience obliges me to give particular thanks to the following: to Jim Reichert, for going above and beyond the call of duty as dissertation adviser by providing a model of scholar, teacher, and advocate that I could only hope to replicate in my own career; to Mizuta Noriko and Kitada Sachie, whose support meant more than they could possibly know or I could ever express; and to Juliette Apkarian, Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Cheryl Crowley, Lynne Huffer, and Mark Ravina for nurturing my devel- opment as a junior colleague and for making Emory feel like more than just an academic home. Jeffrey Angles, Jan Bardsley, Rebecca Copeland, Sally Hastings, Vera Mackie, Mark McLelland, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Atsuko Sakaki, Chris Scott, Bob Tierney, James Welker, and many others gener- ously commented, encouraged, and especially challenged me at crucial junctures when this manuscript was finally coming together, and I hope that I have been able to do justice to a fraction of the intelligence that they have brought to the evaluation of my work. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments made this project much better than I could have managed on my own. Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful feedback. Any remaining deficiencies are entirely my responsibility. Personally, I’ve also been extremely fortunate to feel supported by family and friends, even when (especially when?) they found it difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. To my family—my mother, father, and sister, as well as the newest addition to our family, my niece Riley Marie—I thank you for indulging me through all those times when I was tired, cranky, or otherwise too involved with this project to be a good daughter/sister/aunt. I promise there is a vacation in our future somewhere. And yes, I’ll actually join you this time. I am also humbled to recognize more friends than I can list here, for their support through times when this felt harder than it really needed to be. First of all, to Dave, who never let me get away with it when I tried to sell myself short. Jules, Vanessa, Pam, Tavishi, and Emiko led by example, just by being amazing women who inspired me to keep on going, even when I didn’t feel like it. As new friends enter my life, I will try to remember to give as much to them as they did to me. Note on Citation Format For works originally published in Japanese, both the Japanese-language title and an English translation of the title are provided the first time a work is cited here. For subsequent citations, I employ the English-language title only. Where a published English translation of a work is available, I have used the English version of the title employed by the translator, and when quoting from that work, I have quoted the translated version so that read- ers wishing to consult the translation can easily locate that quote. Where no published translation exists, all quotations and English glosses for story titles are my translation. In the works cited, both original Japanese texts and English translations are cited where available. Where no translation is available, I have provided English glosses for Japanese titles. Personal names are referenced according to cultural custom—last name first for Japanese and first name first for Western—except in cases where an author with a Japanese name has Western-style ordering for works published in English. ix Introduction Bad Wives and Worse Mothers? Rewriting Femininity in Postwar Japan “Woman-hating.” That title just leapt right off the page. I was more puzzled than offended because the essay in question was by a woman writer whose work I admired for her portrayal of bold, independent, and bravely eccentric female protagonists—women who challenged the status quo, bad girls, some so deliciously bad that you couldn’t wait to see what they would do next. Aha, I thought, she’s going to give those male chauvinists what for. But upon reading the essay, I encountered the following: “I myself have a strange fear of people with whom rational language doesn’t communicate. In spite of the fact that I’m a woman, I have a fear of women and children.”1 Women were described as infantile, superficial, materialistic, insipid, and generally inferior to men. And this from an author I had come to think of as “feminist.” What was going on here? I reread the essay, sincerely wanting to understand why a woman might make such statements about other women. I tried to set aside my own assumptions about what “counted” as feminism and began to notice a degree of rhetorical complexity that had escaped my previous, less patient reading. What I found was a text that was profoundly con- flicted, with respect to both the various meanings assigned to the term “woman” and the author’s position regarding those “feminine” qualities. For such an extraordinarily brief essay, the author oscillated with dizzying speed between identifying herself as a woman and critiquing “women” as if this category had nothing to do with her. The text seemed to recognize “woman” as a cultural construct even as it simultaneously appeared to present that term as an essential and fixed category.

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