A Modern Woman's Journey. Miyamoto Yuriko in the Soviet Union and Europe 1927–1930

Self and the City: A Modern Woman's Journey. Miyamoto Yuriko in the Soviet Union and Europe 1927–1930 Jill Dobson Submitted for the degree of PhD School of East Asian Studies The University of Sheffield August 2014 Abstract As the daughter of liberal-minded and affluent parents, the writer Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) had unusual freedom for a young Japanese woman in defining herself. Her pivotal three years in Soviet Russia and Europe in 1927–1930 brought about her conversion to communism in the Stalinist era and changed the course of her life. The fundamental question of this thesis is how travel can transform an individual’s sense of self. I address this by using the concept of positionality to analyse how Miyamoto Yuriko presented her experience of travel across several genres of self- writing. Drawing on Chloe Starr’s (2013) approach to different genres of self-writing as individual components of an overarching narrative, I take as my source material Yuriko’s various accounts of her three years abroad: the autobiographical novel Dōhyō (Roadsigns) (1947–1950), two key essays from her Sobieto kikō, ‘Mosukuwa inshōki’ (Record of Moscow Impressions, 1928) and ‘London 1929’ (1930), and Yuriko’s diaries from this period. By reading these accounts, written at different times in different genres, against and through each other, I will analyse the variations and commonalities to produce a more detailed and nuanced picture of the relationship between Yuriko’s travels and her self-conception. In my analysis of travel as a transformational experience, I draw on cultural geography to explore the interaction of place and self, in particular, the city. Historically I situate Yuriko’s travels in the context of opposed models of modernity – the newly formed Soviet Union and ‘Old’ Europe – and the different implications of these modernities for women. 2 Photograph from the first issue of Nyonin geijutsu (1928), (left to right) Chūjō Yuriko, Narumi Kanzō, Evdokia Nikitina, Yuasa Yoshiko, Akita Ujaku. Courtesy of Nihon Kindai Bungakukan. 3 Contents 1. Introduction 5 2. Literature Review 9 3. Critical and Contextual framework 17 4. Methodological Approach 35 5. Dōhyō: The Retrospective, Coherent Self 47 6. The Sobieto kikō: The Modern(ist) Self in the City 101 7. The Diaries: The Fragmented, Private Self 130 8. Conclusion 192 References 198 Appendix: Chronology 229 Acknowledgements 233 4 1. Introduction The writer Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) was in no way a typical woman of her time. After a precocious love marriage in her early twenties to an older man, she left him to live with another woman. A cosmopolitan traveller in a period when few Japanese had opportunities to go abroad, she was comfortable speaking foreign languages. As a writer who made an early debut in a prestigious mainstream journal, she lived and worked as a modern, independent woman. As the daughter of an affluent middle-class family coming to maturity in the 1920s, she had unusual freedom in defining and developing herself, and yet rejected her background to become an ardent communist when the left in Japan was being harshly suppressed. Unlike her female contemporaries in the socialist-anarchist milieu, Sata Ineko (1904–1998) and Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–1972), Yuriko had every advantage in starting out as a writer, and yet chose a path that led to multiple imprisonments, publication bans, a 12-year separation from her second husband, and premature death just as her career was flowering anew in the postwar period. The subject of this thesis is Miyamoto Yuriko’s pivotal three years in the Soviet Union and Europe in 1927–1930, which brought about her conversion to communism in the Stalinist era and changed the course of her life. Yuriko’s works in general have not received much attention in English-language scholarship, and the works associated with her Soviet and European sojourn have not been closely studied in parallel in either English- or Japanese-language scholarship. The fundamental question of this thesis is how travel and displacement can transform an individual’s sense of self. I approach this by using the concept of positionality to analyse how Miyamoto Yuriko presented her life-changing experience of travel and residence in Soviet Russia and Europe across different genres of self-writing produced at different times in her life. When she followed her friend and companion, the student and translator of Russian, Yuasa Yoshiko (1896– 1990), to Moscow in December 1927, Yuriko was an established writer with no formal political affiliations. Her debut work, ‘Mazushiki hitobito no mure’ (A Flock of Poor Folk), published to acclaim in the journal Chūō kōron in 1916, demonstrated a sympathetic awareness of the plight of poor peasants, but had no ideological 5 underpinnings. Yuriko’s first long, autobiographical novel, Nobuko, published serially in Kaizō (1924–1926), explored the struggles of an individual woman to escape social and family strictures and find personal fulfilment. However, as a writer published in the two leading journals Kaizō (Reconstruction) and Chūō kōron (Central Review),1 she had avoided the label of ‘woman writer’ (joryū sakka), which served to segregate writing by women from the male mainstream by characterising it as unintellectual and sentimental (Ericson 1997, Copeland 2006). When Yuriko returned to Tokyo in November 1930, she was a committed communist who immediately joined the All-Japan Proletarian Arts League (NAPF) and put her literary skills to work writing laudatory ‘introductions’ to the Soviet Union. Yuriko did not become a communist because of social injustice she witnessed in Japan or because Marxism was a major intellectual current in 1920s Japan: she was transformed by the experience of travel and residence in several foreign cities that represented competing models of modernity. As a writer, she left various records of this experience, public and private, fiction and non-fiction. Drawing on Chloe Starr’s (2013) approach, I consider the autobiographical novel Dōhyō (Roadsigns) (1947–1950), two key essays from Yuriko’s travel writings (known as her Sobieto kikō), and her diaries as individual components, inflected by genre, of an overarching life-narrative.2 By reading these different accounts against and through each other, I will analyse the variations and commonalities in her representation of her time in the USSR and Europe to produce a more nuanced, layered picture of Yuriko’s transformative travels. In doing so, my study will also illuminate the relationship between genres of self-writing. The self represented in each is necessarily influenced by the form itself, as well as the different motivations and audiences (real or imagined) for each one and the temporal distance between the life events narrated and the act of narration. The 1 Chūō kōron and Kaizō were the two major current affairs monthlies in my period of study, both with circulations of around 100,000 (Kasza 1988: 44). Not only did they have a reputation for being liberal-left and open to foreign ideas, but they served as a significant mainstream platform for proletarian and leftist works. Both were forced to close down in mid-1944 for failing to respond to government editorial ‘guidance’ (Rubin 1984: 262-270; Kasza 1988: 229-231). 2 In researching this thesis, I drew on the diaries and Sobieto kikō volumes of the 1979–1986 zenshū, which was the only edition available to me in the UK when I began my PhD. I was able to access the relevant new critical essays in the 2000–2004 zenshū at Waseda University library in 2011–2012. 6 slippages between different versions of the self demonstrate that the ‘self’ is not fixed but contingent and often highly mutable. Multiple versions of the self-as- written may confirm, ‘correct’ or challenge each other as they serve different purposes at different stages in a writer’s life. I will start with Yuriko’s retrospectively constructed and public self-narrative of transformation, the novel Dōhyō, written 20 years after the events it describes. The linear ideological and geographical journey taken by the protagonist Nobuko retrospectively validates and celebrates Yuriko’s commitment to her chosen cause throughout the long war years, which was vindicated by the defeat of the Japanese militarist regime and the resurgence of left-wing activism suppressed during the war years. I will demonstrate how Nobuko’s growing political awareness is embedded in her journey through several key cities, starting and ending in Moscow, which includes key encounters and episodes that act as clear ‘roadsigns’. Intrinsic to Nobuko’s political development is her search for a fulfilment as a woman and as a writer. I will highlight how her various positionalities – gender, class, nationality, family, sexuality, profession, political beliefs – are foregrounded, intersect and sometimes clash at different points in the novel, culminating in her final self- identification at the novel’s close. Proceeding to the next layer of analysis, I consider two key essays, ‘Mosukuwa inshōki’ (Record of Moscow Impressions, 1928) and ‘London 1929’ (1930), to show how Yuriko’s shifting sense of self was explicitly contextualised within her experience in these two cities. I will examine these essays, written while Yuriko was still abroad, for what they can tell us of her subjectivity at two intermediate points in her transformative journey, before her emotional loyalty to Russia was consolidated by affiliation to the Japanese communist movement. Finally, I will examine the diaries, which have no overarching narrative thread. Following Lejeune’s approach (2009), I will focus on recurring themes to piece together what the diaries tell us when read alongside the crafted and coherent accounts of Dōhyō and the two articles. I situate my analysis of Yuriko’s self-definitional journey within two key material and discursive contexts. First, in approaching travel as a transformational experience, I draw on cultural geography to explore the interaction of place and 7 self, in particular, the city.

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