The Other Women's Lib

Japanese literature/gender studies
Bullock
“Julia Bullock’s lively study fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of femi-
nist theoretical development prior to the women’s lib movement of the 1970s.
Dealing with three of the most fascinating and challenging authors of the era,
Bullock’s sustained literary analyses are adroit, illuminating, and informative. Her
study is lucid enough to open itself to bright undergraduates, but provocative
enough to engage seasoned scholars of modern literature.”
The OTHER WOMEN’S LIB

â•…â•… —Rebecca Copeland, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan
(2000)
“In this stunning and original book, Julia Bullock analyzes the ‘philosophies of
gender in fictional form’ which were explored by three Japanese women writers
in the 1960s: Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko. Bullock The OTHER
WOMEN’S LIB
demonstrates that, in their exploration of the themes of ‘power, violence, and
language,’ these writers anticipated many of the themes of the women’s liberation
and feminist movements of the following decades. This book will be of interest to
scholars and students in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, literary studies,
and modern Japanese cultural history.”
â•…â•… —Vera Mackie, author of Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship,
Embodiment and Sexuality (2003)
“Julia Bullock’s cogent and focused study of three of the most imaginative Japa-
nese writers of the 1960s and 1970s analyzes issues driving the boom in writing by
women at that time. There is nothing else like it. She engages with the history of
feminism in Japan and pays special attention to ‘second-wave’ feminism. Her book
captures the complications these women faced as they grappled to express ideas
and experiences before representational schemes and categories were in place.
Among other successes, the book helps make sense of the violence of these works,
which has troubled so many.”
â•…â•… —Doug Slaymaker, author of The Body in Postwar Fiction: Japanese Fiction
after the War (2004)
Julia C. Bullock is assistant professor of Japanese at Emory University.
Cover Art: Lingering Dream by Kusama Yayoi (1949).

Cover design by Julie Matsuo-Chun
G E N D E R A N D B O D Y I N J A PA N E S E W O M E N ’ S F I C T I O N
University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888
Julia C. Bullock
The Other Women's Lib
The Other
Women's Lib
Gender and Body in
Japanese Women’s Fiction
J ulia C. B ullock

honolulu
© 2010 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
15â•‡ 14â•‡ 13â•‡ 12â•‡ 11â•‡ 10â•…â•‡ 6â•‡ 5â•‡ 4â•‡ 3â•‡ 2â•‡ 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bullock, Julia C.
â•… The other women’s lib : gender and body in Japanese women’s fiction /
Julia C. Bullock.
â•…â•… p.â•… cm.
â•… Includes bibliographical references and index.
â•… ISBN 978-0-8248-3387-9 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8248-3453-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
â•… 1.â•‡ Japanese fiction—20th century—History and criticism.â•… 2.â•‡ Women in
literature.â•… 3.â•‡ Japanese fiction—Women authors—History and criticism.
4.â•‡ Feminist literary criticism—Japan.â•… 5.â•‡ Gender identity in literature.
6.â•‡ Human body in literature.â•… 7.â•‡ Women—Identity—Japan.â•… I.â•‡ Title.
â•… PL747.82.W64B85 2009
â•… 895.6'35093522—dc22
â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… 2009032034
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free

paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Council on Library Resources.
Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.
Contents
â•…â•… Acknowledgments vii

â•…â•… Note on Citation Format ix
Introduction
â•…â•… Bad Wives and Worse Mothers? Rewriting Femininity
â•…â•…â•…â•… in Postwar Japan 1
Chapter 1
â•…â•… Party Crashers and Poison Pens: Women Writers
â•…â•…â•…â•… in the Age of High Economic Growth 13
Chapter 2
â•…â•… The Masculine Gaze as Disciplinary Mechanism 53
Chapter 3
â•…â•… Feminist Misogyny? or How I Learned to Hate My Body 77
Chapter 4
â•…â•… Odd Bodies 97
Chapter 5
â•…â•… The Body of the Other Woman 127
Conclusion
â•…â•… Power, Violence, and Language in the Age of High
â•…â•…â•…â•… Economic Growth 153
â•…â•… Notes 169

â•…â•… Works Cited 185
â•…â•… 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 sup-
port 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 disserta-
tion 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. In short, I finished the
essay with a strong sense that the author herself felt profoundly ambivalent
about her own gender and at the very least did not want to be a “woman”
if that meant conforming to conventionally “feminine” norms.
1
2 Introduction
The author in question was Takahashi Takako, and the essay, “Onnag-
irai” (1974), sparked my desire to understand this thing called “feminin-
ity,” which could motivate such an angry diatribe against one’s own sex.
As I read more by Takahashi and her contemporaries, I realized that many
other women writers of her generation seemed to share a profound sense
of unease regarding what it meant to be a woman in Japanese society. This
seemed to have much to do with the fact that during the 1960s, when so
many of these women made their debuts on the literary scene, Japanese
society was experiencing a resurgence of the prewar “good wife and wise
mother” ideology—a stereotype of femininity that many of these women
resisted. These writers defied models of normative femininity through
their literature, crafting female protagonists who were unapologetically
bad wives and even worse mothers: frequently wanton, excessive, or self-
ish and brazenly cynical with regard to “traditional” conceptions of love,
marriage, and motherhood—when they did not opt out of this system
entirely.
Born in the late 1920s to early 1930s and raised in a country mobilized
for total war to contribute to the Japanese empire by becoming “good wives
and wise mothers,” this generation of women faced a brave new world of
opportunity after World War II, when sweeping Occupation-era reforms
sought to legislate equality between the sexes. And yet prewar models of
femininity persisted into the postwar era, as high economic growth from
1955 to 1973 was underwritten by a strictly gendered division of labor
that required women to take full responsibility for the domestic sphere
so that their husbands could devote themselves to rebuilding the nation’s
economy through paid labor. In the 1960s, women were still discursively
constructed as “good wives and wise mothers” even as more and more of
them began also to work outside the home.2
The term “femininity,” as understood in Japan during the 1960s,
thus primarily denoted qualities associated with women’s nurturing and
supportive functions vis-à-vis men. It was also understood as the comple-
ment and logical opposite of “masculinity,” so that, for example, women
were expected to respond to male activity and self-assertion with passive
and self-effacing behavior. In attempting to rewrite femininity, these
women writers therefore struggled against binary models of gender that
assumed a direct correspondence between the terms “male/masculine”
and “female/feminine,” such that bodies were expected to exhibit the
gendered behaviors considered “natural” to them. Furthermore, because
these terms were understood to be mutually exclusive and complementary,
it was expected that there would be no overlap between the characteris-
B ad W ives and W orse M others ? 3
tics that were considered “masculine” and those considered “feminine.”

Embracing one side of the polarity thus meant denying the other.
In a context where those who inhabited female bodies were required
to produce a corresponding range of behaviors coded as “feminine,”
what possibilities existed to resist these norms? When gender is struc-
tured according to a set of binary oppositions that require the subject
to choose one of two mutually exclusive positions, how can a woman
avoid becoming entrapped in stereotypical notions of the “feminine”
without presenting herself as “masculine”? When the terms “female” and
“feminine” cannot be thought separately, how is it possible to critique
feminine norms without also criticizing the category of “woman” itself,
thus opening oneself up to charges of chauvinism or misogyny? And how
can the term “woman” retain its structural integrity as an essentialist and
totalizing category when, in spite of binary discourses of gender to the
contrary, there appear to be as many differences among women as there
are between women and men?
The authors whose works are analyzed in this study were keenly
interested in these theoretical concerns at a time when raising such issues
placed one firmly outside the boundaries of culturally ingrained “common
sense.” In their fictional works, and often in nonfiction essays as well, they
persistently grappled with the problem of feminine subjectivity against a
discursive backdrop that rendered this “logically” impossible. In their will-
ingness to radically challenge binary models of gender, they share much
in common intellectually with the “women’s liberation” activists of the
following decade, who argued in explicitly political terms what these writ-
ers had already envisioned in the realm of fiction. This volume represents
the first systematic analysis of the narrative and representational patterns
through which normative femininity was contested by women writers of
this period, in advance of the flowering of “second-wave” feminism in
Japan in the 1970s. In the sense that both fiction writers and activists
sought to critique and subvert hegemonic discourses of femininity that
confined women to the “traditional” roles of wife and mother toward a
broader range of permissible expressions of feminine subjectivity, I argue
that both groups should be understood as espousing a feminist position.
Histories of feminism in Japan tend to give prominence to the Seitō
(Bluestocking) group of writers in the 1910s and then touch on the
“housewife feminism” of the early postwar period before moving on to the
more exuberant generation of women’s liberation activists in the 1970s.
Vera Mackie’s landmark study, Feminism in Modern Japan, provides a
considerably broader spectrum of feminist activity, as Mackie gives equal
4 Introduction
attention to women’s organizations that aided the war effort during the
1930s and other lesser-known or more politically problematic activists like
the women of the Red Army. However, much of the existing literature
on Japanese feminism seems to concentrate primarily on women’s politi-
cal activism as a crucial marker of their participation in projects to alter
normative constructions of gender.
Thus discussions of radical feminism in the 1960s tend to focus pri-
marily on student-movement activists who would go on to create the phil-
osophical base of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.3 From
the massive anti–Security Treaty demonstrations that paralyzed the Japa-
nese Diet in 1960 to the takeover and occupation of university campuses
during the worldwide unrest of 1968–1969, young women organized and
struggled alongside men during this turbulent decade, which included
inter- and intrasectarian violence and pitched street battles with riot police.
However, as in the United States and other countries that experienced such
counterculture movements, many Japanese women became disillusioned
with the New Left organizations that emerged during the 1960s because
of the chauvinistic treatment they received from male comrades—ranging
from their relegation to kitchen duty to sexual harassment and even rape.
In the 1970s, such frustrations erupted around the world into a flurry of
“women’s liberation” movements or woman-centered political organiza-
tions and theoretical attempts to redefine women’s roles in society. In
Japan, this came to be known as ūman ribu (women’s lib).4
While explicitly political expressions of radical feminism did not
emerge in postwar Japan until the women’s liberation movement of the
1970s, women writers of fiction began to challenge normative discourses
of gender much earlier. In the 1960s, as some women participated in New
Left student movements, others contributed to an extraordinary boom in
literary publication by women, whose radical and shocking articulations of
feminine subjectivity forced a new dialogue on sexuality and gender roles
within the community of intellectuals known as the bundan, or Japanese
literary world. To date their work has been largely neglected in histories
of Japanese feminism, most likely because many of these writers eschewed
explicit political activism in favor of an implicitly political rewriting of
femininity through literature.5 However, I argue that their literature must
be seen as part of a larger attempt to negotiate alternative discourses of
gender during the 1960s. Like the “women’s lib” activists of the following
decade, they identified everyday relationships between men and women
as a primary source of gendered oppression and critiqued the way the
power dynamics that structure such relationships suppress or manipulate
women’s sexuality in order to harness it toward the goals of a patriarchal

order. Like the feminists of the 1970s, these writers challenged “com-
monsense” assumptions of motherhood as woman’s “natural” role and
attacked binary models of gender that defined woman as man’s eternal
complement. Like these explicitly political feminist activists, they identi-
fied women’s bodies as the site of gender oppression and thus attempted
to trouble facile linkages between body and gender, biology and destiny.6
The contributions of these writers of fiction to emerging feminist
discourse helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for a more explicitly
political “women’s lib” in the following decade. What they imagined first
in the realm of literature—from insightful observations regarding how gen-
der roles are constructed and enforced, to problematizing binary models
of gender, to questioning the category of “woman” itself—reemerged in
later decades as more explicitly political articulations of feminist theoretical
discourse. By demonstrating the contributions of these women as theorists
of gender, whose ideas were very much a part of larger debates on gender
and sexuality taking place in Japanese society at this time, this study bridges
scholarship on Japanese feminist history and modern Japanese literature
to fill an important lacuna in our understanding of feminist theoretical
development prior to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
This study centers around a sustained analysis of the works of three of
the most famous women of this generation—Kōno Taeko (1926– ), Taka-
hashi Takako (1932– ), and Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005). Kurahashi,
the youngest of the group, was the first to capture the attention of the
literary world, and her controversial ascent onto the literary stage in 1960,
while still a university student, marked the beginning of that decade’s
boom in women’s writing.7 Takahashi, a fellow student of French litera-
ture, has much in common intellectually with Kurahashi, in spite of being
slightly older and married at the time of her debut. Kurahashi, a graduate
of Meiji University, and Takahashi, a graduate of Kyoto University, were
part of the first generation of young women to attain entrance to the
prestigious male-dominated universities that had been closed to women
during the prewar period. Being somewhat older, Kōno did not have that
opportunity, but her passionate interest in English literature (which began
during her student years at Osaka Women’s University), as well as her
evident fascination for the bizarre and the grotesque, makes her a perfect
complement to Kurahashi and Takahashi in terms of her willingness to
challenge gender stereotypes from unconventional perspectives.
Another reason that these authors were chosen is that all three of
them are readily available in English translation, for the benefit of readers
6 Introduction
who cannot understand the original Japanese texts. Because I have selected
texts for analysis primarily on the basis of their employment of common
themes and tropes, not all texts analyzed in this manuscript are available
in English, but other texts that address similar themes are, and thus the
English-language reader can readily compare translated stories to the ones
I have included here.
One final criterion employed in the selection of texts for this project
was their year of publication. I have limited the scope of this study to
works published between 1960, when Kurahashi’s debut inaugurated the
boom in women’s writing of this decade, and 1973, the year that most
scholars cite as the end of the period of high economic growth. As noted
above, the discursive constructions of gender against which these women
writers struggled to define new models of femininity were intimately
interwoven with the ideological and structural fabric of Japanese society
in the age of high economic growth. They were difficult to resist precisely
because they seemed to “work,” in the sense that such binary models
of gender drove the engine of economic recovery forward. Challenging
these models of normative gender effectively meant challenging the very
basis of prosperity itself, something that violated contemporary common
sense and rendered the challenger a subversive threat to the integrity of
a newly stabilized Japanese society. Under the circumstances, then, it was
no wonder that in the 1960s such challenges took the form of avant-
garde literary feminism, which then morphed into more explicitly politi-
cal activism once the recession of the 1970s and resultant environmental
and social problems made it easier to question the fruits of economic
growth.
In order to understand the theoretical contributions of these women
to postwar Japanese feminist discourse, it is also necessary to understand
the ways that gendered discourses and behaviors were transmitted and
enforced through networks of power at all levels of society, from the most
official of government institutions to the most intimate personal relation-
ships. In this sense, Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower” is useful in
helping to elucidate the way normative models of gender are produced and
deployed. In volume one of his History of Sexuality, Foucault traces the
process by which the social and sexual behavior of Western populations in
the modern era came to be shaped, not so much by repressive government
controls, but rather through regimes of “biopower,” which required the
consent and active participation of the individuals they targeted. Mod-
ern nation-states required disciplined and healthy populations capable of
contributing willingly and eagerly to national projects, whether those be
waging war on another country, combating the spread of famine and dis-
ease, or contributing labor toward the development of industrial capitalist
economies. In addition to government legal and bureaucratic structures,
Foucault cites the pivotal role played by schools, military organizations,
and prisons, among various other institutions that served to produce the
“docile bodies” necessary for such projects.8
As Sheldon Garon notes, although with respect to Western nations it
is difficult to describe these disciplinary institutions as part of a deliberate
and coordinated effort by governments to shape the development of their
societies in a calculated fashion, in Japan this is precisely what happened.
As Japan suddenly and abruptly opened up to the West at the beginning
of the Meiji period (1868–1912) out of a sense of urgency to beat the
imperialist powers at their own game, reigning oligarchs explicitly and
deliberately crafted administrative institutions and strategies to remake
the Japanese people into a cohesive and nationalistic populace capable of
contributing to the project of imperialism.
The [Japanese] imperial state did not rely on repression alone

in its efforts to increase national power, promote economic
development, and maintain social order. In more positive terms,
the government energetically disseminated an “emperor-system
ideology” to the public, inculcating patriotism, loyalty to the
emperor, and the virtues of diligence and thrift. The state did so
by utilizing a highly centralized set of institutions: the national
school system, the military, a network of State Shinto shrines,
and numerous hierarchically organized associations. If social
control in the West implies society’s regulation of its members or
one group’s domination over another within society, its Japanese
analogue—the emperor system—refers to the unrelenting drive
by a transcendent state to control society as a whole between
1868 and 1945.9
Garon further demonstrates, in his book Molding Japanese Minds, that

the kind of “moral suasion” that the Japanese imperial government used
to mobilize its subjects before the end of World War II continued, albeit
in modified form, into the postwar period, as economic growth came to
replace imperialist expansion as the new national project.
Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” harnessed toward the national
project of postwar economic growth, is a useful rubric through which to
understand the disciplinary process of engendering that contributed toward
8 Introduction
the gendered division of labor that increasingly characterized Japanese

society during the 1960s. Men and women were exhorted to take up the
complementary roles of salarymen and housewives respectively, not simply
through repressive governmental controls, but also through institutional
and organizational structures that shaped their behavior in less explicit
ways. These gender roles increasingly came to seem not only “natural”
but also desirable to much of the mainstream of Japanese society, creating
the illusion that individual behaviors were a matter of choice rather than
the “administrative guidance” that nurtured not only economic growth
during this era but also the human capital that made this project possible.
Under such circumstances, when disciplinary mechanisms of engen-
dering are woven seamlessly into all aspects of social life, how is it possible
for the individual subject to resist hegemonic discourses of gender? Judith
Butler, in her landmark work of feminist scholarship, Gender Trouble,
explores one way this is possible in her theory of the performativity of
gender. By complying with gender norms yet performing them differ-
ently—for example, through excessive or parodic expression, as in drag
performance—one may highlight the ways in which gender is a learned
and socially constructed set of behaviors rather than a “natural” and indi-
vidual expression of inherent qualities.10 For feminist critics, highlighting
the artificiality of gender norms is a necessary first step toward changing
them, and the authors whose works are explored in this book often fol-
low precisely this strategy, using literature as a vehicle for the excessive or
parodic performance of femininity in order to problematize such gender
norms. Capitalizing on the rich potential of fictional worlds to highlight
ironic disjunctions between feminine stereotypes and feminist realities,
they actively participated in creating alternative discourses of femininity
during the 1960s and early 1970s—even as this era of high economic
growth seemed to render such gendered distinctions not only inevitable
but also necessary to the cause of national and individual prosperity.
The primary objects of my analysis—novels and short stories written
during the 1960s boom in publication by an elite cadre of women writ-
ers—represent the perspectives of a new female intelligentsia that came to
question dominant constructions of femininity from within the bundan,
the literary world that had previously been dominated by male graduates
of prestigious Japanese universities. It was through literature that many
female members of this emerging intellectual elite pushed for recogni-
tion of women as more than wives and mothers. Therefore, their fictional
work serves as an important clue to the way discourses of gender were
discursively negotiated at this moment in time—in advance of the more
explicitly political discourses of liberation forwarded by the “women’s lib”

movement of the 1970s.
This is not to say that they were the first generation of women writ-
ers to question normative femininity or that they were in any way typical
of their own generation in terms of their willingness to question reign-
ing common sense. Generations of female political activists and literary
figures, from the early Meiji-era Popular Rights Movement feminists in
the 1870s to the members of the Seitō group in the 1910s, to promi-
nent writers like Enchi Fumiko whose educational background earned the
respect of male and female contemporaries alike, had each in her own way
contributed to the negotiation of gendered discourses in previous eras of
modern Japanese history. What made the 1960s boom in women’s writing
so significant, though, was that for the first time many of these writers
were able to speak from a position inside the academy—or at least fight
for inclusion in that hallowed space from a position of strength. Post–
World War II legal and cultural transformations in Japanese society, due
to Occupation-era reforms that had given prominence to the elevation of
women’s status, had guaranteed women the right to attend school along-
side men through a system of coeducation that extended from primary
school through university, and many of these women were the first to
take advantage of this new system. Armed with new social and educational
capital that had been denied to their forebears, they began to participate in
the literary world in ways that rendered them not merely cloistered writers
of fiction but also public intellectuals with serious academic pedigrees who
actively participated in debates that included, but were not limited to, the
role of women both in the bundan and in society more generally.
In focusing my analysis on works of fiction, I do not mean to imply
that these literary creations should be understood as transparent represen-
tations of the reality of these women’s lives. Rather, I see these stories as
imaginative recreations of a process of gender role negotiation that was
playing out simultaneously in Japanese society at this time. Understanding
these stories as discourse—or more specifically, as philosophies of gender in
fictional form—allows us to read them against the nonfictional discourses
of gender that were in circulation at this time, toward a better understand-
ing of how women like these writers challenged the center of gendered
representation from the margins. I am interested not only in what these
stories say, but also in how they say it and in what ways this form of expres-
sion can be seen as itself produced through negotiation with discourses
in circulation in the real world that always seems to hover on the margins
of these texts. Real world and textual world are thus seen as separate but
10 Introduction
mutually imbricated spaces that operate according to analogous rules and

structures and shed light upon one another.
Therefore, this book is organized not according to discrete analyses
of individual authors but according to the various tropes they employ to
challenge, reformulate, and/or lament the constructions of femininity
that structure the lives of their protagonists and, by extension, Japanese
women like them who inhabit nontextual spaces. In each chapter I read
several authors against one another, as well as against the historical back-
drop that forms the context for their work, to understand the similarities
and differences in expression of each trope or theme. While each chapter is
devoted to a different trope, it is important to note that all of these narra-
tive strategies highlight the female body as both the object and instrument
of the process of engendering. Women are subjected to feminization in
these texts precisely because they inhabit female bodies, and they live in a
society that assumes a direct and logical connection between biology and
identity or role type. Severing this discursive connection between bodily
sex and gender is thus a primary objective of these narratives and a neces-
sary first step toward envisioning a less restrictive model of subjectivity for
women in modern Japan.
Chapter 1 is intended to contextualize the work of these authors
against the historical backdrop that framed their literature, with particu-
lar attention to the production of hegemonic ideologies of gender and
the ways in which these writers’ fictional narratives sought to resist such
dominant paradigms. The next two chapters explore the way that sub-
jects are engendered through both “hard” (formal or explicit) and “soft”
(informal or implicit) disciplinary mechanisms. I begin in chapter 2 with
a trope that seems crucial to the process of construction of femininity as
these authors understand it: the “masculine” gaze—so gendered because
society itself, or more properly the structures of authority that permeated
Japanese society at this time, is understood to be masculine. Being fixed by
the disciplinary gaze is depicted in these texts as a kind of scopic violation
akin to rape, an experience that forces the subject to acknowledge herself
as female and therefore to internalize appropriately feminine behaviors.
In addition to this oppressive and violent means of disciplining
women as “feminine” subjects, these authors also highlight the function
of “soft power” in enforcing feminine norms. Chapter 3 takes as its objects
of analysis texts in which women are induced to comply with normative
femininity through a self-imposed abjection of their own bodies. The pro-
tagonists of the narratives explored in this chapter learn to internalize the
binary logic that aligns women with the inferior plane of the corporeal
in contrast to men, who are envisioned as spiritually and intellectually

superior. This “logic” is mastered in the context of intimate relationships
with male lovers or mentors, who reward complicity and punish resistance
by withholding the affection or respect that is desired by the woman in
question.
Once having exposed the artificiality of such gendered constructions,
these authors are then eager to problematize the logic of strict binary dis-
tinctions between masculine and feminine subject positions, which serve
to rationalize the enforcement of gender norms. Chapter 4 illustrates one
trope that often serves this purpose in women’s literature of the 1960s—
the “odd body,” which defies classification as either masculine or feminine,
male or female. Curiously, many of these embodiments of alternative cor-
poreality are male bodies that are queered in various ways—for example,
they are frequently attributed with typically female bodily processes or
feminine behaviors—in an apparent attempt to strike at the heart of the
sex/gender system. If male subjectivity forms the ground upon which
feminine difference is understood, then using male (rather than female)
bodies to disrupt conventional linkages between sex and gender effects a
more radical “troubling” of that difference.
Finally, the texts analyzed in chapter 5 all attempt to problematize the
coherence of the category of “woman” itself by highlighting the differ-
ences among women, even as they acknowledge the potential for similarity
or connection. The body of the Other Woman is variously figured in these
texts as an object of desire, fear, and identification in ways that incorporate
other women textually as privileged sites of self-knowledge. The doppel-
ganger, or second-self, motif frequently appears in these texts as a means
of depicting an Other that is simultaneously not other yet always somehow
out of reach of the protagonist. While acknowledging a desire for rela-
tionships with other women, these texts are unanimous in highlighting
the impossibility of true intimacy between women, as the protagonist’s
desire for the Other Woman is continually frustrated and frequently ends
in tragedy.
In the conclusion, I highlight specific points of connection between
the literary feminist agenda of these three authors and the goals of the
“women’s lib” movement of the following decade, with particular atten-
tion to the function of power, violence, and language in each type of femi-
nist discourse. These three categories of analysis are significant because
they represent problems that continually reassert themselves in all the texts
analyzed in this study. Each in some way limits the way these authors are
able to express, envision, and theorize new forms of feminine subjectivity,
12 Introduction
even as it enables the production and expression of subjectivity on other

fronts. In other words, feminine subjects in these texts are produced
within networks of power that simultaneously constrain and form them
through violence, which alternately shapes their possibilities for expres-
sion in language. Although this yields a form of feminist discourse that
is profoundly conflicted in its articulation of “femininity,” this conflict is
productive not only because it draws the reader’s attention to contradic-
tions in hegemonic discourses of gender that oppress women, but also
because it helps to define and clarify many of the theoretical problems that
would occupy subsequent generations of feminist activists. The result is
an alternate version of “women’s lib” that shares much with the explicitly
political feminist speech of the following decade while differing from it in
important ways.
Chapter 1
Party Crashers and Poison Pens

Women Writers in the Age of
High Economic Growth
Listening to you talk, all the penises of the world

would probably go flaccid.
â•…â•… —Kurahashi Yumiko, “Yōjo no yō ni”
T he 1960s witnessed the debuts of a succession of women writers of fic-

tion whose subversive heroines and controversial themes posed a profound
and disturbing challenge to cherished ideals of femininity and “feminine”
writing. The decade began with the publication of Kurahashi Yumiko’s
“Partei” (Parutai, 1960), a wickedly satirical exposé of student-movement
dogmatism that took readers aback for its no-holds-barred poison-pen
critique. This was soon followed by Kōno Taeko’s “Toddler-Hunting”
(Yōjigari, 1961), a provocative blend of themes of sadomasochism, child
abuse, and pedophilia. As if to say that no sacred cow was safe from slaugh-
ter, Kurahashi and Kōno were soon joined by a cadre of other women,
including Takahashi Takako, who wrote about incest, partner swapping,
abortion, infanticide, murder, rape, bestiality, masturbation, homoeroti-
cism, and a host of other topics that violated assumptions of feminine
passivity, sexual innocence, maternal instinct, and marital bliss.
Needless to say, such women writers were exceptional in their willing-
ness to challenge the conservative social mores and practical, upwardly
mobile mindset of the dominant society. As members of the “Shōwa
One-Digit Generation,” it was their age cohort that was charged with the
herculean task of resurrecting Japan from the ashes of defeat, transform-
ing the country into the economic powerhouse that it is today. By the
1960s, most members of their generation had adapted to the roles crafted
13
14 Chapter 1
for them by the high-economic-growth society—producing, consuming,

and reproducing more producers and consumers—while enjoying a more
comfortable standard of living than any of them, having grown up during
the war years of privation and instability, could ever have imagined. By
contrast, these women writers resisted the gendered division of labor that
underwrote the prosperity of the era, which confined women to roles that
were strictly supportive of male labor. Their unconventional protagonists,
who rejected stereotypically gendered roles and subverted or mocked
institutionalized structures of family and state power, forwarded a tren-
chant critique of the social and political order that had come to define a
newly stabilized and prosperous Japanese society.
In this chapter, I demonstrate how the social and political transfor-
mations of Japan in the 1960s produced oppressively narrow ideologies of
gender, which in turn motivated these women to write against such trends,
producing a counter-hegemonic discourse that I describe as feminist. I
begin with a brief historical and cultural overview of this era, describing
the process of war recovery and rebuilding that led to rising economic
prosperity and increasingly conservative social mores. In the next section,
I employ Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” to explain how a gen-
dered division of labor that rhetorically confined women to the private
sphere as housewives and mothers, vis-à-vis their husbands’ public role
of salarymen, diffused itself through various institutions to become the
dominant paradigm of femininity. Finally, I provide a brief introduction
to the lives and works of each of these three authors, contextualizing their
work within the broader spectrum of postwar Japanese literary production
with particular attention to the way they subvert hegemonic gender norms
in their literature. Despite the fact that these writers are clearly very differ-
ent from one another in terms of life experiences and literary style, each
of them may be seen as challenging dominant stereotypes of femininity
that they felt to be overly reductive and restrictive, thereby promoting a
broader conceptualization of what it meant to be a woman in Japan during
the 1960s. It is on the basis of this subversive intent that I characterize
these three authors as feminist.
Japan in the 1960s

The 1960s was an era of remarkable social and political stability, aided
and abetted by high economic growth.1 The seeds of this stability were
sown in the 1950s, as Japan emerged from the ashes of defeat and a seven-
year Occupation by Allied forces to become an independent nation under
P arty C rashers and P oison P ens 15
increasingly conservative rule. The Occupation had begun with sweeping

social, economic, and legal reforms that empowered socialists and union
leaders, but the urgency of Cold War politics led to a dramatic “reverse
course” in policy during the second half of the Occupation period that
favored stability over reform. While the left wing fragmented into fac-
tions that disagreed over the terms of the peace treaty that granted Japan’s
independence in 1952, conservative parties merged into a single Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955, which dominated Japanese politics until
1993, inaugurating an era of increased cooperation between government
and industry that came to be known in later decades as “Japan, Inc.” The
Japanese economy finally regained its prewar strength in 1955 and then
rapidly exceeded this mark as the gross national product (GNP) continued
to grow exponentially throughout the 1960s. As a result of these politi-
cal and economic transformations, the attention of the Japanese gradually
shifted from the foreign policy problems and labor disputes that had con-
tributed to the political strife of the 1950s to an enjoyment of the fruits of
their labor as a rising tide of economic growth and individual prosperity
swept the nation.
In 1960, two events occurred simultaneously to seal the nation’s
conservative turn. The first was the rioting and civil unrest that accompa-
nied renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Japan had emerged from
the shadow of the Occupation only to reenter the shade of the American
nuclear umbrella, in the form of a treaty that bound it to U.S. foreign
policy (known in Japanese as the Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku, or ANPO for
short). This treaty allowed, among other things, for the United States to
maintain its military bases in Japan as a staging point for operations in the
Korean War (and later Vietnam). Having just experienced the physical
and economic devastation of loss in World War II, concerned about ris-
ing Cold War tensions, and caught geopolitically between the two main
nuclear powers, many Japanese were wary of becoming ensnarled in fur-
ther conflict.2 When the Security Treaty came up for renewal in 1960, left-
wing parties and student activists led a fierce campaign against it, resulting
in massive demonstrations that mobilized ordinary citizens from all walks
of life.3
At the same time that riots ravaged Tokyo, ongoing labor-man-
agement tensions erupted into violence in the Miike coal mine strike of
1960.4 The resulting melee, which pitted union members against strike-
breakers and gangsters hired by the corporation, forced the government
to send fifteen thousand national police to quell the disturbance. “The
situation had reached crisis point with television broadcasts sending out
16 Chapter 1
images of a nation apparently on the brink of revolution.”5 In the wake

of the bitter Miike battle, both industry and unions turned toward more
conciliatory means of resolving labor disputes, leading to a more coopera-
tive framework whereby union leadership was more or less incorporated
into the bureaucratic structure of industry, effectively making unions part
of management.
Having successfully navigated two major challenges to the new post-
war order in quick succession, the Japanese people eagerly turned their
attention away from contentious political and economic issues to focus
on happier pursuits closer to home. With standards of living rising, and
consumer products like refrigerators and washing machines finally within
reach of the average household budget, in the 1960s they devoted them-
selves to enjoying the fruits of their labor during the era of rising prosper-
ity and consumerism that came to be known as the “economic miracle.”
In 1960, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato announced a rather ambi-
tious goal—to double the GNP over the next decade. Even more remark-
able, the goal was met. Through a comprehensive stimulus package that
included tax cuts, lower interest rates, and a generous amount of “admin-
istrative guidance” of crucial industries by the Japanese government, the
unemployment rate plummeted and the standard of living of the average
Japanese citizen soared over the course of the 1960s.6 In 1960 over 70
percent of the population considered itself to be middle class; by the early
1970s this figure had risen to 90 percent.7 Dubbed the “economic miracle”
as early as 1962, this era of high economic growth resulted in profound
transformations in Japanese daily life, from increased consumer activity,
to soaring demand for higher education, to profound demographic shifts
that dramatically altered the fabric of family life.
One immediate result of these changes was increased purchasing
power of the average Japanese household. As the high unemployment of
the 1950s gave way to labor shortages in the 1960s, wages increased. Con-
sumers were able to spend a smaller percentage of their total household
budget on food and more on durable goods and entertainment. Televi-
sions, washing machines, and other household appliances were popular
purchases at the outset of the decade; by 1970 consumers had graduated
to cars, homes, and overseas vacations.8 Regardless of how many people
actually lived the lifestyle they were being sold in the mass media, the
perception that Japanese people had of themselves as middle-class and
upwardly mobile consumers increasingly came to define the national self-
image, in turn structuring the conservative social mores and role distinc-
tions that shaped ideologies of gender in the 1960s.9
Rising aspirations fueled increasing demands for higher levels of education,

and competition for slots at all levels of noncompulsory (post–junior high)
education grew intense, fueled by both demographic shifts and altered
conceptions of a “good enough” standard of living. In 1962 the children
of the postwar baby boom were just beginning to graduate from middle
school, but a shortage of high schools to accommodate these unprece-
dented numbers of students led to phenomenal overcrowding, and classes
were frequently packed with as many as sixty to seventy students. These
numbers reflected a growing appreciation of the need for a high school
education, at minimum, to meet the demands of an increasingly techno-
logically sophisticated workplace.10
College and university enrollments were more modest, reflecting bit-
ter competition for slots, especially at the more prestigious schools. In
1960, only 13.7 percent of male students advanced to four-year universi-
ties, compared to a mere 2.5 percent of girls. By 1970, the figure for males
had doubled to 27.3 percent, versus 6.5 percent for girls. The number
of girls attending junior college showed a more rapid increase, to 11.2
percent in 1970 (up from 3 percent in 1960), reflecting a cultural assump-
tion that higher levels of education were unnecessary or even detrimental
to a girl’s future success in the marriage market—still considered to be the
primary purpose of education for girls.11
For the parents of this postwar generation of young people—in other
words, the members of the Shōwa One-Digit Generation that had been
charged with national recovery and rebuilding—the need to provide their
children with ever-increasing levels of education placed great pressure on
both household budgets and family energies. Getting a child into a college
or university, particularly a prestigious one, required an enormous invest-
ment of time, energy, and money for both parents and children. Fathers
worked longer and longer hours to satisfy the demands of high-growth
economic productivity, which meant that mothers were increasingly given
sole responsibility for managing their children’s educational careers—a task
that required extensive involvement in school activities, help with home-
work, arranging for after-school classes and tutors, emotional encourage-
ment, and physical care. The financial burdens of additional instruction
pushed many mothers into the workforce as well—albeit in a part-time
and poorly paid capacity. In the 1960s, these pressures produced ideolo-
gies of gender defined according to a rigid division of labor that charged
women with supportive tasks, such as domestic labor and childrearing, so
that men could devote themselves to the increasing burden of overtime
work that fueled the high-growth economy.
18 Chapter 1
Ideologies of Gender
In 1960, the authors addressed in this study ranged in age from twenty-five
to thirty-four—precisely the age at which young women were expected to
marry and begin a family, according to the gendered division of labor
described above. As we will see in the biographies below, these authors
failed to conform to socially ingrained expectations of a “proper” life
trajectory for women their age. Not surprisingly, their fictional heroines
also subverted expectations of normalcy by explicitly rejecting the cultur-
ally defined common sense of the 1960s. Before we look at these literary
strategies of resistance in detail, let us first examine the ways in which
society sought to discipline women to conform to hegemonic ideologies
of femininity.
Just as salarymen had their place in society as “corporate warriors,”
their children could contribute to the nation by devoting themselves to
academic success, toward becoming future productive workers them-
selves. Women, as during wartime, were constructed as the support staff
in this national cause, making their husbands’ and children’s labor possible
through their roles as “good wives and wise mothers,” a prewar ideology
of femininity that found renewed relevance in the postwar period.12 While
women before and during World War II were mobilized to turn their
“natural” instincts for nurturing others toward service to the empire—
by bearing and raising future soldiers and preserving the integrity of the
home even as husbands and children were sent off to war—women in
the postwar period were urged to perform similar roles in the service of
economic growth.
Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” helps us to understand how
such gender roles can come to seem “natural,” as they are ingrained in
the individual through formal and informal disciplinary mechanisms that
permeate all levels and institutions of society.13 Individual Japanese con-
tributions to this postwar project of national economic growth, through
compliance with gendered ideals of behavior designed to distribute the
burden of production to all sectors of society as efficiently as possible,
were likewise solicited through such regulatory mechanisms. Formally,
government policies established the parameters of what was legally permis-
sible, including a range of behaviors with highly gendered consequences,
such as laws governing abortion and birth control. Informally, disciplin-
ary regimes were incorporated into the organizations and institutions that
came to structure daily life for most Japanese people—workplace, school,
family, neighborhood. These disciplinary regimes reinforced gendered
norms designed to produce “docile bodies” capable of channeling indi-

vidual desires toward contributing peacefully and productively to a new
and improved Japan and were themselves reinforced by the mass media,
which served to both reflect and produce postwar ideologies of gender.
It is important to note that compliance with these gender norms
was achieved not merely through initiatives sponsored by government,
industry, and media, but was in large part also the result of cooperation
by a substantial proportion of the Japanese population itself. As we will
see, the authors addressed in this study may be seen as exceptional in their
determination to resist such disciplinary regimes. But first let us survey the
specific contexts that produced these norms. In the following sections, we
will see some examples of how conformity to these ideologies of gender
was solicited and rewarded through both formal and informal disciplinary
mechanisms.
A bortion and B irth C ontrol

During World War II, exhorting women to bear more children was part
of a larger attempt to encourage women to contribute to the war effort
through heightened expressions of domestic femininity. Women were
understood discursively not only as producers of future soldiers, but also
as protectors of hearth and home. Keeping mothers at home seems to have
been perceived as crucial to maintaining some sense of stability during a
profoundly unstable time. This rationale explains why Japan, unlike the
United States or other nations during World War II, remained reluctant
to make use of the labor of married women, even as it conscripted young
schoolgirls to factories and other military support industries.14
In the postwar period, the tendency to view the full-time housewife
as anchor of home and family persisted, yet the prewar pronatalist rheto-
ric no longer made sense in light of the nation’s altered circumstances:
“Beginning in 1947, mortality rates started a long, steady decline and
birth rates skyrocketed. Official thinking of these years came to be marked
by a profound fear that overpopulation would choke off any hope of eco-
nomic recovery. With the prewar option of promoting emigration to the
colonies no longer possible, the government gradually moved toward sup-
port of family planning and birth control.”15 Amid a storm of controversy,
abortion was effectively legalized in 1948 as a response to the dire postwar
situation. However, conservative attitudes toward women’s sexual subjec-
tivity persisted, and many pundits feared that easier access to birth control
would encourage juvenile delinquency and lax morals.16 Government
policy in the postwar period was still underwritten by an assumption that
20 Chapter 1
the only morally acceptable outlet for women’s sexuality was motherhood,
so its embrace of birth control was tentative and qualified.
As the birth rate declined precipitously throughout the 1950s, first
due to easy access to abortion and later the increasing availability of con-
doms, government willingness to legalize new forms of birth control (par-
ticularly oral contraception) evaporated.17 From the 1960s on, Japanese
elites—in the form of interest groups representing obstetricians and gyne-
cologists, religious groups, pharmaceutical companies, and family plan-
ning organizations—battled one another to influence government policy
on abortion and birth control. Several attempts were made to restrict legal
access to abortion, beginning in 1967.18 Women in the 1960s were bar-
raged by religious groups with messages that “abortion is murder,” even
as they were given few options to limit their fertility and little to no educa-
tion on sexual matters other than exhortations to remain “pure” until
marriage.19 For a variety of structural reasons that had little to do with
the promotion of women’s reproductive freedom and much to do with
the convenience of government bureaucracy, industry, and the medical
establishment, abortion and condoms became the primary means of birth
control in the absence of other options, a situation that was not remedied
until oral contraceptives were legalized in 1999.20
There are many implications of this state of affairs, all of which left
women at a distinct disadvantage. Certainly from the state’s perspective of
expanding the economy, it was desirable for women to have some access
to birth control so as to limit family size. On the one hand, an increasingly
sophisticated technological society could be maintained only by a highly
educated workforce, and such a society required an intensive investment
of money and time in each child. On the other hand, as the nuclear family
structured according to a highly gendered division of labor provided the
optimal structure within which to raise such children, it was undesirable
for women to have too much sexual freedom, as they might decide to
enjoy satisfying sexual lives while opting out of this structure altogether.
Given these social and historical exigencies, it is hardly surprising that
the two available means of birth control, condoms and abortion, both
required the cooperation of a woman’s male partner, and one was an inva-
sive and expensive procedure with potentially serious consequences for
the woman’s health.21 Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that
the majority of women acceded to social pressures to conform to models
of femininity that stressed marriage and motherhood as woman’s “natu-
ral” roles. As we will see below, all three of the authors under study here
resisted this notion of marriage and motherhood as woman’s destiny, and
while all three eventually got married (although one waited until quite late
in life), only one of the three had children.
E ducation for M arriage

While Western-style ideals of romantic love had some currency in Japan as
early as the 1920s, love marriages were in fact relatively rare at this time.
Furthermore, as Barbara Sato notes, as the national climate of increasing
militarism in the 1930s began to hold sway over the private lives of Japa-
nese citizens, individual desires—including those influencing choice of
marriage partner—were gradually subordinated to the needs of the state:
In 1940, in compliance with the state’s policy to increase the

population, marriage became women’s duty carried out for the
good of the country. This policy led to a temporary decline in
the trend toward love marriages as official doctrine left no room
for individualism in marriage. “We can’t think anymore about
marriage being for our personal happiness,” Shufu no tomo [a
popular women’s magazine] told its readers. “A good marriage
is one that will help strengthen the state.”22
On an individual level, marriages in the prewar period were typically

arranged by the head of household—often the father or eldest brother—
who managed the lives of family members according to a patriarchal logic
patterned after the emperor’s rule over his subjects. Individual needs were
thereby subordinated to those of the ie (household), which was in turn
subordinated to the needs of the state, so the emperor was seen as a kind
of national father figure. In this way the state was able to make use of
traditional values of filial piety in the service of national order; just as
one’s father must be obeyed unconditionally, so must the emperor. It was
not until the new postwar constitution formally dismantled the ie system
that women (and men) were finally granted the legal right to choose their
own spouses. The Shōwa One-Digit Generation was therefore the first to
benefit from this increased freedom to marry a partner of one’s choice.
By the 1960s love marriages had become an attainable ideal for many
in Japanese society and quickly came to signify the promise and rewards
of Japan’s newly democratized and thoroughly middle-class society. How-
ever, while the choice of marriage partner was increasingly left up to the
individual, the question of whether or not one should marry, or what
sort of marriage one should aspire to, remained very much a matter of
state concern. In the immediate aftermath of the war, elite fears of “moral
22 Chapter 1
corruption,” in the form of rising rates of prostitution and abortion, and

the specter of girls and boys being taught together in classrooms for the
first time under the new system of coeducation, led the Ministry of Educa-
tion to develop a sex education curriculum that overwhelmingly focused
on “purity education”—that is, abstinence. Educating future wives and
mothers in the postwar period thus began early, with young female stu-
dents indoctrinated to preserve their virginity for marriage. After marriage,
they were expected to channel their sexual impulses into the production
and rearing of children, as well as into creating a warm and comfortable
home for their husbands.
There was no recognition that women might legitimately have sexual
desires that were independent of motherly “instincts.” Such impulses
were actively discouraged as harmful and antithetical to women’s maternal
destiny. As an example of the majority opinion among “experts” on sex
education, Sonia Ryang notes the following about one influential manual
written in 1949:
While there is a conspicuous absence of mention of the “com-

fort” men could receive from prostitutes or other sex workers
outside wedlock or prior to marriage, the author goes on warn-
ing against fukenzenna kōi (unhealthy behavior) on the part of
women, including masturbation which, according to [the author]
Numanoi, could turn women into homosexuals and would ruin
their marital happiness. Similar warnings against female sexual
self-gratification, focusing on clitoral orgasm as a possible cause
of mental illness and frigidity (that is, inability to sexually satisfy
her husband), abound in purity education and sex education
guidebooks.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›One can clearly see that junketsukyōiku [purity
education] was really about female virginity and not male sexual
purity, about controlling female sexuality (by way of educating
men as well as disciplining women), and about dividing sex into
marital and extramarital components from the men’s point of
view.23
According to this logic, then, the only “healthy” outlet for women’s sexu-
ality was within the context of marriage. But as Ryang notes, even within
this limited sphere of possible sexual activity for women, emphasis was
placed on the “product” of sex—that is, the conception of children—
rather than the activity itself or the relationship between the partners.
Ironically, this “asexualization” of marital sex took place simultaneously
with an increased emphasis on (heterosexual) romantic love, yielding a

curious state of affairs whereby couples everywhere were incited not to
repress their sexual desires but to actively channel them into marriage and
reproduction while eliding the sexual content of the encounter through a
discourse of “pure love.”
These messages were reinforced in the mass entertainment media
through narratives of “pure love” like the novel Ai to shi o mitsumete (Fac-
ing Love and Death, 1963), a best-selling tearjerker about a young couple
whose relationship remained “pure” until the untimely end of the virginal
female protagonist. The story was subsequently made into a highly popu-
lar TV drama and a feature film. “The sexuality and sexual desires of wives
were suppressed or displaced by watching soap operas in the living room,
while those of husbands were redirected outside the home, as in the cases
of flirting with bar hostesses or buying prostitutes.”24 It was not until after
the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that public opinion began
to shift toward acceptance of the notion that women might legitimately
possess and act upon sexual impulses of their own, outside of the context
of marriage. Yet well in advance of these developments in the second-wave
feminist movement, the women authors whose works form the core of
this study produced frank and often shocking narratives of feminine sexual
agency that challenged the notion of women as passive (a)sexual objects.
Education for marriage and motherhood was also infused, formally
and informally, into other aspects of the curriculum, demonstrating
remarkable continuity across the prewar-postwar divide, even as postwar
women were granted legal guarantees of access to a higher quality and level
of education than ever before. In the prewar period, even at relatively pres-
tigious women’s institutions of higher learning, girls had been presented
with a dumbed-down curriculum that emphasized graceful acquiescence
to gendered roles and placed extreme limits on feminine self-expression
through rigorous disciplinary mechanisms.
Even within the higher normal schools, which provided the most
advanced education available to women in prewar Japan, the cur-
riculum was dull and out of touch with a changing society. Math
courses emphasized bookkeeping; chemistry courses featured
lectures on the molecular makeup of household goods; English
courses assigned recitations from Pilgrim’s Progress and Florence
Nightingale’s biography; and ethics courses reviewed the “do’s”
and “don’t’s” of feminine etiquette: how to sit gracefully at a
tea ceremony, what clothes to wear for a funeral, which flowers
24 Chapter 1
to hang near the lavatory on New Year’s. In addition, the male

administrators of these institutions spared no efforts in sheltering
their young ladies. Dress codes, curfews, prohibitions on news-
papers, and wrought-iron gates insured that the higher normal
school graduate had a minimal understanding of, or interest in,
politics, social reform, or even simply self-expression.25
It was understood that the purpose of higher education for women was
to prepare them for their future roles as wives and mothers, and those
who violated this norm by pursuing a career instead—even through the
more or less acceptable route of schoolteaching—were viewed askance as
“represent[ing] a threat to ‘manliness,’ marriage, and family.”26 Although
all three authors addressed in this study would have been subjected to this
type of “feminine” curriculum during the early years of their education,
two out of three went on to study at prestigious and previously male-
dominated institutions, and the third, slightly too old to benefit from the
removal of legal barriers to this path, nevertheless attended a prestigious
women’s college.
In spite of postwar efforts to restructure the Japanese educational
system to guarantee equal educational opportunity to women, conserva-
tive attitudes regarding gender roles nevertheless persisted in the minds of
government and bureaucratic officials, not to mention the average citizen.
As Donald Roden notes, even during the height of the Occupation-era
reformist zeal, there was great resistance to the kind of restructuring of
the educational infrastructure that would be necessary to fully integrate
women into university environments on an equal basis with men. Roden’s
research indicates, for example, that Japanese bureaucrats during the
Occupation actively worked to obstruct the creation of deans of women at
historically male-dominated institutions who might have acted as guidance
counselors to encourage and support the first cohorts of young women
admitted to such prestigious institutions. 27 Under such circumstances, it
is hardly surprising that women of this generation, like Takahashi Takako,
recall experiences of chauvinism and demoralization in all-male university
environments.28
After 1952, the gap between the promises of the new Japanese con-
stitution and the realities of Japanese women’s lives persisted. In the wake
of the Allies’ departure and the rising tide of political conservatism, key
Occupation-era reforms that had been intended to decentralize the edu-
cational system were rolled back. Thanks to this second “reverse course,”
the Ministry of Education was able to exert a great deal of control over
everything from the composition of local school boards to the contents of

textbooks.29 This control facilitated the socialization of children according
to rigidly defined gender roles, through both formal and informal mecha-
nisms. In spite of constitutional guarantees of equality between the sexes,
in 1958 the Ministry of Education introduced vocational training from
the middle-school level that was effectively sex-segregated. As Atsuko
Kameda notes, “The postwar educational reforms mandated that all stu-
dents pursue a common, uniform curriculum at all levels of education. As
part of this policy, home economics was made a mandatory subject for
both girls and boys at the elementary and secondary levels. At the lower
secondary schools level, a course called “industrial arts and homemak-
ing” was newly established in 1958, and boys were taught industrial arts
and girls homemaking.”30 It seems that this policy was designed to obey
the letter of the law while violating its spirit by considering “industrial
arts and homemaking” as a single class, even as boys were assigned the
former and girls the latter. Educators were thereby able to claim that they
required the same “curriculum” of everyone, even though the contents
differed according to the sex of the student. In 1969, home economics
was made a required course for high school girls (effective 1973), but this
“requirement” was not extended to boys until 1989 (effective 1994), a
revision that was freely ignored by many schools even after this point.31
Thus, educational curricula left young people during the 1960s with little
doubt as to their destinies, continuing to craft girls into future wives and
mothers, while boys were prepared for careers in the workforce.
The persistence of these gendered attitudes toward appropriate voca-
tional aspirations for men and women obviously clashed with the guar-
antees of equal educational opportunity of the postwar constitution. In
spite of these barriers, the number of young women enrolling in four-year
universities continued to rise throughout the 1950s and 1960s, prompt-
ing a conservative backlash that erupted in the mass media in the form of
widely publicized debates over “coeds ruining the nation.” This debate
was sparked by an article penned by Professor Teruoka Yasutaka of the
prestigious Waseda University; the article ran in the March 1962 issue
of Fujin kōron, a large-circulation magazine targeted toward an educated
female readership. Hiroko Hirakawa summarizes the esteemed professor’s
remarks on the subject as follows:
According to Professor Teruoka, female university students were

lowering the standards of higher education and wasting not only
their own time but people’s taxes, since they were only going
26 Chapter 1
to become housewives. In magazines and radio programs, his

claims were supported by other (male) intellectuals, though
some defended coeds on the grounds that higher education
would help women become “enlightened mothers.” The pres-
ence of these mass-mediated debates indicates that, by the time
the Ampo turmoil [of 1960] broke out, the construction of a
normative model of the nuclear family, however contested, was
already under way.32
The contemptuous attitude that Professor Teruoka demonstrated

toward girls who aspired to something more than marriage and mother-
hood must not have been lost on young women of the time, in spite of
the increased opportunities that were theoretically available to them. This
contempt was surely driven home by the fact that even the coeds’ support-
ers justified their pursuit of higher education exclusively within the rather
limited discourse of the nurturing of future “enlightened mothers.” The
specter of the coed contagion was then taken up in other mass-circulation
periodicals like Shūkan Asahi, a weekly magazine aimed at a general reader-
ship, and in radio broadcasts, and it continued for about a year. The length
and extensive coverage of this debate indicates how contested the question
of “appropriate” roles for women was at this point in Japanese history, a
controversy that exposed critical gaps between the promise of postwar
reforms and the reality of most women’s lives. Women who attempted
to deviate from this “appropriate” path encountered profound resistance
not merely from official bureaucratic structures, but in the court of public
opinion as well. Mass media portrayals of “appropriate” feminine activity
further worked to reinforce these normative discourses, either by explic-
itly critiquing women’s aspirations to anything but marriage and mother-
hood or more subtly by rewriting other types of activity as expressions of
women’s maternal destiny.
In light of these historical circumstances, the narratives of the women
writers addressed in this study stand out for the way they are not only
able to forward trenchant critiques of hegemonic ideologies of femininity,
but also for the frank and explicit attention they give to various expres-
sions of feminine sexuality. By boldly engaging head on with such taboo
subjects, these writers implicitly challenged conventional binary models of
gender that constructed women as sexually innocent, passive, and nurtur-
ing maternal figures. In the next section, we will see how relationships
between the worlds of work and family life were constructed so as to fur-
ther underscore a gendered division of labor that reinforced such binary
models of gender in postwar Japanese society, before we go on to explore

some of the ways these women writers resisted such binary distinctions in
their literature.
G endered D ivision of L abor

The remarkable persistence of this ideology of domestic femininity in the
1960s might seem like something of a paradox, given the fact that sub-
stantial numbers of women worked outside the home and that these num-
bers increased markedly throughout the period of high economic growth
from 1955 to 1973. Of course, women whose families made their living in
agriculture or small business had always worked alongside their husbands
and children. It was also common for young single women to work for a
few years before retiring to get married. But as industry faced an increas-
ingly urgent labor shortage after 1960, many corporations turned to hir-
ing married women to fill the gap, typically on a part-time or temporary
basis. The number of women employed in this capacity jumped from 4.4
million to 10.7 million between 1955 and 1970.33
However, this increased rate of employment among housewives did
little to alter the discursive construction of women as primarily wives and
mothers, as the structural characteristics of the Japanese labor market still
conspired to prevent most women from earning enough to attain financial
independence. Young women were pressured to marry and start a family
by age twenty-five, and until the practice was declared illegal in 1966,
they were typically required to retire from the workforce upon marriage.34
Furthermore, the seniority system that dominated corporate employment
and promotion practices provided benefits and raises only to workers with
many years of uninterrupted service. Married women who reentered the
labor force after raising children were thus generally limited to part-time,
temporary, and poorly paid jobs that amounted to little more than supple-
mentary contributions to most household budgets so that their salarymen
husbands continued to fill the role of breadwinner for the family. Govern-
ment policies also created incentives for women to confine their efforts
to the domestic sphere. Tax and pension schemes were structured on the
assumption of a male head of household who worked outside the home,
with a dependent “nonworking” spouse, so women who earned more
than one million yen per year actually increased their household’s burden
in terms of tax and pension plan contributions.35
In the face of these structural barriers to women’s ability to earn a
living wage, marriage and motherhood came to seem like the only logical
choice for long-term financial security. Under such circumstances, it is no
28 Chapter 1
wonder that as late as 1983, nearly half of Japanese people of both sexes
aged eighteen to twenty-four agreed with the statement that “men should
work outside the home and women should stay at home.”36
Such attitudes should not be seen as “traditional” in the sense of
natural and ahistorical, but rather as the product of disciplinary practices
that gradually instilled Japanese citizens in the postwar period with com-
monsense assumptions of binary and complementary roles for men and
women.
Andrew Gordon demonstrates one way in which this discipline-for-
growth was disseminated and promoted through the corporate-sponsored
and government-supported “New Life Movements” of the 1950s and
1960s. These campaigns, which began as discrete and localized initiatives
in the countryside and then spread to urban areas thanks to corporate
adoption, encompassed an impressive array of activities and programs
intended to professionalize the role of the housewife. They included
courses in everything from practical skills like cooking, sewing, and knit-
ting to lectures on efficient and modest household management. By offer-
ing wives the training necessary to acquit their household responsibilities
well, these programs instilled in women a sense of pride in their contri-
butions to family, company, and nation. Both industry and government
stood to gain from channeling women’s labor toward maintenance of the
domestic sphere, through rhetoric that “spoke of rationalizing the role of
housewife, the life of the family, and the home as both physical and social
space. But its greater impact was in naturalizing a certain model of gender
relations—of proper roles for men as well as for women. A society where
women of all social strata managed the home, while their men managed
the workplace, came to be understood as the natural way things were and
ought to be.”37 Ultimately this resulted in a gendered division of labor that
created definitive boundaries between the private and public realms and
was increasingly articulated as an ideological distinction between feminine
and masculine roles.
Gordon emphasizes that women were not forcibly inscribed within
these domestic roles, but rather actively cooperated in creating and dis-
seminating the gospel of “good wife and wise mother,” as reinvented in
the postwar period under the auspices of the New Life Movement. By per-
forming as competent and “professional” household managers through
an internalization of the tenets of modern domestic science, women were
able to craft for themselves a role within the high-growth economy that
was valued as separate but equally important as that played by their salary-
men husbands. For this reason, many women readily acceded to the role
of full-time housewife, even as it constrained their lifestyle options on

other fronts. Gordon further notes that by the 1970s the movement had
outlived its usefulness, ironically because the job of training women for
their future roles in the domestic sphere had been taken over by the public
schools.38
Nevertheless, housewives increasingly returned to the labor force
from the mid-1950s on, if only on a part-time basis, while continuing to
shoulder the entire burden of housework and child care. Women were
hardly oblivious to the challenge this outside employment posed to their
discursive construction as wives and mothers, and this structural paradox
motivated a series of vituperative “housewife debates,” which raged off
and on from 1955 to 1976 in the pages of Fujin kōron. The debates
began with an incendiary essay by Ishigaki Ayako, a female critic who
chastised Japanese housewives for being content with full-time domestic
work that, she claimed, allowed them to pursue lives of indolence and
ease. Ishigaki charged that this thereby stunted their intellectual and
emotional growth compared to American women, whose work outside
the home challenged them to develop into mature and independent
adults. Jan Bardsley summarizes Ishigaki’s argument as follows: “In
the space of the home, gendered as female, Japanese housewives grow
predictably soft and simpleminded, their concerns taking on a rather
nervous, petty quality. The marketplace and other public places, [which
are] gendered as male, are the site of serious adult work, something that
makes the leisured appearance of the housewife and her inconsequential
speech stand out all the more because they are so aberrant.”39 The stri-
dent tone of Ishigaki’s critique may sound unreasonable, given the very
real barriers to meaningful employment for women circa 1955. More-
over, her characterization of such women as infantile and intellectually
stunted seems to echo uncomfortably well the chauvinist discourse that
was employed by men at this time to denigrate feminine potential for
anything but housework, as the comments of Professor Teruoka (above)
amply demonstrate.
However, in the biographical background she provides on Ishigaki,
Bardsley offers a likely reason that this ostensibly “feminist” critic might
so savagely attack other women. As Bardsley recounts, the course of Ishi-
gaki’s own youth was marked by her resistance to restrictive stereotypes of
femininity that confined women within the domestic sphere:
Her family criticized her as a young adult because she showed no

interest in marriage or in leading the sheltered life of a middle-
30 Chapter 1
class Tokyo woman. Ishigaki describes how she despaired of find-

ing a job in Tokyo in the early 1920s that would have enabled
her to be self-supporting, and how she berated herself for being
no more than a “parasite” on her family. She also writes about
how her decision to move to New York and to marry a man of
her own choosing brought even harsher criticism, causing her
father to sever all ties with her. When Ishigaki attacks the mod-
ern Japanese housewife with such force, she is, in effect, fighting
against the ideal her family had always upheld for her—and the
ideal which, in their minds, she utterly failed to achieve.40
Viewed from the perspective of her personal history, Ishigaki’s frus-

tration with women who conform to gendered roles is perhaps easier to
understand. The more women comply unresistingly with the expectation
that they confine their efforts to the domestic realm, the harder it is for
exceptional women who dare to challenge these stereotypes to justify their
behavior or aspirations. In fact because of the disciplinary mechanisms
outlined above, which permeated all levels of society, creating a sense of
the “naturalness” of women’s destiny to become wives and mothers, it
was an exceptional woman indeed who dared to challenge the “common
sense” of mainstream Japanese society at that time. As we will see below,
the authors addressed in this study may likewise be seen as exceptional
women, whose impulse to challenge restrictive gender roles led them into
conflict not just with societal norms, but also with those women who
complied with them.
Texts and Contexts

This section will explore the emergence of the women writers of the 1960s
within the broader context of the bundan. After a brief description of this
milieu, we will see how it functioned to determine the success or failure of
literary careers in both explicitly and implicitly gendered ways. We will also
see how gendered discourses worked simultaneously to shape women’s
writing as “feminine” and to construct masculine subjectivity as active
and superior to women, who were discursively rendered as correspond-
ingly passive and inferior. Finally, we will survey the lives and works of
the authors analyzed in this study, with particular attention to the points
of connection between their literary attacks on hegemonic discourses of
gender and the ways these forms of self-expression were shaped by their
experiences with the bundan.
“F emininity ” and the J apanese L iterary E stablishment

While the term bundan is now rather loosely applied to the center of
Japanese literary power and prestige, its composition and function have
changed over time in response to broader transformations in literature
and society. The term was originally used in the Meiji period (late 1800s)
to refer to a literary guild structured according to a close-knit set of mas-
ter-disciple relations, where young writers labored under the tutelage of
established authors. In the early 1900s, the term came to be applied to
a coterie of writers inspired by European naturalist literature who devel-
oped the shishōsetsu (I-novel). This quasi-autobiographical form of fiction
stressed the pursuit of “truth” through a relentless interrogation and
exposure of self and became the dominant form of the modern Japanese
novel in the first half of the twentieth century. As the market for literary
production and consumption expanded dramatically in the Shōwa period
(beginning in 1926), the center of power gradually shifted from this small
fraternity of like-minded intellectuals to the publishing industry itself, as
mass-circulation newspapers and journals increasingly took the place of
coterie magazines as the primary outlet for original works of fiction.41 By
the 1960s, the term bundan had come to refer broadly to those public
intellectuals with the “power”—in the form of educational capital and sta-
tus, as members of the academy or the publishing industry—to determine
the success or failure of the literary careers of aspiring writers.
From the beginning of the modern period, the power of the bundan
was exercised in evidently gendered ways to restrict or shape women’s lit-
erary production. In the 1890s, as women began to contribute to literary
circles and coterie magazines under the tutelage of master writers, it took
the explicit form of male mentors who directed the work of their female
protégés to conform to what they perceived as appropriately “feminine”
style.42 As the publishing industry grew and such interpersonal mecha-
nisms of control were gradually superseded by editorial decisions regard-
ing literary marketability, the bundan functioned not so much to silence
or exclude women from publishing as to selectively reward those who
conformed to expectations of legibly “feminine” writing.
As Joan Ericson demonstrates, these literary expectations were
gradually codified in the form of the emergent “genre” of joryū bungaku
(women’s-style literature), a “style” of writing that came to define literary
expression for women from the 1920s on. As more women embarked on
literary careers, male writers increasingly sought ways to distinguish their
own “pure” (artistically superior) literature from what they saw as an influx
32 Chapter 1
of “popular” (stylistically inferior) writing by women. As a result, women’s

literary work came to be categorized as joryū bungaku, a classification that
collapsed a variety of writing styles and thematic material under a largely
constructed and totalizing category of the “feminine”:
Modern Japanese women writers confronted a specific constella-

tion of attitudes toward their gender that shaped not only their
prospects for publication and critical reception, but, in some cir-
cumstances, even how the women themselves wrote. Attributes
presumed to be natural in a woman’s voice—sentimental lyri-
cism, and impressionistic, nonintellectual, detailed observations
of daily life—were the result of a confluence of social and literary
trends that, in the 1920’s, crystallized the notion of a distinct
“women’s style.”43
It is important to note here that while this “feminine” style was presented
as “natural” and inherent to the female sex, in fact it took on a prescrip-
tive and disciplinary function, thereby creating that which it presumed to
describe.
Women writers who conformed to the standard of joryū bungaku
were rewarded with opportunities for publication and literary prizes. Writ-
ers like Enchi Fumiko, who wrote lyrically in a style that evoked the beauty
of the great Heian (high classical) female authors, or Sono Ayako, whose
works extolled “traditional domestic virtues of marriage and the family,”
fit comfortably within male expectations of “feminine” style, even when
in other respects their work might be said to forward a feminist message.44
As Chieko M. Ariga notes, even those who did not conform could often
be reinscribed within more comfortably “feminine” parameters through
critical commentaries that interpreted the meaning of their work for read-
ers in more conventionally gendered terms.45 Those who could not be
recuperated as appropriately “feminine” were consigned to the margins of
literary history.46
Women who made their debuts on the literary scene in the 1960s
thus faced a network of “hard” and “soft” disciplinary mechanisms that
operated in emphatically gendered ways and were frequently mutually
imbricated. By “hard” mechanisms, I refer to explicit or formal methods of
restricting access to publication or bestowing recognition upon an author
or her works. In postwar Japan, these methods ranged from editorial deci-
sions regarding whether or not to publish a work in a prestigious journal
or zenshū (collected works), to positive critical reception (including the
conferral of literary prizes), to inclusion in the ranks of those anointed to

judge the merit of other authors’ works (for example, prize selection com-
mittees or roundtable discussions devoted to the critique of new works).47
By “soft” mechanisms, I refer to implicit or informal methods of control,
such as interpersonal relationships and gendered discourses (literary and
otherwise) that shaped attitudes toward women and their literary works
and to some extent were internalized by the women themselves.
In terms of the way these mechanisms operated to exclude or margin-
alize women in the bundan, it is helpful to think of power as functioning
not in absolute or strictly hierarchical terms but through a variety of com-
plex and overdetermined ways that ultimately yield gendered outcomes.
Women’s careers were often made or broken not through the decree of
one powerful male who deemed them unworthy but through a multitude
of everyday interactions with members of the male-dominated establish-
ment, each of whom possessed a measure of power and wielded it in subtle
and perhaps even unintentional ways. These encounters could include
everything from having a manuscript rejected for its failure to conform to
legible expressions of “femininity” to allowing the career of one’s husband
or lover to hamper one’s own professional advancement.
The sum of these individual power encounters—particularly when
power was employed to contain women (deliberately or not) within con-
ventionally “feminine” modes of self-expression and behavior—created a
formidable wall to women’s advancement in the literary world that was
only gradually overcome and left an indelible mark on the writing of
women authors of fiction during the 1960s. The authors discussed in this
study all had personal experiences of frustration and failure in attempting
to overcome these networks of power, experiences that in turn shaped
what they were able to say and how they were able to say it. In chapters 2
and 3, we will see that these authors explicitly grappled with these experi-
ences in their literature, depicting in harsh terms those “hard” and “soft”
disciplinary mechanisms that sought to contain their protagonists within
appropriately gendered forms of subjectivity.
G ender in P ostwar J apanese L iterature

Thus far we have seen how networks of power, both formal and informal,
shaped the success or failure of women’s literary careers, as well as the
form of their creative self-expression. The authors addressed in this study
had the dubious distinction of pushing the boundaries of “feminine” lit-
erature at a time when they were malleable enough to allow for some
distortion yet rigid enough to leave a mark on both the author and her
34 Chapter 1
work. Women writers during the 1960s could not help but be affected by
discourses of normative femininity even as they struggled against them,
particularly since such discourses profoundly shaped not only their own
life experiences, but also the standards of literary excellence according to
which their own works were judged.
These stereotypes were further reinforced by images of women as
depicted in the literature of those male writers who were anointed with
both critical and popular success during this turbulent decade. At the time
the authors of this study were writing, the bundan was dominated by
male writers who depicted women in their literature in chauvinist, if not
downright misogynist, terms. These male-stream narratives were products
of a profound crisis in male subjectivity resulting from the emasculating
experience of defeat and Occupation in the immediate postwar period,
aggravated by the perception that women were encroaching upon previ-
ously male-dominated spaces (including the bundan) as they attempted
to capitalize on the new rights extended to them by the postwar constitu-
tion.48 Postwar narratives by male writers thus tried to rhetorically reassert a
dominant masculine subjectivity by rendering women as corporeal objects
that facilitated the recuperation and transcendence of their embattled and
emasculated protagonists. In chapters 3 and 4 of this volume, we will
see how women writers in the 1960s protested, and then subverted, this
masculine trope of aligning women with the base realm of the corporeal
as a ground for masculine transcendence to the “superior” realm of the
intellect. But first let us briefly survey the context for postwar literature of
the body that underwrote this struggle to define femininity.
While prewar practitioners of the “I-novel” were still actively pub-
lishing after World War II, new forms of literature authored by male writ-
ers also emerged from the ashes of defeat to reshape the postwar literary
landscape. During the late 1940s, one of the first such genres of fiction
to offer a new direction for Japanese literature was nikutai bungaku, or
“literature of the flesh.” As a response to and reaction against the total
spiritual and moral devotion to the national project of imperialism, which
had been required of Japanese citizens during the war, this literature
sought release from ideological bondage in the form of physical and car-
nal experience. With its attention to the body as a crucial site of mediation
between self and other—as well as the prominence it placed on sexuality,
both as a means of interaction with the Other and as a vehicle for self-
knowledge and identity construction—this genre is one obvious genea-
logical source for the literature of the body produced by women writers of
the 1960s.
The work of Michael Molasky and Douglas Slaymaker is particularly

useful for understanding the relevance of nikutai bungaku to this study, as
both scholars are sensitive to the gendered implications of such literature.
Molasky describes male writers who wrote during or about the Occupa-
tion period as engaged in a project of “national allegory,” wherein female
characters are portrayed as literally embodying the fate of the nation, par-
ticularly through narratives that dramatize the fraternization of Japanese
women with American GIs. In such narratives, the sexual use and abuse of
Japanese women’s bodies provides male writers with a convenient trope
for expressing the indignity that men felt as a result of defeat and occupa-
tion, while it projects anxieties of sexual violation and humiliation onto
the body of the Other.49 Slaymaker concurs, noting that writers of nikutai
bungaku promoted an ideology of “living by the body,” where bodily
experience, and particularly sexual release, served as a means of escape
both from the enforced subservience to nation and emperor required of
them during the war and from the crushing sense of emasculation and
inadequacy that plagued men during the Occupation:
Male characters in postwar fiction [by male authors] affirm their

identity via agency and transgression under the gaze of the Other;
insisting on their agency in sexual relations, they thus re-assert an
inviolate identity (precisely what they are anxious about) through
heterosexual agency, an act that violates the boundaries of a
woman. The flesh writers display an assumption (which I suggest
is male) that founds the identity of the thinking individual on an
agency coded as liberation; the agency they image [sic] violates
the integrity of the woman.50
It is striking that in male narratives of the Occupation, for male protago-

nists, control over their own body and the body of the Other (woman)
seems requisite for a sense of masculine subjectivity. “Liberation” is there-
fore figured in these texts in terms that are specifically both masculine and
heterosexual.
Yet while male authors during the Occupation made much of “living
by the body” as a means of coping with the postwar malaise, it seems
clear that the body in question was not their own but that of a woman.
In other words, rather than merely expressing a man’s own bodily plea-
sures and experiences, what these narratives seem in fact to wish for their
male protagonists is not so much transcendence through the body but
transcendence of the body. By employing the body of the Other (woman)
36 Chapter 1
as a vehicle for their own transcendence of the base, corporeal realm, the
protagonists are able to project onto Woman all of the negative qualities
that are associated with the corporeal—physical vulnerability, violation
of one’s bodily boundaries through sexual submission, acquiescence to
domination by structures of power—qualities that threaten to emasculate
an already fragile male sense of agency. Within this context, what possibil-
ity existed for Japanese women to establish a sense of agency in the postwar
period? This is precisely the question that occupied the women writers
addressed in this study, as we will see in subsequent chapters.
As the nikutai bungaku of the early postwar period gave way to a new
generation of young male authors who came to define literary excellence
in the bundan of the 1960s, these new male writers continued to depict
women’s bodies as the ground for construction of a postwar masculine
subjectivity. As Susan Napier demonstrates, male writers of this time con-
tinued to depict the humiliation of defeat through narratives that char-
acterized postwar Japan as a “wasteland” that could be transcended only
through violent action, frequently accompanied by the sexual abuse and
denigration of women. In her thorough study of two great male writers of
the 1960s, Ōe Kenzaburō and Mishima Yukio, she explains the frequency
of works depicting the rape, torture, and terrorization of female characters
as motivated by a desire for mastery and potency in a world that they
perceived to be chaotic and barren.51
Even in stories where women are depicted in more or less positive
terms, they serve primarily as “vessels through which male characters work
out their fears and desires.” For example, Napier finds that the wife of the
protagonist in Mishima’s “Patriotism” (1961), quite possibly the most
sympathetically drawn of any of Mishima’s heroines, is positively depicted
primarily for her utter subordination to her husband’s will: “Reiko’s
beauty, highlighted by her traditional garb, her obedience, and above all
her traditionally submissive character, signify a world of lost calm and secu-
rity where relationships were defined and control was firmly in the hands
of a virile male.” Napier then compares this to the character of Himiko in
Ōe’s A Personal Matter (1964), who willingly offers her body up for the
protagonist’s sadistic and violent sexual use so as to cure him of his impo-
tence: “Himiko’s care-taking attitude and her womblike little apartment
offer refuge for a male adrift in the atomizing sea of modernity.”52
Ōe’s work is particularly telling in this regard, in part because of the
pervasive misogyny evident in his narratives and also because of his stature
as a darling of the postwar literary establishment. Anointed by Japanese
critics from the beginning of his career in the 1950s as a spokesman for the
emergent generation of young (male) writers, Ōe went on to establish an

international reputation as a dominant voice in postwar Japanese letters,
eventually being honored with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. With
authors like Mishima and Ōe setting the standards for literary excellence in
the 1960s, it is no wonder that postwar women writers felt compelled to
counter these male discourses by narrating experiences of the female body
from their own perspectives. As we will see below, the authors addressed in
this study also produced narratives that combined sexuality and violence in
frequently shocking ways yet to very different ends than those of the male
writers described above.
A uthor B iographies
In this section, I give a brief overview of the careers and experiences of
Kōno, Takahashi, and Kurahashi, up to and including the 1960s, when
the texts analyzed in this study were written. In doing so, I highlight the
way that each of these women defied normative constructions of femi-
ninity both in their literature and in their own lives. Personal experience
may in this sense be seen as motivating their rhetorical challenges to the
ideologies of gender elaborated above. My objective is not to posit a direct
and transparent correspondence between biography and bibliography, but
rather to demonstrate the ways in which literature offered these women a
forum to challenge hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality. While I
do not want to overstate the importance of biography, given the extraordi-
nary times during which these women lived, it would be surprising if they
were unaffected by the historical transformations that impacted the range
of experiences and opportunities available to them as women.
One thing that immediately becomes evident when these authors’
experiences are examined together is the extent to which each woman’s
life course was affected by the age at which she experienced a common set
of social and historical transformations. These authors were born less than
ten years apart, and yet even slight differences in age at crucial moments
in history seem to have dramatically influenced the way they experienced
war, defeat, and the reorganization of Japanese society that occurred as a
result of Occupation-era reforms. Kōno, the oldest, was born in 1926, and
not surprisingly memories of war trauma and loss figure most prominently
in her work. While Takahashi, born in 1932, employs the war as a back-
drop for some of her fiction and essays, her recollection of events during
this time seems more detached. War and its aftermath—to the extent that
these are addressed at all in Takahashi’s literature—seem to serve her pri-
marily as a convenient setting for exploration of the spiritual and religious
38 Chapter 1
concerns that increasingly informed her writing as she developed as an

author.53 Born in 1935, Kurahashi, the youngest of the three, seems to
have been little affected by the events of the war—at least judging by her
self-presentation in autobiographical essays—and her literature seems far
more inflected by her young adult experiences during the early 1960s than
by the period of her childhood.
These three women may also be compared in terms of the educational
opportunities presented to them, which were determined in dramatic ways
by their age when Occupation-era reforms went into effect. Kōno was
nineteen when the war ended in 1945, and by the time the coeducational
system was inaugurated, she was past the age where she could benefit from
it. She had spent just four months in college before her education was
interrupted—first by conscription to factory labor; then by air raids that
burned her family home to the ground; and subsequently by defeat, occu-
pation, and the daily struggle to survive that characterized life in immedi-
ate postwar Japan. Her college cohort nevertheless graduated on time,
albeit without actually having spent much time in class. Her struggles to
support herself as a writer during the following years may be attributed in
part to the narrower range of opportunities available to her as a result of
these chaotic conditions. While Kōno’s own literary work has clearly been
enriched through her reading of both the Western and Japanese literary
traditions, this seems less a product of her formal educational background
and more a consequence of her own love of independent reading.
Takahashi, who was sixteen when her school went coed, experienced
a number of adjustment problems to this new system but was able to
translate these experiences into opportunities by competing successfully
for entrance to the prestigious Kyoto University. The expertise in French
literature that she acquired there is echoed in her own literary style; she
was particularly influenced by the surrealist fiction of André Breton and
the spiritual and moral concerns of French Catholic writers like François
Mauriac and Julien Green. This educational pedigree conferred upon Taka-
hashi the kind of academic and intellectual capital that had previously been
the exclusive province of men. Yet her experience of being surrounded
by male classmates, whom she describes as possessed of a confidence and
sense of entitlement that she lacked, produced a deep-seated psychological
conflict that only intensified with her marriage to another writer.
Kurahashi, who was just nine years old at the time of Japan’s defeat,
seems to have benefited the most from Occupation-era reforms while
experiencing the least degree of trauma in adjusting to the brave new
world of opportunity available to her. Like Takahashi, she was able to
gain entry to a prestigious school that nurtured her interest in French

literature, which left a dramatic imprint on her literary style. In fact, she
has often described her own style as a process of imitation or parody of
the writers she admires most—beginning with the “trinity” of Jean-Paul
Sartre, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus.54 Her educational experiences also
brought her into contact with powerful literary critics like Hirano Ken—a
professor at her alma mater, Meiji University—who helped to forward her
career. While her unorthodox literary style offended some members of the
literary establishment, the brash confidence that her protagonists exude
in gleefully subverting gender norms provides eloquent testimony to the
psychological effects of these unprecedented opportunities for achieve-
ment. What a difference a decade makes.
K ōno T aeko
Kōno was born in 1926, the second youngest of five children, to an Osaka
merchant family.55 Her love of literature was sparked by her encounter
with the works of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Izumi Kyōka, two authors
whose fascination with the fantastic, grotesque, and erotic seems to have
found echoes in her writing. Her own growth and maturity paralleled the
escalation of conflict between Japan and its neighbors that came to be
known in Japan as the Fifteen-Year (Pacific) War. Kōno was just eleven
when hostilities formally broke out on the Chinese mainland in 1937 and
fifteen when the United States entered the war in 1941. Much of her high
school “education” consisted of air raid drills, crash courses in first aid and
disaster response, sewing military uniforms, and cultivation of fallow land
to supplement food supplies, as Japanese society rapidly transformed into
a culture mobilized for total war.
At the age of eighteen Kōno was admitted to the Economics Depart-
ment of what is today known as Osaka Women’s University (Osaka Joshi
Daigaku) in 1944. During the precious few months that she spent in class,
she discovered a passion for English literature, until “nationalistic policies
forced her to abandon her newfound interest.”56 Then, shortly after the
beginning of the school year, the entire school was mobilized for manda-
tory service in a munitions factory. Factory labor and contributions to
other military support services were required even of teenaged girls during
the early 1940s, when Japan had sent most of its able men to the front.57
Such work was dangerous and exhausting, and the young “recruits” were
subjected to extreme forms of discipline that included corporal punish-
ment for infractions such as failure to behave in appropriately deferential
ways toward military officers. Any personal indulgence in food, clothing,
40 Chapter 1
or other adornments was interpreted as flouting austerity regulations,

which were intended to discipline subjects to devote themselves physi-
cally and spiritually for service to the empire.58 Not surprisingly, a number
of Kōno’s early stories read as thinly veiled protests against the violence
and hypocrisy of prewar Japanese militarism, communicated through the
experiences of young female protagonists whose childhoods are disrupted
by the exigencies and trauma of wartime.59
Immediately after Japan’s defeat in World War II, Kōno recalls feeling
a sense of “liberation” from the grim austerity of life under the militaristic
wartime regime; the feeling quickly turned to disillusionment as the fresh
start she had hoped for failed to materialize. Her search for a sense of
purpose led her to try her hand at writing in 1947, the year she graduated
from college. However, her family objected strenuously to this choice of
profession and pressured her to get married instead. In fact, the “normal”
and accepted path for young women at this time would have been to
marry soon after graduation from college.60 Pressure on young women
to marry and bear children at the “appropriate” age was strong, and any
woman, like Kōno, who resisted social pressure to comply with this model
of femininity faced an uphill battle that pitted her not merely against pres-
sure from friends and neighbors, but against loved ones as well.
In spite of her family’s opposition, Kōno took an office job in order
to save up enough money to move to Tokyo, the location of major
publishing houses and home to many members of the Japanese literary
world. However, the rampant inflation that swept Japan in the wake of
the wartime devastation of its economy and infrastructure quickly made it
impossible to save anything, and she was forced to quit this job a year later
due to ill health. Kōno’s early career was characterized by a series of false
starts resulting from poor health and economic struggles, aggravated by
the stress of attempting to pursue a career as a writer while simultaneously
holding down a full-time job to support herself. Not a strong person to
begin with, this balancing act seems to have taken its toll on her physically,
and in 1957 she contracted tuberculosis, a disease that would plague many
of her fictional heroines as well.
While it is easy to attribute this parallel between literature and life as
motivated by mere autobiographical fidelity, in Kōno’s work, the strategic
deployment of illnesses like tuberculosis, which render her protagonists
sterile, serves as an implicit challenge to ideologies of gender that insisted
on the “naturalness” of conflating femininity with motherhood. Kōno
herself did not marry until the age of thirty-nine and never had children;
her career thus resembled anything but the image of “traditional” house-
wife and mother. Perhaps for this reason, she consistently crafts protago-
nists who resist conventionally feminine roles.61 As Uema Chizuko notes,
“Most of the protagonists of Kōno’s fiction, usually in their late thirties
to early forties, are unable to bear children due to illness. They attempt
to redefine ‘womanhood’ in a society where a woman’s only role is that
of a mother. Accordingly, such women struggle to find alternative ways
to re-establish relationships with their husbands and lovers when having
children is no longer an expected or a ‘natural’ way to assure the validity of
their relationships.”62 While many of Kōno’s protagonists are sterile, they
frequently do not react to this condition as a properly maternal woman
“should”—that is, they do not seem to feel that they have been denied an
experience that is precious and fundamental to woman’s happiness. Either
they are profoundly conflicted about their status—secretly relieved that
they have been spared the burden of children, yet vaguely guilty because
they know they are “supposed” to want them—or they simply experience
their childlessness as liberating and fortuitous.
An example of the former type of story would be “The Next Day”
(Akuru hi, 1965), where the protagonist is profoundly conflicted upon
being told by her doctor that she is sterile due to a case of tuberculosis
that has spread to her reproductive organs. Although she had decided
long ago that she did not want children, she is thrown by this sudden
discovery that her childlessness was not a conscious choice. She seems to
have constructed an identity for herself as a woman who has refused to
have children and feels that identity to be profoundly destabilized by the
discovery that her body has made the choice for her. She imagines that the
illness might be a kind of “punishment” for her decision not to procreate
and even expresses feelings of guilt for using national health insurance
funds to visit a gynecologist when she has no desire for children in the
first place.63 The implication here is that the only “appropriate” reason
for her to visit a gynecologist would be if she were pregnant or trying to
get pregnant; there seems to be no recognition by the protagonist that
non-mothers also deserve access to reproductive health care. This poi-
gnant scene both exposes the way ideologies of maternal femininity had
eclipsed any other form of subjectivity for women in Japan by the 1960s
and further underscores the role of the state in enforcing these ideologies
through regimes of biopower that penetrated to the most intimate corners
of women’s lives.
In other stories, Kōno’s heroines are gleefully nonreproductive and
frequently abhor children to the point of harboring violent feelings toward
them. “Toddler-Hunting” is a frequently cited example of this type of
42 Chapter 1
story (see chapter 4). Another example is “Ants Swarm” (Ari takaru,
1964), where the female protagonist is vehemently opposed to having
children and then begins to change her mind, but only on the condition
that she might have a daughter whom she would be able to treat harshly.
As the protagonist is depicted as playing the role of masochist vis-à-vis
her husband, this fantasy of abusing a daughter seems to replicate the
treatment she receives at the hands of her husband, allowing her at last to
take up the position of sadist in this cruel family game. Presumably it is
easier to envision playing the dominant role vis-à-vis another woman who
is younger and dependent on her than it is for the protagonist to imagine
turning the tables on her husband, a man in a position of power over her.64
This highlights the way that power asymmetries between men and women
produce misogynist dynamics, which then reassert themselves in relation-
ships between women.
Marriage in many of Kōno’s stories is depicted as an artificial yet
virulent structure that produces asymmetrical power relationships between
men and women, even when both partners try to avoid such an outcome.
For example, in “Dream Castle” (Yume no shiro, 1963), the protagonist,
Kanako, is a divorcée who has recently taken up with a new boyfriend.
This new relationship gives her occasion to reflect back on the reasons why
her marriage failed; the protagonist attributes it to her lack of any desire to
build a conventional home and family. The previous relationship is asso-
ciatively linked with the house that she and her former husband had been
saving to build; though she seems to have enjoyed the process of working
toward this goal with him, once the house was built, she lost all interest in
it (and him). At the end of the story, as her boyfriend is helping her locate
a new apartment, he mentions the possibility of living together, and she
reflects that in spite of their intentions, they have begun to replicate the
patterns of a standard (Japanese) domestic partnership. Upon noticing a
Western-style mansion that she finds attractive, Kanako notes that perhaps
a foreign domicile would allow them to avoid this fate, indicating that the
problem is with the way marriage is structured in a specifically Japanese
context.
“Twin Arches” (Sōkyū, 1966) takes up this same theme and infuses
it with the sadomasochistic dynamics for which Kōno is well known. So
long as the protagonist, Fusako, and her boyfriend live together as unmar-
ried partners, he is respectful of her independence and cooperative around
the house, yet the moment the couple decides to officially register their
marriage, he becomes selfish and abusive toward her. By the end of the
story, Fusako has completely given herself over to serving her husband,
even happily calling herself his “slave.” Ironically, her husband grows dis-
contented with this outcome because he had enjoyed her “queen”-like
bearing and is disappointed with the ordinary wifely demeanor she has
adopted toward him. Here masochism provides Kōno with a theoretical
framework for understanding femininity as embedded in relationships of
dominance and submission that she sees as integral to the institution of
marriage itself. Such narratives underscore the irresistible force of the gen-
dered roles ingrained into both women and men in Japanese society, roles
that are not “natural” to her characters but rather have been woven into
the fabric of marriage patterns and prove exceedingly difficult to subvert,
even when they are distasteful to the characters themselves.
In spite of her early struggles to establish herself as a writer, with
the publication of “Toddler-Hunting” in 1961, Kōno made her mark
on the literary world as a writer of serious and provocative fiction that
challenged conventional notions of femininity. This story earned her the
Shinchō magazine prize; over the next few years she received several more
prestigious literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize—the highest
honor bestowed by the Japanese literary world—for “Crabs” (Kani) in
1963. Other literary prizes included the Joryū Bungaku Shō (Women’s
Literature Prize) for “Final Moments” (Saigo no toki) in 1967 and the
Yomiuri newspaper’s literature prize for her novel A Sudden Voice (Fui
no koe) in 1969. The following decades brought more awards and other
indications of success and critical recognition—for example, the inclusion
of Kōno’s stories in many important literary anthologies and invitations to
serve on nomination committees for the Akutagawa, Joryū Bungaku, and
Yomiuri literature awards.65
While Kōno eventually earned success and recognition for her literary
achievements, she struggled a great deal in the early years of her career,
not just with poverty and illness, but also to establish herself as a serious
writer of provocative and sexually explicit fiction at a time when Japanese
society was taking an increasingly conservative turn. Yonaha Keiko reflects
that when Kōno’s first critically acclaimed story, “Toddler-Hunting,”
appeared in 1961, readers were thoroughly shocked by its themes of sado-
masochism and child abuse. As Yonaha notes, Kōno defied commonsense
sexual mores by portraying women who actively pursued their own, often
“deviant,” sexual desires within the context of marriage or established
heterosexual partnerships. The implication that a legally or socially recog-
nized marriage, which appeared “proper” from the outside, might serve as
a façade for unimaginable violence and sexual perversity, was profoundly
troubling for much of the reading public at this time.66
44 Chapter 1
Even critics who evaluated Kōno’s literature positively expressed res-

ervations about its style and content. Davinder Bhowmik summarizes the
critical reaction to her work as follows:
Despite having won Japan’s top literary prizes for decades,

surÂ�prisingly, Kōno has taken a battering from the critical com-
munity. While impressed with her writing, many critics fail to
comprehend Kōno’s trademark masochistic trope, calling it
“incomprehensible” (nankai) and “abstract” (kannenteki). Even
feminist critics, whom one would expect to endorse Kōno’s many
determinedly independent heroines, fault her for the extremely
negative portrayals of young girls she repeatedly includes in her
works.67
As we will see below, Kōno’s literary work during the 1960s in fact posed
a profound challenge to the ideologies of gender that structured Japanese
society at this time, including much of the mainstream feminist discourse
that continued to articulate feminine subjectivity through the conventional
women’s roles of housewife and mother. But before exploring the specific
ways in which Kōno intervened in normative discourses of femininity, we
will see some similarities in personal background and literary agenda with
the two other writers addressed in this study.
T akahashi T akako
Takahashi (née Okamoto) was born in Kyoto in 1932, the only child of an
architect working for the Kyoto municipal authorities. She began her post-
elementary education at a girls’ higher school in 1944, as was prescribed
by the sex-segregated institutional structure of the day, and like Kōno, she
describes being mobilized to labor for the war effort. However, Takahashi
was just sixteen years old when the Japanese educational system was made
coed by Occupation fiat, and being younger than Kōno, she was able to
take advantage of the superior educational opportunities that the postwar
reforms offered.
The educational reforms proved to be something of a mixed blessing,
though, in terms of her intellectual and emotional development. On one
hand, Takahashi was one of the first young women allowed to compete for
admission to the prestigious Kyoto University, which she entered in 1950.
On the other hand, the transition from the girls’ school course—oriented
as it was toward giving girls the domestic skills necessary to fulfill their
destinies as future wives and mothers—to the boys’ prep school course,
geared toward molding young men into future leaders and intellectual
elites, seems to have been exceedingly rough for Takahashi. According
to her recollection of events, merely sitting in the same classroom with
boys or passing them in the hallway was something of a shock to girls like
herself who had spent their entire lives (inside and outside the classroom)
in strictly sex-segregated environments.68 Along with a burning curiosity
toward these alien forms of life, Takahashi seems to have experienced a
profound sense of inferiority with respect to her male classmates, which
was no doubt aggravated by her lack of academic preparation for the new
system.
Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that when Takahashi
entered the prestigious Kyoto University, she was one of a tiny minority
of female students in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment.
Her experiences in this bastion of traditional male power and privilege are
testimony to the fact that sometimes systems change faster than attitudes.
She recalls being continually subjected to chauvinist treatment by fellow
students and professors:
There were a lot of brilliant people, and any woman mixed in with
such male studentsâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›would feel stupid by comparison. Some-
one attending a women’s university probably would have gotten
by without feeling that way, but the women at Kyōdai [Kyoto
University] really lost confidence in themselves. I was continually
scorned by the male students in the French department. Even
when they didn’t criticize you directly, they had this way of say-
ing things that made you lose confidence in yourself.69
Not surprisingly, many members of the postwar male elite, at Kyoto

University and elsewhere, felt threatened by the incursion of women into
what had until recently been male-dominated space. Male resistance to the
implementation of Occupation-era reforms that gave women de jure equal-
ity with men was hardly exclusive to the sphere of educational opportuni-
ties, and dealing with this resistance therefore became a unifying theme in
the literature and personal experiences of women of this Shōwa One-Digit
Generation. Raised during the prewar period according to restrictive mod-
els of feminine comportment—but then required to personally embody
much of the burden of national reinvention at an age when they were too
old to forget the past yet too young to fully understand the overwhelming
expectations placed upon them—members of Takahashi’s age cohort were
caught between two opposing and incommensurable models of femininity.
46 Chapter 1
Nowhere was this tightrope act more difficult, or more urgent, than in the
realm of personal relationships. In Takahashi’s case, the conflict between
old and new models of femininity was epitomized in her marriage to fel-
low writer and Kyoto University graduate Takahashi Kazumi.
Although she married Kazumi in 1954, the year she graduated from
college, Takahashi never had children, and she worked to support herself
and her husband for much of their married life. In fact, she put her own
literary career on hold for many years in order to take on the exclusive
responsibility of household breadwinner so that Kazumi could concentrate
solely on his writing. During the 1950s she worked odd jobs as translator,
tour guide, tutor, and secretary, among others, while simultaneously pur-
suing a master’s degree in French literature at Kyoto University (earned
in 1958), as well as supporting Kazumi’s work by running interference
with publishers and handwriting clean copies of his manuscripts.70 Her
experiences during this period serve as profound testimony to the fact that
while many women during this period did work outside the home, such
work was coded as supportive to men’s labor. Yet precisely because of her
unique situation as a woman with an elite education, she found it difficult
to relate to conventional standards of femininity or to the multitude of
women who conformed to such standards.
Perhaps for this reason, Takahashi, like Kōno, frequently takes aim
in her literature at stereotypical feminine roles. As if to mock conven-
tional assumptions of feminine passivity, Takahashi’s heroines aggressively
pursue sexual liaisons, often with much younger men, in narratives that
evoke Kōno’s blend of eroticism, dominance, and incestuous desire.71 Her
stories likewise attempt to undermine or expose as artificial the notion
that women are naturally inclined toward motherhood, either through
female protagonists who refuse this role altogether or through a depiction
of mothers who seemingly lack “normal” maternal impulses. “Congruent
Figures” (Sōjikei, 1971), for example, explores a relationship between an
estranged mother and daughter in which the mother resents her daughter
as a kind of vampire who sucks away her life essence. In direct opposition
to Confucian beliefs that children are crucial to ensure the continuation
of the family line, Takahashi portrays the relationship between successive
generations as one of parasitism, with the young sapping the strength of
the old.
Takahashi returns to this theme of antagonism between parent and
child again and again, frequently using it to explore the demonic side of
human nature that is typically suppressed by social structures, which chan-
nel women’s desires and impulses into the acceptably feminine outlets of
marriage and motherhood. “Transformation” (Keshin, 1965), “Endless

Expanse” (Byōbō, 1970), and “Summer Abyss” (Natsu no fuchi, 1973)
feature mothers who contemplate or actually commit infanticide, and the
mother in “Honorable Child” (Kodomosama, 1969) gradually begins to
see her child as evil. The protagonist of the novel To the End of the Heavens
(Sora no hate made, 1973) abandons her own child in a burning house
during an air raid, sends her husband in after the child in the knowledge
that he will not survive, and later steals the infant of a woman she dislikes,
determined to raise the girl to be “twisted” by warping her personality
through cruel treatment. The title of this novel refers to the final scene,
in which the protagonist reflects on her sinful acts while gazing out at the
endless expanse of sky, as if seeking salvation.
In To the End of the Heavens we see the increasing influence of Catho-
lic themes that would dominate the author’s work later in her career, as her
protagonists turn to religion as a means of exorcising the frustrations they
experience as women trapped in restrictive social situations or unsatisfying
heterosexual relationships. Takahashi’s interest in Christianity was sparked
by her love for the literature of French Catholic writers, nurtured during
her years of study at Kyoto University.72 After many years of exploring
such questions through her own literature, she converted to Catholicism
in 1975, eventually leaving Japan in 1980 to spend almost ten years living
and studying in France.
Takahashi’s fascination with infanticidal impulses might seem incon-
gruous (or downright heretical) in light of this author’s Catholic faith.
But as Yonaha Keiko notes, these themes of religious spirituality and resis-
tance to gender norms can be understood as continuous with the author’s
relentless pursuit of the self from the earliest stage of her literary career.73
Mark Williams further notes the role that Takahashi’s faith has served in
reconciling the “splintering” of self suffered by protagonists who struggle
against oppressive models of femininity.74 Takahashi sees motherhood as
an ideology that confines women to the realm of the quotidian, forcing
them to subsume their own transcendent potential to the roles of ordinary
wives and mothers, and she (and her characters) appear to want none of
that, thank you very much.
K urahashi Y umiko
Kurahashi was born in Kōchi prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, in
1935, the eldest daughter of a dentist.75 Perhaps because of this rural yet
relatively privileged upbringing, she seems to have been given wide lati-
tude for self-expression as a child, and she recalls flouting conventions of
48 Chapter 1
gender early on by bullying the boys in her class. While other members of
her generation recall air raids and near starvation, Kurahashi’s memories
of this time are mostly of fond experiences playing in the river with friends
and collecting firewood. In contrast to the psychological devastation that
members of older generations recount at hearing the emperor’s declara-
tion of surrender, Kurahashi recalls merely feelings of bewilderment and
incomprehension at the behavior of the adults around her reeling from the
shock of defeat.
Kurahashi’s subsequent experiences seem to reflect the same mixture
of individualism and independence that characterized her tomboy child-
hood years and would later infuse her idiosyncratic protagonists. Thanks
to the resources available to her by virtue of her upper-class status, she was
able to make use of private tutors and after-school prep courses and seems
to have done well in school in spite of frequent absences due to illness.
However, she failed her entrance exams for medical school, and she pro-
visionally entered the Japanese literature department of Kyoto Women’s
University (Kyoto Joshi Daigaku) while simultaneously preparing to retake
the exams. When she failed them for a second time, she gave up medicine
in favor of dentistry, a career path that no doubt was influenced by her
father’s ambitions for her as eldest daughter of a family of dentists. After a
brief stint at a junior college in Tokyo, she earned an associate’s degree as a
dental hygienist in 1956, while secretly applying for and earning admission
to the French literature department of Meiji University in the same year.
She graduated in 1960 and immediately continued her study of French
literature at the graduate level of that school, against the wishes of her
family.
Kurahashi’s experiences during her university days figure prominently
in her early fiction, albeit rendered hyperbolically in absurd and perverse
form. Her portrayals of the seediness of dormitory life, the ridiculous self-
importance of university administrators and politicians, and the logical
contradictions of absurdly doctrinaire student-movement activists all evoke
the factional strife of Japan circa the anti–Security Treaty crisis of 1960.
Kurahashi seems to have taken a resolutely apolitical stance during this
period, describing herself as “totally unconcerned” about current events,
her attention absorbed entirely by preparation for her graduation thesis on
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. One wonders how she could have remained
almost autistically disengaged from events that shook the fledgling Japa-
nese democracy to its core, yet this ability to resist the centripetal pull of
the mainstream in favor of a position on the critical margins of society is
precisely what gave this author her unique literary style and voice.
Kurahashi began writing her first published story, “Partei,” in 1959, a

work that launched her uncomfortably into the spotlight when it won the
Meiji University literary prize a year later and was subsequently nominated
for the Akutagawa Prize. Thanks to this stunning debut, she attracted the
attention of noted literary critics and publishers, who began to lobby her
incessantly for further manuscripts. The requests for her work increased
exponentially throughout the 1960s, exhausting Kurahashi to the point
where she left the country in 1966 to study for a year as a Fulbright scholar
in the United States, primarily to escape the increasing demands of her
publishers.
While she wrote prolifically throughout the period leading up to her
American sojourn, Kurahashi relocated from Tokyo to her family home in
Kōchi in 1962, after the death of her father cut short her pursuit of a mas-
ter’s degree at Meiji University. Her decision to return home seems also to
have been motivated by a desire to distance herself from the bitter disputes
occasioned by the harsh critical reception of some of her early works—
“Partei,” “Snake” (Hebi), and Blue Journey (Kurai tabi). There she met
Kumaya Tomihiro, a photojournalist for the Kōchi branch of Nihon Hōsō
Kyōkai (NHK), whom she married in 1964.76 The couple eventually had
two daughters, the first born in 1968, less than a year after their return
from the United States. The only one of the three authors examined in this
study to bear children, Kurahashi’s decision to become a wife and mother
is ironic in light of the way she savagely parodies these roles in her early
fiction. While some critics suggest that Kurahashi’s post-Fulbright life and
works demonstrate a conservative “return” to Japanese tradition, Atsuko
Sakaki argues against this interpretation, characterizing the change in her
literary style as more “neoclassical” for its fascination with Greek tragedy
as well as classical Japanese literature.77 Furthermore, her determination
to parody or subvert “traditional” values in her literature seems consistent
across this personal divide.
Kurahashi is perhaps best known for her absurdist, Kafka-esque plots,
as well as for abstractly drawn characters denoted by an alphabet soup of
letters (K, S, L, and M) rather than proper names. There is no denying
Kurahashi’s intellectual debt particularly to Sartre, Camus, and other cere-
bral European authors, yet the themes of her stories have much in common
with other women writers of the 1960s who used their fiction to explore
the changing roles and opportunities available to women in the postwar
period, not to mention their own sometimes troubled engagement with
the more conventionally “feminine” topics of marriage and motherhood.
Kurahashi’s concern with such themes is reflected even in the titles of
50 Chapter 1
many of her early stories—for example, “Engagement” (Kon’yaku, 1960)

and “Marriage” (Kekkon, 1965). Her parodic treatment of normative
bourgeois values in such texts belies a not-so-subtle anxiety about her own
difficulty in combining the role of professional novelist with her identity as
a woman, and specifically with the demands placed on any young Japanese
woman to marry and bear and raise children.78
Kurahashi’s literature inscribes with remarkable consistency a rather
cynical and subversive attitude toward the relationship—or what she sees
as a lack of relationship—among sex, love, marriage, and motherhood.79
Reading Kurahashi’s early works in particular, one gets the impression
that sex is a rather ridiculous business, from which one would do best
to abstain. In the short story “Symbiosis” (Kyōsei, 1966), for example,
we are informed that sex is an activity that most people perform out of
a sense of “duty” to enjoy themselves in this way, and thus they are usu-
ally disappointed with the results.80 Kurahashi heroines (frequently also
writers and uniformly denoted as L) typically meet their husbands’ sexual
advances with the challenge, “What would be the point?” or else with a
firm reminder that sexual service was not part of the contract they signed.
In fact, marriage in such early Kurahashi stories is more often than not
governed by the existence of an actual contract that provides for the
writer-wife, L, to be “kept” by her husband while absolving her of most
of the typical “duties” of a housewife. One such heroine claims that the
terms of her contract with her husband in no way obligate her to cook,
clean house, eat or sleep with her husband, or have his children; she is
merely required to “support” him. Although what this “support” entails
remains unspecified in the text, we are assured by L that it involves “a lot
of work.”81
While such texts contain moments of playful parody, they most often
end on a dark note of tragedy. For example, at the conclusion of “Mar-
riage,” the contract that should have protected L from the drudgery of
conventional matrimony has now apparently been rewritten in conformity
with the gendered division of labor commonly associated with middle-class
households of the 1960s. L, now pregnant, is confined to the home and
devotes herself to the daily production of elaborate meals that her working
husband will never be home long enough to eat. While the story begins
with a subversion of the structure of marriage from within, it concludes
with a return to “normalcy” that is explicitly coded within the text as a
most unhappy ending. The emptiness and futility of her new arrangement
seem to have driven L mad, and she even begs K, the masculine half of
herself that she has had to abandon in order to fulfill her domestic destiny,
to kill her. The tendency of such stories to end with L’s failure to subvert
the structure of conventional marriage underscores two primary themes
that link the author’s early works: a subtle message of protest at the deadly
mediocrity of so many Japanese women’s lives and a lament that the cen-
tripetal force of bourgeois marriage ideology is so difficult to resist.
Critical assessments of Kurahashi’s works seem to focus primarily on
her avant-garde stylistic techniques, treating the substance of her literature
as little more than a vehicle for technical experimentation. Male critics
during the 1960s seem to have been thoroughly oblivious to the challenge
her fiction posed to normative ideologies of gender, preferring to debate
the merits of her parodic appropriation of great works of both Western
and Japanese literature. Many of these critics, including prominent schol-
ars Etō Jun and Nakamura Mitsuo, savagely attacked her for “plagiariz-
ing” these works, denying the legitimacy of her technique. Atsuko Sakaki
interprets these attacks as motivated by perception that Kurahashi was
attempting to encroach upon male intellectual territory while defying the
dominant (masculine) genre of the “I-novel,” which was based in a more
realistic and autobiographical mode. Writers like Haniya Yutaka, who
supported Kurahashi’s technical experimentation, nevertheless criticized
her for other reasons, such as her lack of commitment to the New Left
political causes that increasingly dominated the bundan during this time.82
While Kurahashi maintained her popularity with readers throughout the
1960s, she maintained a tense relationship to the bundan, as the bitter
disputes surrounding the value of her work continued into the subsequent
decade.
Kōno, Takahashi, and Kurahashi are all known for their depiction of inde-
pendent heroines who shun or mock conventional marriage, as well as
for frank, occasionally grotesque, portrayals of sexuality and other bodily
experiences from a female point of view. All three were eventually rewarded
not only with literary prizes and popular recognition, but also with a seat
at the table in the boardroom of the literary establishment. In addition
to successfully publishing their own work, they were actively sought for
participation in roundtable discussions and other formats that placed them
in the position of judging the merits of other writers—both male and
female.
Yet these accolades were not easily won—they came at great cost,
both personally and professionally. Kōno’s award of the Akutagawa Prize
in 1963, after years of struggling for recognition for her efforts in spite of
poverty and poor health, is a perfect example of such delayed gratification.
52 Chapter 1
She was only the fourth woman in history to accomplish this feat, yet soon
afterward, the deluge of women writers awarded this and other presti-
gious awards prompted one resentful male critic to wonder if they ought
not to establish prizes specifically for men since the women seemed to be
enjoying such success.83 Kurahashi’s initial critical success sparked such a
vitriolic series of debates that from 1963 to 1987 she won no prizes at all,
in spite of maintaining a phenomenal popularity with readers as an icon of
the 1960s and 1970s counterculture.84 Takahashi began writing in the late
1950s, but it took more than ten years for her to gain recognition for her
efforts, in part because she willingly subordinated her own career to her
husband’s, and in part because his reputation so overshadowed her own
that editors refused to take her seriously. One critic thus describes her as
suffering from a kind of “textual harassment”—the assumption that the
wife of a famous writer must owe her accomplishments to his support (or
ghostwriting abilities), while the considerable contribution of the wife to
her husband’s literary success is overlooked.85
Given the intensity of the struggle these women faced along the road
to professional success, it would be surprising if their experiences did not
influence their literary expression. As we will see in subsequent chapters,
that is precisely what happened, as these writers’ struggles with the norma-
tive discourses of femininity that pervaded the bundan and Japanese society
generally emerge in their fiction in imaginative form as power dynamics
that enmesh their protagonists. The fictional narratives analyzed in this
study may therefore be understood, à la Foucault, as nodes of resistance
that troubled such normative ideological networks from within, rendering
them strange and illogical even as they posed as transparent and natural
representations of the way the world should be.
Those disciplinary mechanisms—sexual, textual, and contextual—
that sought to contain these authors within appropriately “feminine”
parameters of self-expression are rendered in their literature as repressive,
violent, and destructive regimes of power that inscribe themselves onto
women’s bodies and behaviors in frequently horrifying and shocking ways.
In such narratives, the female body is consistently foregrounded as the site
of inscription of gendered norms, through an engendering process that is
experienced as corporeal violation. In the following chapter, we will see
how their determined exposure of such networks of power functioned
as a potent critique of the masculine gaze—a regime of biopower that
rendered female subjects “feminine” through an invasive and sometimes
violent process of engendering.
Chapter 2
The Masculine Gaze as

Disciplinary Mechanism
Sadism demands a story.

â•…â•… —Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and
â•…â•…â•… Narrative Cinema”
It is striking how many Japanese expressions related to interpersonal

communication employ the word “eye.” In a culture that so prizes word-
less communication, apparently the “eyes” have it. Children are admon-
ished to behave lest others look at them with the whites of their eyes.
An unpardonable offense can be described as too much for one’s eyes.
One’s superiors in a hierarchical system are said to be above the eyes. Not
surprisingly, many of these expressions also imply the power of the bearer
of the gaze to discipline or dominate the one who is seen.
Western theorists have likewise been fascinated with the intercon-
nectedness of power, knowledge, and visuality. In his landmark study on
the subject, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault devotes an entire
chapter to the topic of “panopticism,” or the ways in which power may
be exercised most effectively by causing subjects to discipline themselves,
through mere anticipation of the gaze of the authorities. Here Foucault
draws on the logic underlying the “Panopticon,” Jeremy Bentham’s inge-
nious architectural design for a prison in which inmates are arranged in
cells monitored by a central tower. The inhabitants of these cells are at all
times visible to those manning the tower, but they cannot see the authori-
ties who observe them.
He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of informa-

tion, never a subject in communication.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›And this invisibility
is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no
danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›If they are
53
54 Chapter 2
schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no

waste of time.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to
induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility
that assures the automatic functioning of power.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The inmates
should be caught up in a power situation of which they are them-
selves the bearers.1
Under this arrangement, it becomes unnecessary to discipline or pun-

ish the inmates of such a facility—they are induced to discipline themselves
merely by virtue of the anticipation of punishment, precisely because they
know that any infraction will immediately be seen by the authorities. Fou-
cault goes on to demonstrate that such disciplinary mechanisms character-
ize not only prisons but also all institutions of modern society, ending his
chapter with the wry comment that in terms of the way power functions
in and through those who are subjected to it, “prisons resemble factories,
schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”2
Feminist film theorists have also made use of scopic dynamics to
understand the relationship among power, gender, and film spectator-
ship. Laura Mulvey’s pathbreaking article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” (1975), first brought critical attention to the way classical Hol-
lywood cinema constructs the body of woman as object of the masculine
gaze. She contends in this essay that the spectator derives pleasure from
voyeuristic control and mastery of the onscreen female object, possess-
ing her by proxy through identification with the hero of the tale. As in
Foucault’s theory of panopticism, there is an implied power differential
here between subject and object of the gaze, and in Mulvey’s theory this
is coded in explicitly gendered terms. Men wield the gaze; women are
subjected to it. In a subsequent elaboration of her theory, Mulvey even
contends that filmic techniques work to so thoroughly construct the gaze
of the viewer as masculine that in order for female viewers to derive visual
pleasure from such forms of spectatorship, they must subconsciously adopt
a masculine subject position vis-à-vis the women onscreen.3
Reading these two theories together tells us much about the com-
plex web of relationships among power, knowledge, and visuality; more-
over, it is interesting to note that Mulvey and Foucault each seem to
highlight the theoretical blind spots of the other. Foucault has frequently
been criticized by feminist theorists, even those who find his work useful,
for neglecting to deal explicitly with the gendered aspects of the exercise
of power.4 Foucault’s understanding of the functioning of “panopticism”
is a perfect example of this blindness to sexual politics. Nowhere in his
T he M asculine G aze 55
elaboration of the workings of this disciplinary mechanism does he deal

with the question of how sexual difference might alter or nuance the
power dynamics that obtain between observer and observed. On the
other hand, Mulvey, perhaps because she is concerned with questions
of spectatorship rather than human relationships unmediated by a film
screen, appears not to recognize the disciplinary potential inherent in
the exercise of visual power by a male subject vis-à-vis a female object.
In other words, while she explores in great detail the potential for plea-
sure experienced by the subject who wields the gaze, her theory cannot
account for the experience of the female object who is visually subordi-
nated to that gaze.
The experience of women in modern Japan speaks eloquently to the
role of visual surveillance in policing behavior, as well as to the gendered
effects of such scopic disciplinary mechanisms. For example, during the
Pacific War, when Japanese citizens were exhorted to display national-
istic fervor in all aspects of their lives, particular attention was paid to
sartorial cues as evidence of one’s level of dedication to the imperialist
cause. Women, who unlike men could not demonstrate their patriotism
by participating directly in combat, were expected to show their solidar-
ity with Japanese soldiers in various ways, most especially by eschewing
“Western” adornments like permanent waves and high heels. Instead they
were expected to wear traditional Japanese clothing like kimono, and later
monpe, or work trousers, which announced their total dedication to empire
building on the domestic front. Andrew Gordon, in his survey history of
modern Japan, provides photographic evidence of the way these sartorial
restrictions were enforced by military inspectors, who patrolled the streets
looking for women who failed to conform and harangued those whose
physical appearance flouted this policy of austerity.5
The state continued to actively intervene in the daily lives of women
in the postwar period, as economic recovery and growth replaced military
imperialism as the national goal. Such intervention frequently occurred
with the support and participation of women themselves, who helped to
police the behavior of other women. As Sheldon Garon illustrates, women
were mobilized to participate in the process of postwar rebuilding through
“moral suasion” campaigns that encouraged them to carefully manage
every aspect of their lives, from household savings and expenditures to the
care of the elderly to their own reproductive potential. Compliance with
such initiatives frequently emphasized visual surveillance of women’s lives
and activities.6 Scopic dynamics were thus central to enforcement of gen-
der norms, and this state of affairs remained remarkably continuous across
56 Chapter 2
the prewar-postwar divide, even as the specific types of desired behavior

may have changed.
As this chapter will illustrate, the authors analyzed in this study,
whose lives traversed this prewar-postwar divide, were very familiar with
the power of such scopic dynamics to regulate the behavior of Japanese
women. In their literature, these three writers portray such visual disci-
plinary mechanisms as an insidious means of enforcing restrictive models
of femininity. I will introduce three works of fiction—“Broken Oath”
(Haisei, 1966), a short story by Kōno Taeko; “Getting on the Wrong
Train” (Jōsha sakugo, 1972), a short story by Takahashi Takako; and Blue
Journey (Kurai tabi, 1961), a novel by Kurahashi Yumiko—that illustrate
the relevance of Foucault’s and Mulvey’s theories to women in postwar
Japan. All three of these stories can be said to operate at the nexus of these
two theoretical models.
Each narrative features a female protagonist who finds herself sub-
jected to a disciplinary gaze that is invasive and even violent. As per Fou-
cault’s theory, the protagonist learns to internalize and reproduce the
gaze, resulting in a kind of “voluntary” compliance with societal expecta-
tions, but this process of self-discipline is experienced as traumatic from
the perspective of the engendered object. Thus, while poignantly illustrat-
ing Foucault’s model of “panopticism,” these stories underscore the fact
that the authorities who wield the gaze are anything but gender-neutral
observers. Society is explicitly or implicitly figured as masculine in each of
these texts, and the effect of the gaze is to induce its objects not merely to
behave, but also to behave as gendered objects.
Each of these narratives features a climactic moment when the
female protagonist, who initially perceives herself to be gender-neutral,
is confronted with her own femininity, in the form of a gender identity
that is forcibly assigned to her by virtue of the fact that she inhabits a
female body. In each case, attempts to resist this process of engendering
are overcome by the overwhelming power of the masculine gaze, which
recognizes the protagonist only through the lens of conventional markers
of femininity such as menstruation, pregnancy, and sexuality that is con-
fined within a framework of monogamous marriage. Failure to identify
with these stereotypes of femininity precipitates a crisis in subjectivity as
the protagonist turns the gaze upon herself, resulting in a loss of identity
and relationship to language. These fictional stories thus provide valu-
able insights into the way bodies are engendered as feminine, through
a complex and detailed elaboration of the relationships between power,
knowledge, and visuality.
“Broken Oath”
In “Broken Oath,” the protagonist, Momoko, is summoned to court to
testify as a character witness for her ex-boyfriend, who has been charged
with assaulting a female employee. Through suggestive lines of question-
ing, the prosecution and the defense attempt to portray Momoko accord-
ing to opposing stereotypes of femininity. The prosecution would like her
to play the role of the scorned woman, whose live-in lover Otaka refused
to marry her and then abandoned her as a pathetic old maid, with no
chance of a “normal” life as proper wife and mother. In spite of the fact
that Momoko never sought marriage to Otaka, her credibility, within the
context of these court proceedings, is predicated on an understanding of
her as an innocent who was seduced and discarded by an inveterate ladies’
man. The defense, on the other hand, is determined to destroy Momoko’s
reputation by insinuating that she carried on affairs with colleagues behind
Otaka’s back. Both of these narratives subscribe to a view of femininity as
properly confined within a heterosexual framework that assumes fidelity
to one man; the “good,” and therefore credible, woman is then defined
by her adherence to this role type, while the “bad” woman, one who is
lacking in credibility, defies this stereotype.
Momoko recognizes these strategies for what they are and attempts
to resist them through the creation of an objective persona that transcends
such gendered typecasting. Throughout her testimony, she scrupulously
monitors her own responses for their truth value, determined to pres-
ent her story in a disinterested fashion that would render her a neutral
participant, rather than a scorned or unfaithful woman. The reaction of
the all-male audience becomes crucial to Momoko in determining how
well she manages to live up to this ideal—when she is able to respond to
a question dispassionately, she feels supported by the gaze directed at her
and actively seeks eye contact with individual members of the courtroom
to confirm this. Furthermore, her constant attempts to reassure herself
that “there is nothing in her testimony to betray her vow” of truthfulness
vies with the interrogation of the lawyers in the intensity of its scrutiny of
her character, indicating that she has on some level turned the masculine
gaze in upon herself. 7
Momoko’s shield of neutral objectivity serves as only a temporary
protection, however, as the moment the possibility of other lovers is
raised, the crowd begins to turn on her. “The gaze of the people [in the
courtroom] all at once stopped being supportive and turned to curios-
ity” (294). Her body begins to fail her as the stutter she thought she had
58 Chapter 2
conquered years ago returns under the pressure of cross-examination.

“Momoko wanted to tell the truth. She hurried to tell them that she
didn’t begin to stutter because of confusion or perjury. It was because the
moment the subject [of infidelity] was broached in questioning, people
already began to doubt her” (295). The more Momoko tries to defend
herself, the worse her stutter gets, and the guiltier she appears before
the gaze of the all-male audience. The story concludes with Momoko
unable to voice a single comprehensible utterance, paralyzed by a role
that she has not chosen for herself and deprived even of her capacity for
speech.
From the very beginning of the story, tropes of concealment and
revelation are intimately connected with the exercise of power, such that
being “discovered” or “known” in a visual sense is effectively equated with
being fixed by the gaze of authoritarian structures. As the story opens,
Momoko is just arriving at the courthouse, but the narrative quickly shifts
to a flashback sequence in which she recalls first receiving the subpoena
that has summoned her there. She is thoroughly shocked by the appear-
ance of the officer on her doorstep and shudders at the efficiency with
which the authorities have managed to track her down:
Of course, it was common sense that the police could find out
anything that they wanted to. If they investigated Otaka’s past,
naturally they would find out about the existence of a woman he
lived with even for a short time. And it wasn’t like she was hid-
ing out or using a fake name or anything, so it must have been
a simple job for them to find the whereabouts of a person like
herself who was living openly. But to think that the police had
been going around and searching for her when she was unaware
of it made her feel that the past that she had neatly tucked away
had been arbitrarily scattered about again. Though she had not
attempted to conceal anything, she couldn’t help but feel that it
was humiliating and vaguely creepy. Gradually she began to feel
like a suspect herself. (272–273)
Since the breakup with Otaka five years ago, Momoko has not seen
or talked to him and has no idea of his whereabouts, and thus the offi-
cer’s discovery of her comes as something of a shock as she is confronted
with a chapter of her personal history that she had believed to be over.
In fact the relationship is described as something that she has worked
hard to put out of her mind and would prefer to leave safely concealed
in her past. The fact that the authorities have so effectively revealed what
she implicitly seems determined to conceal—from herself, if not also
from the outside world—makes her feel violated, as if they have willfully
thrown into disarray a part of her life that she has struggled to bring to
order. This disturbs her sense of composure, unsettling her before she
even enters the courtroom, so she is already in a vulnerable state when
she is challenged on the stand—the experience that leads directly to the
breakdown in her capacity for language by the end of the story.
As the theoretical frameworks of both Foucault and Mulvey would
suggest, there is a clear power imbalance between the parties in this epi-
sode. While the authorities appear to know much already about Momoko’s
relationship with Otaka, she is thoroughly unaware of the crime in which
she has indirectly been implicated. The officer who arrives at her doorstep
hands her a summons that tells her nothing about the nature of the case in
which she is ordered to provide testimony or the nature of the information
that they will solicit from her. All she knows is that it has something to do
with Otaka and that she cannot refuse to reveal herself to the court. She
is required to give information about herself, but they are not required to
tell her anything unless it pleases them. Momoko is thus rendered utterly
subordinate to a system of authority that knows much and can impel her
to reveal even more, yet she cannot even know the circumstances of her
subordination. To borrow Foucault’s phrasing once more: “He [sic] is
seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject
in communication.”8 The days leading up to Momoko’s initial interview
with the prosecutor are fraught with anxiety; she is unable to sleep and
cannot help pulling out the subpoena and staring at it, as if searching
for clues to the nature of the crime in which she has been implicated by
association. But all the mute document reveals to her is a display of its
own authority, in the form of the Kasumigaseki address to which she must
report.9
Momoko is thus thoroughly intimidated before she even takes the
stand, and the persistence with which she admonishes herself to tell the
truth reveals how much she perceives herself to be on trial, as if she is tak-
ing on the role of both witness and prosecution in her own mind. Based
on her previous interview with the prosecutor, she knows before taking
the stand that he wishes her to play the role of the abandoned woman in
order to destroy Otaka’s character, and she arrives ready to refuse this role
by giving testimony that neither slanders nor supports her ex-boyfriend.
As she prepares herself mentally to testify while waiting outside the court-
room, she reflects:
60 Chapter 2
In the more than twenty days that had passed [since her meeting
with the prosecutor], she repeated to herself over and over what
she had said to him: “You’re terribly mistaken if you think that
I still hold a grudge against him for abandoning me. I’ve hated
him to the point that my feelings for him have totally disinte-
grated. At this late date, there’s no way that you can give me
satisfaction [by seeing him convicted]. If a fossil from his past
will do, then please use me.” Regardless of whether or not there
was a penalty for perjury, she was determined to be completely
faithful to her own feelings in her testimony to the prosecutor.
At the same time, Momoko also decided to give absolutely
correct testimony to Otaka’s lawyer as well. They were veterans at
this. They assumed that because he had abandoned her, she must
still be hung up on him, and probably they would try to use that
cleverly to elicit testimony from her that would be beneficial to
their cases.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I did live with him, but I’m not that sentimental a
woman, she thought. However I may appear, I’m tough. (276)
Momoko is thus clearly aware of the intentions of the men who will ques-
tion her and actively takes steps to prepare herself for this ordeal through
a form of self-discipline, “repeated over and over,” that is designed to
produce an objective and truthful persona.
Momoko’s vow to tell the truth seems motivated by two related
desires. First, she seems determined not to allow either side to manipulate
her into tailoring her story to fit their agendas. Knowing that each man
intends to characterize her according to opposite but similarly unaccept-
able tropes of femininity—as a “good” (scorned) or a “bad” (unfaithful)
woman—she strives to refuse either role by aiming for a position some-
where in the middle. She therefore enters the courtroom having crafted an
objective persona that is capable of presenting the facts without succumb-
ing to emotional responses to the lawyers’ lines of questioning. Second,
she seems determined to demonstrate to herself, and to everyone else, that
she has dealt with the pain of her breakup with Otaka and has moved on
and therefore feels no need to either defend or attack Otaka’s character.
Having “tucked away” their relationship neatly into the closet of her past
life, she is mindful of the potential of the trial to “scatter about” the rem-
nants of her past that she has worked so hard to bring to order. She envi-
sions herself as a “fossil” from Otaka’s past as if to will him to stay buried
within her own—a desiccated, emotionless relic that no longer poses any
threat to her equilibrium. The objective persona that she crafts for herself
thus becomes her best defense against the psychological violation that the
experience of cross-examination represents for her.
Ironically, while Momoko sees her vow to tell the truth as a kind of
defensive strategy to protect herself from the scrutiny of the court, it also
requires her to adopt a posture of self-scrutiny that replicates and inter-
nalizes the invasive gaze of the men who question her. Poised between
two opposing camps both determined to plunder her personal history and
warp it into a hackneyed stereotype of femininity with which she cannot
identify, Momoko senses that the only way she can forestall this invasion
of her memory closet is to maintain a defensive position midway between
them. They are seeking not merely factual information but also knowledge
of her that can be willfully interpreted to characterize her as a scorned or
unfaithful woman, and Momoko’s strategy is to provide only those bits
of information that will fail to be useful to each case since if she takes the
side of one man, she will be rapidly attacked by the other. She is able to
deflect the invasive gaze of the Other, then, only by preemptively turning
it upon herself, carefully monitoring her own testimony to ensure that
she does not provide anything that can be used to make a case for either
side. Momoko’s objective persona is revealed to the reader to be anything
but—her constant reminder to herself to tell only the “truth” is rather a
mask for the discipline she has imposed upon herself to edit her testimony
so as to remove all emotional content, thus presenting herself defensively
as a “neutral” party to the debate.
Momoko is able to maintain this smooth wall of defensive objec-
tivity only as long as she is able to remain deliberately unaware of the
gaze of the court upon her. Upon first taking the stand, she manages to
protect herself from the eyes of the observers by maintaining a downcast
gaze, but she is then admonished by the judge to face forward and speak
up. She complies with the judge’s order by fixing her gaze upon a safely
vacant corner of the opposite wall, so that her line of vision does not
intersect with that of anyone else in the room. Her testimony proceeds
smoothly after this, and she is able to continue to feel comfortable in her
objective persona until, apropos of establishing a precedent for Otaka’s
violent treatment of women, the prosecutor presses her on the question
of whether or not her first experience of sexual relations with him was
entirely consensual.
At this point Momoko’s confidence in her objectivity begins to fal-
ter, as she has remembered the night in question in different ways over
the years since the breakup, and the scene has appeared in her memory
as alternately violent or romantic (281). She selects a relatively neutral
62 Chapter 2
account for the purpose of the courtroom testimony, but her steadiness on
the stand begins to waver soon after, when the prosecutor presses her on
the reasons for the breakup. She then begins to feel acutely aware of the
gaze of the members of the courtroom upon her:
The reason she had not felt anyone’s gaze for some time seemed
not to be because she was calm after all. The initial nervousness she
had felt when she was sworn in seemed to have simply frozen that
way. Now perhaps that had begun to thaw, for the moment she
began to search her feelings, she once again was forced to realize
that she was all alone on the witness stand in front of the court.
Until just a moment ago, whenever the prosecutor’s words
emerged from the upper-right-hand corner of her atmosphere,
she had been able to produce a correct answer, just like a machine
operated by a remote-control device. Even when she had to
search her memory about the time in question, she had quickly
felt with a palpable certainty that her answer was true beyond
any doubt and was able to put into words what she had felt. But
suddenly that changed.â•›.â•›.â•›.
Since the judge had told her to face the court, she had kept
her gaze fixed straight ahead on the far corner of the room, and
within that hazy field of vision the whole court had appeared
strangely bright. The gaze of the people in the courtroom that
she had only felt up to now with her body now entered her unex-
pectedly wide field of vision. On the far right, Otaka sat bolt
upright and occasionally turned only his eyes in her direction.
On the left side, the judge had turned his chair sideways to look
at her. Below her the tape recorder behind the court reporter’s
desk was revolving. After each question was asked, Momoko felt
that the whole courtroom became quiet, the gaze of everyone
in the room hardened upon her, and even the revolution of the
tape recorder reel became more deliberate. Then the memories
and words that had seemed to come together instantly fell apart,
and she had to search for them again. As this was happening, the
prosecutor would change the angle of questioning, and her mind
would become even more confused. (282–283)
It is at precisely at this point in the text that Momoko’s composure is shat-

tered, and she begins to lose confidence in her ability to respond objectively
to the prosecutor’s questioning. During the remainder of the interrogation,
there are several moments when she seems to doubt her responses or feel
unsure as to what might constitute a truthful response. During the cross-
examination, as the defense attorney begins to capitalize on her uncertainty
and use her previous testimony against her, her stutter returns, and by the
final lines of the story she is mute and defenseless on the stand.
This pivotal moment in the narrative, when Momoko begins to lose
control of the situation and succumbs to the masculine gaze, reveals much
about the role of scopic power as a disciplinary mechanism. While she
seems to have been aware of the gaze of the court on some level through-
out the proceedings, having “felt it with her body,” she is able to maintain
her composure until she makes eye contact with those who are watching
her. It is as though the Achilles’ heel of her psychological armor is the part
that is turned inward—her own gaze—and her willingness to discipline
herself through a strict monitoring of her testimony, however preemptive
and self-protective a gesture that may be, is precisely what leaves her so
vulnerable to the opportunistic questioning of the prosecutor. Her need
to produce absolutely truthful testimony is what causes her to hesitate
on the stand, and the more her confidence in her ability to tell the truth
falters, the more the gaze of the audience “stop[s] being supportive, and
turn[s] to curiosity” (294).
It is significant that the part of the interrogation that flusters her so
relates directly to the problem of her own tenuous sense of sexual subjec-
tivity because it is on this point that both men attempt to make their case
about Momoko’s credibility as a witness. As noted, while the prosecutor’s
line of questioning is designed to portray Momoko as a good woman who
was an unfortunate victim of the “ladykiller” Otaka, the defense attorney
wishes to present her as a loose woman who is undeserving of the sympa-
thy of the court. Both men therefore are invasive in their queries about
Momoko’s sexual history and relationship with the accused. Was she raped
by Otaka on that first night? Did he use force or coercion? What words
and tactics did he use to persuade her? Although the prosecutor justifies
this line of questioning on the pretext that it is relevant to Otaka’s treat-
ment of other women, there is a prurient subtext to his desire to know and
expose Momoko’s sexual history for the edification of the members of the
courtroom, whose curious gaze leaves her feeling even further exposed.
Even though the prosecutor is pushing the “good woman” theory of
Momoko’s character, his questioning at this point gives the impression
that she is the one on trial.
When this story was published (1966), it was still very much the norm
in Japan for feminine sexuality to be subordinated to the twin projects of
64 Chapter 2
marriage and motherhood. Not only does Momoko’s experience of hav-

ing lived with a man outside of marriage mark her as a marginal figure of
some disrepute, but she further offends normative models of femininity by
expressing little interest in the prospect of marriage. In fact the prosecu-
tor seems somewhat taken aback by her testimony that she never pressed
Otaka to marry her (280). As if attempting to reinscribe Momoko within
a framework analogous to conventional marriage, so as to make the case
for his characterization of her as a “good” woman who was unfortunately
used and discarded by a “bad” man, he describes her initially as Otaka’s
“common-law wife,” a characterization that she refuses (279). She likewise
declines to support the prosecutor’s portrayal of herself as a victim of Otaka’s
“ladykiller” ways when asked to describe their first night together, opting
instead to emphasize her own role in choosing to sleep with him (281).
Unfortunately Momoko’s insistence on her own sexual agency pro-
vides the defense attorney precisely the information he needs to make the
case for her as a “bad” woman. He first capitalizes on her insistence that
she chose, rather than was coerced, to sleep with Otaka. He then turns the
conversation to an inquiry into her sexual history, wanting to know how
many previous lovers she has had, how many “male acquaintances” she
had during the time she was living with Otaka, and how many of these she
“associated with” during their relationship (293–294). He deliberately
uses language that can be interpreted as variously innocent or suggestive,
making it difficult for Momoko to answer truthfully without implicating
herself in a romantic relationship that she never had with any of these men.
Momoko’s vow of truth, then, becomes her undoing as she is led down a
line of questioning that makes it impossible to protest that she is innocent
of what the attorney is implying without making herself seem even more
guilty. It is at this point that she begins to stutter, which confirms for the
curious members of the courtroom the verdict that she is in fact a “bad”
woman after all.
Momoko is unable to resist this outcome precisely because the terms
of debate are decided for her in advance. Given that the gaze of the authori-
ties recognizes only two valid types of women—good ones and bad ones—
she cannot resist one stereotype without being tarred with the brush of the
other. Her attempt to maintain a neutral position between these two options
is ultimately shown to be untenable; the members of the court scrutinize
her with the explicit purpose of determining whether she is good or bad and
literally refuse to see her according to any other model of femininity.
Kōno’s story thus offers an ironic twist on Foucault’s theory of visually
imposed disciplinary mechanisms, as her protagonist is twice disciplined
within the space of this short story to very different ends. Momoko first
adopts a posture of absolute truthfulness, in an almost hyperbolically faith-
ful acquittal of her legal responsibility to give accurate testimony before
the court. In a sense she is attempting to protect herself through a parodic
performance of her sworn duty to tell the truth, as she is instructed by
the court. Yet what the court says it requires of her and what it actually
requires of her appear to be two different things. She learns during the
course of the proceedings that she is in fact expected not to tell the truth
about her relationship with Otaka as per her own understanding of what
transpired between them, but rather to play a role that is designed to aid
the prosecution in making its case against him.
Momoko’s attempt to resist this role backfires, as the more she
refutes the “good” woman stereotype, the more the audience sees her as
its logical opposite. She is even disciplined to perform in accordance with
the bad woman role type, contrary to her own intentions, first by provid-
ing information on the stand to support these assumptions, and then by
failing to defend herself against them through her loss of speech. It is
important to note that Momoko’s own perception of herself has nothing
whatsoever to do with how she is seen and understood by the members
of the courtroom—in fact the more she resists their attempts to fix her in
the role of unfaithful woman, the more guilty she seems in the eyes of the
spectators. Her silence in the final lines of the story thereby renders her,
against her own will, as compliant with the mold of femininity to which
she has inevitably been assigned, according to the perception of the male
observers who are empowered to so define her by virtue of being pos-
sessors of the gaze.
“Getting on the Wrong Train”

In contrast to Kōno’s realistic courtroom narrative, Takahashi Takako’s
“Getting on the Wrong Train” is a surreal and abstract tale of scopic viola-
tion and loss of identity. The protagonist’s misadventures begin as she
leaves home for a class reunion and encounters a mysteriously adult-look-
ing boy on the train whose penetrating gaze intimidates her. During her
train journey the main character, known to the reader only as “Watashi”
(“I”), becomes hungry and decides to purchase a boxed lunch from a
platform vendor. She begins eating the meal, but to her dismay this action
draws the gaze of the boy even more persistently in her direction, which
unnerves her: “Because of those eyes, I was made to see the horror of the
fact that I was eating. No, the boy seemed to be looking at something
66 Chapter 2
more than that. Perhaps he was looking at the horror of the fact that I was
sustaining my life through eating.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Because I had committed the single
mistake of eating, the boy began to exist beside me as the very incarnation
of misfortune.”10 He continues staring at her, and she experiences the gaze
as oppressively coming at her from all sides, as his stare is also reflected in
the window beside her.
As a result of this encounter, Watashi begins to experience a bizarre
form of physical transformation that is explicitly linked to the “penetra-
tion” of the boy’s gaze: “The feeling of oppression threatened to flow
out of my mouth, so I forced myself to swallow it down. It swelled larger
inside me, and along with that mass I was assaulted by an unsteady feeling
of being scooped up into the air. This engorged thing reached saturation
point and exploded into shards that whirled about with a roar. Inside me,
something fundamentally abnormal had formed” (223). Confused by the
intensity of his observation of her, she first gets off the train too soon
and then mistakenly boards another train going in the wrong direction.
She finally disembarks in an unknown town, and as she wanders aimlessly
through the streets, she reflects on her situation: “Points of departure and
destination had both dissolved into something vague and elusive. A bare
self surrounded by darkness and buffeted by strong winds—what was I?
Neither male nor female. Ageless. Cut off from past or future, brought
to the point of nakedness—it was the fault of this station, but it was that
boy’s fault that I was forced to get off here. That’s right; it seems that my
fate was sealed on that train platform when I first got on the train” (226).
But although she momentarily sees herself as a form of disembod-
ied existence that has come untethered from the gendered structures of
everyday life, she is soon redirected by a series of arrows that point her
toward a house where five men are sprawled on the floor in philosophical
discussion of suicide. They first ignore her and then turn on her, demand-
ing to know “what” she is. When she falters and is unable to speak, they
punish her for her silence by threatening to “take” her thoughts in what
can only be described as a scopic gang-rape. Each pulls out a camera and
begins snapping photos of her against her will. While she consoles herself
with the reassurance that they won’t be able to discover anything about
her this way, she is aghast when they return triumphantly with developed
photos of the “fetus” that she supposedly harbors within her. She associ-
ates the object in the photographs with the gaze of the strange boy on
the train that unnerved her so: “The thing in the photograph wasn’t a
fetus. It was that evil boy who was encased in that womb-like space. He’s
living inside me with those terrifying eyes that see through everything.
When I stare off into space, the boy’s eyes follow my gaze. Even if I close
my eyes, that boy’s eyes stay wide open in place of mine. Those eyes
are guiding me in an unknown direction. A dreadful yet sweet abstract
pregnancy” (237).
Watashi seems to lose consciousness from the shock of this exposure,
and the story concludes with the protagonist’s total loss of identity and
capacity for speech. In the final lines of the story, Watashi is aimlessly
wandering the streets of this unfamiliar town with nothing but an end-
less night before her, having literally internalized the masculine gaze. She
“hears” the voice of the boy as if it emanates from the strange mass inside
her, and her own will has apparently been completely overridden by the
demands of the voice within.
As in Kōno’s courtroom narrative, Takahashi’s story likewise illus-
trates the futility of women’s attempts to remain gender-neutral in a soci-
ety that insists they conform to feminine norms. The protagonist is first
marked as “feminine” when she is fixed by the gaze of the boy on the
train, whose eyes seem to rebuke her for eating. The consumption of food
is implicitly associated with female corporeality in a scene just prior to this,
when Watashi notices a middle-aged woman buying a large quantity of
boxed lunches on the platform outside the train:
From the front of the train emerged a middle-aged woman who

went running at a frenzied pace toward the vendor. She called
out to him in a voice that resembled a bird of prey descending
from the sky to pounce on a corpse.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I could see her return
carrying an armload of ten boxed lunches or so. She was prob-
ably buying for a large group of travelers, but I imagined her
devouring them all herself. She didn’t buy any tea, I realized. It
seemed like she intended to choke down all ten lunches without
any tea. Imagining such vast quantities of rice passing through
her mouth, mixing with a copious amount of saliva, and making
their way to her stomach, I felt my appetite diminish. (220)
The middle-aged woman in this scene seems almost a hyperbolic represen-

tation of that icon of normative Japanese femininity, the “good wife and
wise mother,” whose primary role is to nurture life, especially through
her preparation and provision of food. Yet here the stereotype is mischie-
vously turned on its head through a grotesque parody of another aspect of
domestic womanhood circa the age of high economic growth—her func-
tion as consumer, by virtue of her designated role of household manager.
68 Chapter 2
The unsavory images evoked by the sight of this woman as Watashi

imagines her consuming excessive amounts of food cause the protago-
nist to recoil from her own physiological needs, as if wishing to erase any
traces of biological femininity through a kind of extreme self-denial akin
to anorexia. However, this strategy proves to be unsuccessful, as she is
nevertheless fixed by the boy’s gaze and defined as feminine, through a
negative association of femininity with bodily desire and need. Reveal-
ingly, even the gaze of an immature man-boy seems to have the power to
scopically engender the protagonist. The boy’s authority as bearer of the
gaze is visually underscored by his physical appearance—clad in a business
suit and carrying a briefcase, he is the very image of a miniature salaryman,
the logical complement to the housewife whose excessive consumption
threatens to implicate Watashi as feminine.
Watashi experiences a second kind of forcible engendering at the hands
of the male philosophers, whose infliction of the rape-by-camera results in
her breakdown at the end of the story. Prior to her encounter with the
men, Watashi clearly had fancied herself to be a genderless creature, as is
evident by her thoughts just prior to arriving at their house: “What was I?
Neither male nor female. Ageless. Cut off from past or future, brought to
the point of nakedness.” Even after entering the room where the men are
sprawled on the floor talking, so long as they take no notice of her, she is
able to think, “Well, it seems like I’m really not a woman after all” (230).
In fact, envisioning herself as an anonymous and sexless entity seems to
provide her a kind of protective camouflage, for she senses that, as on the
train, drawing attention to herself as a feminine subject could have dire
repercussions: “The men drained their cups and poured more water from
the kettle. I was thirsty too. But there were only five cups, for the men.
Yes, I can’t go on drinking carelessly like that, I reminded myself. Because
of that mistake of eating on the train, that boy became aware of me and
brought misfortune upon me, didn’t he? In this place devoted to talk of
suicide, I mustn’t wish for life-sustaining food or even water” (234). As
with the boxed-lunch incident on the train, Watashi assumes a posture of
self-denial designed to conceal her gendered identity through refusal of
even the most basic biological necessities, food and water.
Underlying this logic of refusal is an implicit binary distinction
between men and women that posits men (in the guise of the philoso-
phers) as rational, logical, and intellectual. In contrast, women are defined
as embodied creatures who consume, and if this marks them as “femi-
nine” in a distinctly negative sense, then Watashi’s instinct is to conceal
her physical presence through an anorexic effacement of her own embodi-
ment. However, as with Momoko’s attempt to hide behind a shield of

neutral objectivity in “Broken Oath,” Watashi’s efforts to deny her gender
through the suppression of bodily desire fail to protect her from the over-
whelming power of the masculine gaze, as the men eventually notice her
and succeed in proving her femininity through photographic evidence of
her reproductive potential. At the end of the story, she is forced to yield to
the dictates of the “abstract pregnancy” that now apparently controls her
destiny, as she is literally inhabited by the gaze of the boy.
This story thus posits a femininity that is defined by society, in the
person of a male observer, as consumptive and reproductive excess. The
protagonist is keenly aware that these “offenses” mark her as feminine in
a negative and derogatory sense, and she actively attempts to evade such
characterizations by denying these aspects of her own subjectivity. She
first reveals herself as “feminine” on the train when she acknowledges her
hunger and begins to eat, drawing the penetrative gaze of the boy toward
her. Though this unwanted attention prompts her to deny her appetite,
she has already been fixed by his gaze, and the result is a curious sort
of transformation that suggests impregnation by force-feeding: “I forced
myself to swallow it down. It swelled larger inside me.” Having been
visually violated and impregnated once by the boy, she experiences the
same treatment again at the hands of the philosophers, who assail her with
visual “proof” of her capacity to produce life—that is, the photograph
of the “fetus” within—highlighting another bodily function associated
with femininity. In spite of Watashi’s sense of herself as “neither male nor
female,” the men she encounters seem determined to remind her of her
feminine (and by implication inferior) subject position.
At the same time, this story also highlights the hypocrisy of such
binary distinctions, as the disembodied intellectualism of the philosophers
is implicitly called into question. Though the consumption of food or
water is necessary to sustain life for any human being, male or female,
only women are taken to task for expressing such bodily necessities. When
Watashi eats, she is subjected to the accusatory stare of the boy, whose
visual penetration of her further feminizes her in an implicitly sexual way.
The male philosophers, on the other hand, freely help themselves to the
kettle of water that is explicitly marked for their exclusive use. Clearly
the men in this story may drink, and presumably eat, without gendered
consequences, even as they posture rhetorically about casting off their own
lives. Furthermore, their “philosophical” discussion of suicide is permeated
with crude sexual references that border on misogyny. For example, one
man jokes about “shooting” a woman with a pistol/phallus, underscoring
70 Chapter 2
what he perceives as the real source of masculine authority, while unwit-

tingly highlighting his own embodiment (231). Thus, while on one level
Takahashi’s protagonist is inextricably bound to the negative polarity of
a binary opposition that renders her inferior, on another level the author
highlights the illogical nature of the fantasies of gender that underpin this
structure.
Blue Journey
Unlike the previous two narratives, both of which are short stories that
climax with the protagonist’s encounter with the masculine gaze, the novel
Blue Journey offers a more sustained exploration of the consequences of this
process of engendering on its protagonist. Blue Journey, narrated entirely
in the second person by a female protagonist, reads like a series of diary
entries written by and addressed to the same person. The story alternates
between present and past, with the primary narrative continuously inter-
rupted by a series of flashback sequences. The primary narrative chronicles
the protagonist’s search for her fiancé, who has disappeared after a long
and vexed “platonic” courtship, marked by both parties’ open acknowl-
edgment of their sexual affairs with other people. The flashback sequences
trace the development of their relationship, from their first meeting in
high school to the present, when both are university students nominally
“engaged” to one another but with no intention of actually marrying.
The portion of the story of interest for us—an episode that is strik-
ingly similar to the visual rape in “Getting on the Wrong Train”—is pre-
sented in a flashback sequence that provides crucial information about
the main character’s development from girlhood into the woman she is in
the present. It is particularly important to the novel as a whole because it
helps us to understand the protagonist’s highly conflicted feelings about
her own femininity, her consequent rejection of normative ideologies of
romantic love, and her resistance to marriage as the natural and inevitable
denouement of the feminine life course.
In this particular episode the protagonist recalls a painful event from
her adolescence, when she was accosted near her parents’ seaside villa by
a gang of young boys who compelled her to remove her bathing suit and
submit to their curious and derisive gaze:
It was the squeaky voice of that pubescent youth that ordered you
to open your legs and assume the shape of the letter Y—the most
vulnerable position, leaving you stripped of any action that might
allow you to cover yourself. They raped you with their eyes, the
eyes of those boys assembled in the space between your open
legs. The pain of shame pierced you like a hot skewer.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›After
a long silence, the boys raised their voices in a persistent round
of insane laughter, stamping their feet and hooting obscenely at
your faint growth of hair.11
Rendered speechless and unable to defend herself from the assault,

the protagonist collapses onto the sand and loses consciousness. The fol-
lowing day she menstruates for the first time, an episode that is explicitly
linked to the scopic violation of the day before in its capacity to inflict
trauma on her. Rather than an auspicious transformation from girlhood
to womanhood, the main character of Blue Journey experiences her first
period as an “execution” of her subjectivity, rendering her feminine in
ways that force her to assume roles and character traits that are alien to her
sense of self.
Though prior to this event she had no perception of herself as femi-
nine, the protagonist describes this experience as having “forced her to
know” the fact of her own gender in an emphatically unpleasant way. The
text is explicit here in disavowing any “natural” basis for gender roles,
emphasizing instead the social construction of feminine identity:
You are adamant about the fact that it’s not that you are a
woman; you are sentenced to be a woman, so in accepting this
sentence you merely perform as a woman.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Until you accepted
this sentence, you were nothing but a cute kid, a flexible exis-
tence that was neither female nor male, and as a child bundled in
silken flesh, you drank the blessed milk of the breast of society.
But everything changed after that, you became a different person
as a result of this sudden change, and your harmony with society
was severed.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›From that time on society became Other to you,
an evil executioner.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›It was your twelfth summer when your
blood first arrived, and that symbol of shame that flowed from
the wound raped by society sentenced you to womanhood. (97)
While menstruation is clearly a biological process that occurs regardless

of the intervention (or indifference) of society, the text is insistent here
on the linkage between the trauma of scopic violation and the resultant
flow of blood—both are encoded as a kind of rape that forcibly engenders
a girl as feminine. In other words, the biological nature of this corporeal
72 Chapter 2
experience is subordinated to the meaning placed upon it by society as

a rite of passage and the corresponding societal need to confine female
bodies within specific tropes of womanhood.
As in the previous two stories under discussion here, Blue Journey
likewise highlights the overwhelming power of the engendering gaze,
illustrating how it is internalized even by women who attempt to resist it.
As a consequence of this experience, the protagonist of Kurahashi’s novel
begins to scrutinize her own anatomy in an exact replication—or perhaps
parody—of the way she was violated by the gang of young boys:
Glittering with the teeth of a witch and the eyes of a martyr,

you made a sacrifice of yourself and offered it to yourself.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›You
devised a way to gaze at that secret part of yourself in the mir-
ror.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›It was a hole, a hideous but seductive brand in the shape
of a flower, an open wound torn by the teeth of society.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›You
can’t really say that you felt hatred toward this hole of yours,
but it was something that you just couldn’t get used to. That
hole with rose-colored walls, that concave existence that revealed
your eerie interior—that was woman. You squatted in a horrify-
ing posture above your own image, eyes glittering like those of
a crazy woman as you wrung out all the knowledge you could
[from this experience]. You figured it would be cleverest to make
a virtue out of necessity and intoned like a curse, I am a woman,
I shall become a woman.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›That is, you thought you would have
to perform as a woman; that would be fine; there was no other
way for you to attain liberation and revenge. (100–101)
The trauma of enforced feminization here yields a protagonist who is liter-

ally rent in two, divided against herself into observer and observed, and in
replicating the masculine gaze, she effectively takes the explicitly unnatural
role of policing gender norms upon herself.
Feminine complicity in enforcing gender norms is further underscored
in the protagonist’s relationship with her mother, which is irreparably dam-
aged once the daughter realizes the futility of explaining her anguish at this
“felicitous” transformation into adulthood: “Shouldn’t you have confessed
the situation to someone—for example, your mother—and had her deal
with it on your behalf? But that way of thinking was alien to you. If you
had done so, mother would probably have behaved like a knowledgeable
guardian, a co-conspirator, in front of this daughter who had felicitously
become a proper <woman>” (100). Thereafter the protagonist begins to
conceal her true self behind a “mask” in order to take on the appropriately
feminine persona expected of her by society. This performance is so effec-
tive that not only does she convince her mother and others of her trans-
formation, but she even loses sight of herself as the distinction between
the masquerade and the actress collapses: “From then on you ceased being
yourself and became increasingly proficient at donning the mask and play-
ing the role of yourself. Even the word “self” came to mean to you nothing
more than the crevice, the vacant passageway, between you and the mask,
because from that time on you lost substance” (99).
The “solution” to this victimization by womanhood is to embrace
and aestheticize the infliction through a parodic performance of feminin-
ity. While on the one hand this amounts to a kind of perpetual self-victim-
ization, on the other, the protagonist is able to control and thus distance
herself from the damage to her ego; this is evident in the way the strategy
is described as a means of both “revenge” and “liberation.”
Of the three narratives under consideration here, Blue Journey ironically

seems to offer both the most explicitly violent example of forcible engen-
dering and the only strategy for overcoming such trauma. Although the
protagonists of the first two stories actively try to preserve their sense
of agency, their attempts at resistance are ultimately unsuccessful, and
they are left defeated and silenced by their experience as objects of the
masculine gaze. Momoko is left catatonic on the stand in the final lines
of “Broken Oath,” and Watashi of “Getting on the Wrong Train” has
evidently gone insane.
In contrast, Kurahashi’s protagonist is able to narrate her way out of
total psychic dissolution. By complying with yet parodying the role that
is forced upon her, but more important by retaining her relationship to
language, the main character of Blue Journey is able to stand on her own
by the end of the story. As Atsuko Sakaki has demonstrated in her study
of this novel, Blue Journey may be read as a narrative about narration,
foregrounding the process of writing in ways that allow the protagonist to
reinvent herself by the end of the story as the author of her own tale.12 In
this sense, while she has accepted the self-fragmentation attendant upon
“performing” the feminine role assigned to her, she is able to retain a
measure of control over the process of performance (or narration) itself,
thus preserving some degree of subjectivity.
Though very different in narrative style and structure, these three
texts demonstrate striking similarities in their portrayal of the impact of
the masculine gaze on a female object. In each case, a female protagonist
74 Chapter 2
who aspires to gender-neutral status is abruptly reminded of her femininity

through the disciplinary gaze of society, which is figured in the text implic-
itly or explicitly as masculine and personified within the texts through
groups of men who collectively outnumber and overpower her. Although
the disciplinary gaze in these stories is figured as masculine, this does not
mean that the one who wields the gaze must necessarily be male.
In fact, each of these narratives demonstrates in its own way that
feminine complicity is requisite in order for the process of engendering to
be successful—whether this gaze is wielded by one woman against another
(as in the mother of Blue Journey) or is self-inflicted. In each case, the
protagonist is isolated, either because there are no other women around
with whom she can seek solidarity or because other women ally themselves
with the disciplinary mechanisms that seek to engender her as feminine.
Alone in her subjection to the masculine gaze, the protagonist’s defenses
crumble and she loses the ability to speak out on her own behalf. The mas-
culine gaze in each story, therefore, can be understood in Foucault’s terms
as a disciplinary mechanism that functions to enforce norms of femininity,
through the reluctant complicity of the protagonist, as she internalizes the
gaze and turns it upon herself. 13
By highlighting the catastrophic effects of these disciplinary mecha-
nisms on their protagonists—not to mention the hypocritical and self-
contradictory nature of the binary structures that contain them—each of
these authors effects a powerful critique of normative femininity. Kōno’s
character may be frozen on the stand at the end of “Broken Oath,” but
her struggles to remain outside of gendered stereotypes elicit the reader’s
sympathy. Momoko’s experiences further underscore the failure of justice
in a legal system that operates not according to standards of objective
truth, but on the basis of stereotypically gendered expectations of human
behavior that have no basis in reality. Likewise, the experiences of Taka-
hashi’s protagonist eloquently attest to the pretensions of male intellec-
tual elites who scorn women as base corporeal objects, even as they prove
themselves to be equally embodied creatures of the flesh. Finally, through
her explicit characterization of femininity as a “mask” worn by an actress
forced to deny any sense of a “true” self within, Kurahashi savagely paro-
dies the lack of substance of gendered conventions that confine women to
playing a role that is scripted for them by society.
While my analysis thus far has focused on the role of plot and char-
acterization in forwarding a feminist critique of gender norms, it is also
important to note the way narrative style contributes to the effectiveness of
this critique. “Broken Oath” is told in the third person and is largely plot-
driven, which allows the reader to observe Momoko’s victimization from

a position of some psychological remove—the reader is able to witness her
tribulations on the stand and feel sympathy for her but nevertheless is not
directly interpellated by the story itself. On the other hand, “Getting on
the Wrong Train,” with a first-person narrative that is almost claustropho-
bically contained within the psyche of the female protagonist, forces the
reader to align him- or herself more closely with Watashi, which makes the
experience of the rape-by-camera scene markedly more uncomfortable.
Yet both of these techniques pale in comparison to Kurahashi’s
second-person stratagem in Blue Journey, where the reader is constantly
interpellated (or even verbally assaulted) by an accusatory “you” that
places him or her in the position of the protagonist, as object of the gaze.
So when the main character of the novel is forced to strip and submit to
the derisive gaze of the gang of boys, the reader likewise experiences this
scene as if she—and I use this pronoun advisedly since the experience of
this scene implicitly feminizes the reader regardless of his or her biological
sex—is violated simultaneously with the protagonist. Kurahashi’s avant-
garde technique in this scene thus effects a powerfully political gesture,
forcing the reader to acknowledge the horrific violence of the engendering
gaze and turning the tables on her readers by subjecting them to the same
disciplinary mechanism. In this sense, Kurahashi’s strategy of feminizing
her audience seems to enact, on the level of narrative structure, the very
“revenge” against society that her protagonist fantasizes about within the
story. Although readers may approach this story with the expectation of a
spectator desiring to witness, from a safely distanced perspective, the trials
and tribulations of a character that is Other to them, they are quickly and
violently repositioned as the objects of the gaze through interpellation as
the “you” that is defined as the protagonist of this story.
These stories, therefore, yield very different readings, depending on
whether one is concerned primarily with character dynamics within the
story itself or the impact of each narrative on the reader. A reading of
each story based solely on the fate of the main character would suggest a
fairly bleak assessment of the possibility for resistance against disciplinary
regimes of engendering, given that two of these narratives end with their
protagonists in a state of total incapacitation and the third at best leaves its
female character radically alienated from (and divided against) herself. Yet
these three narratives performatively effect a critique of such disciplinary
mechanisms by placing the reader in the awkward position of witnessing,
and even identifying with, a protagonist who is victimized by society’s
intrusive gaze.
76 Chapter 2
Having explored how gender norms are enforced and internalized

through the oppressive and invasive masculine gaze as a disciplinary
mechanism, we will turn in the next chapter to a discussion of the incen-
tives offered to women to comply “voluntarily” with such constructions
of femininity. Chapter 3, on “feminist misogyny,” analyzes fiction that
depicts the process of feminine self-abjection, whereby women learn to
accept the notion that they occupy an inferior position vis-à-vis men. This
sense of inferiority is based on a binary logic that relegates women to
the realm of the corporeal so that men may transcend this abject state
as spiritual or intellectual beings. This lesson is imparted in the context
of intimate relationships with men who serve as lovers or mentors of the
protagonists and who discipline these women through a system of rewards
and punishments based on the women’s willingness to comply. Women
are rewarded for embracing a position of corporeal immanence through
affective ties with men whom they love and respect, or else they are pun-
ished for their failure to do so through the withholding of such affections.
In tracing these microchannels of power, the authors of these texts wish
to expose the hypocrisy of such power dynamics by demonstrating that
they cause women to internalize misogynist attitudes, replicating them not
only toward other women but toward themselves as well.
Chapter 3
Feminist Misogyny? or
How I Learned to Hate My Body
It takes a feminist to know a misogynist,

and vice versa.
â•…â•… —Susan Gubar, “Feminist Misogyny”
In chapter 2, we saw the importance of the masculine gaze in disciplining

women to behave as “appropriately” feminine subjects. While such disci-
pline implies a negative form of reinforcement of gender norms, it is nev-
ertheless clear that in other stories, the desire for positive validation by the
men in one’s life is equally important in rendering women complicit with
social constructions of femininity. In this chapter, we will examine three
stories that detail the bond between a female protagonist and her male
lover or mentor, underscoring the ways male chauvinism or misogyny is
internalized and reproduced by the women themselves in the context of
intimate relationships. In each case the hierarchical nature of such relation-
ships, whereby the male occupies a dominant position vis-à-vis the female,
encourages the protagonist to compensate for her relative lack of power
through compliance with and/or manipulation of the standards used to
judge her as “inferior.” In the process of trying to outwit the male at his
own game, she unwittingly winds up internalizing and replicating negative
attitudes toward women, a phenomenon that Susan Gubar has ironically
termed “feminist misogyny.”
In chapter 1 we saw that in postwar Japanese literature by male
authors, women’s bodies formed the ground for construction of a mascu-
line subjectivity that rendered women inferior by aligning them with the
realm of the corporeal. By disavowing those qualities that threatened them
with emasculation in the face of a superior occupying army—physical fra-
gility, sexual vulnerability, submission to authority—and then projecting
them onto women, Japanese men were able to posit themselves as superior
77
78 Chapter 3
to women by virtue of their own theoretical invulnerability. Misogynist

rhetoric thus served as a palliative strategy for coping with the crisis to
postwar Japanese masculinity posed by the Occupation. Julia Kristeva has
described this strategy of disavowal and projection of undesirable quali-
ties as a process of “abjection,” whereby the abject or “unclean” entity
is expelled from the economy of power but is at the same time a crucial
structuring element of it. As such, the strategy serves to define the bound-
ary between “clean” and “unclean,” “normal” and “abnormal”—or in
this case, “masculine” and “feminine.”1
As we will see in this chapter, Kōno, Takahashi, and Kurahashi challenge
this misogynist “logic” head on by crafting narratives that demonstrate the
psychological cost to women who are thus rendered “inferior.” As in fiction
by contemporary male authors, women here are aligned with the realm of
bodily specificity so that men may identify themselves with the realm of the
spiritual, the intellectual, or some otherwise exalted sphere of existence. But
narratives by women differ in their attention to the adverse effects of this
logic on women. The male characters in these stories so convince the female
protagonists of the validity of this hierarchically gendered value system that
the women either accept it at face value and succumb to self-destructive
behavior or identify themselves as provisionally masculine in order to prove
that they are an exception to the rule of feminine inferiority.
“Bone Meat” (Hone no niku, 1969), by Kōno Taeko, is an example
of the first type of narrative, wherein the female protagonist’s abandon-
ment by her lover sends her into a state of hysterical self-abjection that
may in fact result in her death at the end of the story. “Like a Witch” (Yōjo
no yō ni, 1964), by Kurahashi Yumiko, and “Castle of Bones” (Hone
no shiro, 1969), by Takahashi Takako, are examples of the latter type
of story, in which women’s internalization of the “superiority” of men
results in a contempt for their own sex and a desire to transcend feminine
immanence in favor of a valorized state of existence that is explicitly coded
as masculine. Rather than affirming this negative valuation of femininity,
these stories expose and critique the way such misogynist “logic” works to
trap women in an emphatically illogical and unjust double bind, whereby
neither resistance nor compliance serves as an effective strategy for build-
ing a tenable feminine subjectivity.
“Bone Meat”
The protagonist of “Bone Meat” is an unmarried woman whose live-in
lover abandons her about six months before the time when the story
F eminist M isogyny ? 79
begins. Much of the tale is told in flashback, as she remembers the time
they spent together leading up to their breakup. She remembers with
particular fondness times when they ate food “with bones or shells”
because these meals were accompanied by a specific form of role-playing
in which the man took the meaty parts for himself and left the woman
with the merest scraps of leftover food. This literal performance of the
hierarchical structure of their relationship—wherein the male demon-
strates his dominance and the woman gracefully submits—is cited by the
protagonist as the very reason that these meals were pleasurable to her
above all others.
The woman’s pleasure is evident in a remembered scene in which the
two eat raw oysters on the half-shell together. As if in deliberate parody
of the stereotype of the cheerfully submissive wife, the woman carefully
prepares the meal and serves it to the man, taking pleasure not only in
watching him eat, but also in denying herself food even when he offers it
to her. After watching him eat a few of the oysters, she takes up one of his
discarded shells and begins to scrape at the tiny bits of flesh left stuck to
the shell, from which she derives immense pleasure. Evidently the ritual
nature of their role-playing, during which she repeatedly asks him for a
whole oyster and he refuses her, is an important part of the enjoyment for
her because when he unexpectedly offers her one, she is disappointed at
this “departure from the usual order of things.”2 It turns out that the man
simply finds that night’s product to be inferior in quality to the oysters
they usually buy, and since the meal lacks flavor, he seems to grow tired of
the usual game:
“How is it?” the man asked.

“Well, I can’t really tell,” she replied. What she could tell was
that it was not nearly so good as the taste of the hinge muscle
scraped from the empty shell or the other bit of meat that had
given her such ecstasy. And it seemed distinctly inferior to the
flavor, the smell, the freshness of the seashore called up in her
mind by the voluptuous sound the man made when he raised
the shell to his lips and sucked out the oyster. Even the flavor
evoked by that sound amounted to little more than imagining a
long-past and much-faded sensation. (259–260)
With this rather unexpected turn of events, the meal ends, along with the
role-playing that is supposed to accompany it, and the scene concludes as
follows:
80 Chapter 3
She felt dissatisfied that the scene they always played when they
ate oysters on the half-shell had not been followed. The man
took her hand and stroked it. She wished she might feel that on
another part of her body.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›
That evening, however, which ended without the usual fulfill-
ment of the scene she associated with the taste, was the last time
they ate oysters together. Before too many more days passed,
spring was upon them and the raw-oyster season was over. The
summer passed and autumn came, and by the time the air again
began to turn cold, the man had already left. (261)
It is clear in this scene that eating oysters together is a pleasurable

and even erotic experience for the woman and that her own pleasure is
predicated on a posture of self-denial that privileges the desires of the man.
It is the sound of him eating and enjoying his meal, not the food itself,
that evokes “the flavor, the smell, the freshness of the seashore” and makes
the meal of oysters special to her. It is also clear that this scene represents
the beginning of the end of their relationship—already “long-past and
much-faded” by the time the story itself begins. In fact, enjoyment of the
oysters, linked as it is with the sexual play that accompanies the meal, can
be read as a kind of metaphor for the relationship itself—neither of which,
it is implied in this passage, gives him pleasure any longer.
The linkages between physical and emotional nourishment are fur-
ther evident in the fact that when he leaves her, the protagonist’s appetite
disappears and she becomes extremely thin. The passion that she felt for
the man, which is intimately bound up with the performance of self-denial
that structures their relationship, is apparently inextricable from her desire
for food so that she literally begins to starve herself after he leaves her:
Since girlhood, the woman had hardly been what could be

described as plump. However, from about the time the man
began gradually bringing in his personal belongings, she had
started to gain a little weight.
Their tastes concurred, and they both liked dishes with bones
or with shells. The woman was poor, and the man’s prospects,
up until about the time he abandoned her, had not looked good,
so in order to serve such dishes often, they had to economize
on their other meals. Even so, it was mostly the bones or shells
which went to the woman. But although she seldom ate richly,
she began to gain weight.
The woman recalled this odd phenomenon as not odd in the

least.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›All those varied bone and shell dishes began to give her
the feeling that a sense of taste had been awakened throughout
her body; that all her senses had become so concentrated in her
sense of taste that it was difficult for her even to move. And when
she awoke the next morning, she felt her body brimming with a
new vitality. It would have been odd had she not gained weight.
(262–263)
The woman had never been critical of him when they had dishes
with bones or shells, because at those times he never made her
anxious or brought her troubles to mind. He coveted meat even
more fiercely than before, and she even more wholeheartedly
savored the tiny bits of bone meat. They were a single organ-
ism, a union of objectively different parts, immersed in a dream.
(263–264)
The description of their relationship as like “a single organism”

underscores the extent to which the woman’s physical well-being becomes
dependent on the presence and participation of the man. She is able to
thrive even though she eats little because their relationship provides her
with an identity and proves that she is necessary to him; what use is a
sadist without a masochist, and vice versa? Her feminine identity becomes
so structured around this performance of a masochistic subject position
that when the integrity of their bond is threatened—that is, when the
game ceases to provide the usual pleasure—she begins to pick fights with
him in order to provoke the kind of passionate exchange they used to
share with food. Her constant refrain, “I’d be better off without you!”
seems intended to elicit reassurance that this is not the case, and indeed
the fact that he continues to stay with her for some time after she begins
to criticize him so vehemently appears to offer her some solace—until the
day when he takes her at her word and leaves.
It is not surprising that the story begins with a long description of
the woman’s attempts to deal with the personal belongings he has left
behind, given that throughout the story these discarded material objects
are likened to her feelings of abandonment:
The first hints that the man was beginning to think of a life in
which she had no part appeared even before his work took a turn
for the better. His decision to abandon her had been reflected in
82 Chapter 3
both his private and public aspects; even the clothing he wore
was all newly made. She felt the sympathy of a fellow-sufferer
for the old clothes that he took no more notice of, and yet
felt scorned by the very things she tried to pity. And thus the
woman found even more unbearable these troublesome leftover
belongings. (253)
Not only does she equate herself with these material objects, but it is
also clear that she perceives the man to have left her behind in exchange
for something better. Effectively, he has cast off both her and his own
worn-out things as he moves up the ladder of success. Elsewhere in the
text the woman’s poverty is stressed, and it is explicitly contrasted with
the man’s more advantageous situation: “She had decided that the best
method of dealing with the perplexing problem of the man’s belongings
was herself to abandon them entirely, along with her own, and move to
a new place. But she didn’t have the money to move to a new place or to
buy all the necessary things for it. Although the woman would have liked
to abandon it all, she could not, and even her own belongings and the
place itself became repugnant to her” (253). It is as though the man has
managed to transcend the realm of base materiality only by relegating her
to a position of immanence, and her feelings of being discarded along with
his old things are transformed into a level of self-loathing that renders her
indifferent even to her own well-being.
The protagonist’s frustration with feeling stuck in her current situ-
ation, literally weighed down by the baggage of a failed relationship that
she is too poor to abandon and too distraught to discard, prompts self-
destructive fantasies of escape that may in fact culminate in her death. She
becomes haunted by obsessive thoughts of fire that seem to imply both a
fear of and a desire for this outcome:
She felt she would like to burn it all—the man’s things, and her
own, and the place. If she too were to burn up with them, she
thought, so much the better. But she merely hoped for it, and
made no plans. Strangely, for a woman who wanted even herself
to be destroyed in the conflagration, she was inclined to be wary
of fire.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›She was tortured by the fear that if she were to start a
fire accidentally it would seem like arson. (254)
All that the woman had disposed of among the things the man had
left behind was the discarded toothbrush, the old razor blades,
and the cigarettes. A moment before, when she had held the ash-
tray in her hands, she had the dreamlike feeling that everything
would, happily, burn to ashes like the cigarettes. (254–255)
In the final lines of the story, it is suggested that she has (perhaps uncon-
sciously) chosen self-immolation over continued misery, as a dream of
burning the physical remains of their relationship morphs into an image
of an actual house fire:
The siren of a fire engine wailed somewhere continuously. But

what caused her dream to recede was less the siren than the words
she had just heard in her dream.
From the ashes of the man’s belongings, that there should be
so many bones and shells! “Is that so? Is that so?” she said nod-
ding, and the siren, to which was added a furiously ringing bell,
filled her ears. Was what she had been told in the dream perhaps
prophetic? The bell stopped, and just then the siren arrived blar-
ing under her window. But the woman, her eyes closed, nodding
“Is that so? Is that so?” simply snuggled deeper into the quilt as
it seemed to begin to smolder. (266)
“Bone Meat” thus offers a fairly literal illustration of the process

whereby a woman’s desire for validation by a male authority figure—in this
case a former lover—ultimately results in a self-destructive internalization
of the very discourses that render her inferior. The protagonist’s complic-
ity with hierarchical power dynamics that encourage and reward her for
her submission to their vaguely sadomasochistic role-play is crucial in the
success of this process of self-abjection. She even learns to take pleasure
in subordinating her own desires to his, and her feminine gender identity
becomes inseparable from the masochistic role she plays vis-à-vis her lover.
Therefore, when he abandons her, she is unable to extricate herself from
the position of identification with his discarded material possessions. The
only escape she can envision from this intolerable situation is apparently to
destroy herself, along with the rest of the “garbage.”
“Like a Witch”
The central character of “Like a Witch” is a writer who returns home to
her family in Kōchi prefecture, a rural area in southern Japan where the
pace of life and cultural patterns of the inhabitants are far more traditional
84 Chapter 3
than the metropolitan lifestyle to which she has accustomed herself as an

adult. On the pretext of helping her younger brother reopen their late
father’s dental practice, she has left her husband “without permission” in
the hope of gaining some respite from their married life together, which
she finds dull and an impediment to her writing career.
The gap in educational level, attitudes, and expectations between the
protagonist and the residents of her former hometown is evident from
the very first pages of the story, as she describes the mundane routine
of housework and gossip that structures the daily life of the women of
the village with a mixture of dismissal and contempt. For example, she
likens the voice of the woman next door, a former classmate of hers, to
the clamoring of stray dogs and wonders how someone so poor could
produce so many children.3 Though the protagonist is married, she has
deliberately kept this information from the villagers because she dreads
being held accountable to the expectations they have of a properly wed
young woman. She therefore sees her marriage as thoroughly different in
content and quality than the norm, as defined by this small town, and is
determined to keep it that way (219).
The basic conflict of this story, between the normative feminine role
of housewife and the protagonist’s status as writer and intellectual, is dra-
matically illustrated through her relationships with two men—her current
husband, whom she views dispassionately and is able to defy seemingly at
will, and her former lover, a much older man and mentor whose approval
she desperately sought yet who never treated her as an intellectual equal.
We know of her relationship with the husband through several phone
calls, interspersed throughout the story, during which he repeatedly and
unsuccessfully entreats her to come home and fulfill her duties as his wife.
She responds by referring to married life as a “prison” and dismisses his
suggestion that sexual “service” is an important part of marriage (216).
She refuses to express jealousy at the possibility that he might become
unfaithful and blithely replies, “If you feel you’re being inconvenienced,
please go ahead and sleep with another woman. Don’t hold back on my
account.” Even when his language becomes explicitly violent, she is seem-
ingly unfazed:
“Why do you want to do it with me? Shall I put it in more stri-

dent terms? What makes it inevitable that you would do so? It’s
ridiculous.”
“Listening to you talk, all the penises of the world would
probably go flaccid from the poison.”
“That’s the idea.”

“With a woman like you, there’s nothing I can do but beat
you, tie you up, whip you until you lose consciousness and then
rape you.”
“Ah, you want to give me the role of masochist. But it would
be hard for me to be any more masochistic than I am by being
bound by the rope of married life.” (215)
Perhaps their banter is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but the sheer misog-

yny of the husband’s discourse suggests how desperately he is attempting to
reassert his authority. As we will see below, even as the wife appears rather
cavalierly to dismiss this rhetorical power play, she unwittingly echoes the
same sentiments vis-à-vis other women elsewhere in the text.
The protagonist’s casual disregard of her husband’s demands would
make it seem that she is immune to the pressures to yield to masculine
authority, but this initial impression is increasingly undermined the more
we learn of her relationship with her former lover. Structurally, the story
begins with the conversations between husband and wife, and it is almost
halfway through the narrative that we first learn of the older man, but
at this point her relationship with him, and the impact it has had on her
current self, begins to dominate the story. It concludes with her feelings
of abandonment by her mentor, which have created a sense of “deepening
night” within her, profoundly affecting her personality and the quality of
her relationships with others in the present. The story therefore moves
gradually from a description of the protagonist’s exterior persona, through
her ties to her husband, family, and neighbors, to the very core of her
psyche, which has been dramatically shaped by the bond she shared with
“him,” the much older man with whom she fell in love at the age of sev-
enteen. It is this man who represents the essence of masculine authority
for her and to whom she has submitted herself emotionally, physically, and
intellectually in an attempt to win his approval.
Her feelings about this older man are conveyed through two
sequences that interrupt the flow of the narrative and provide psychologi-
cal depth at crucial junctures. The first is a long flashback sequence to the
time when she met him, and it occupies nearly a third of the entire text.
Then after a brief return to “reality,” in which a subplot concerning the
brother is wrapped up, her former lover reappears in a fantasy sequence
that intrudes upon the diegetic present and concludes the story with her
abandonment by the older man. While the first part of the story revolves
around relatively mundane aspects of life in the village—her relationships
86 Chapter 3
with husband, family, and neighbors and her feelings of being a fish out
of water in her own home town—the introduction of the older man takes
the narrative to a more philosophical and abstract level that reveals much
about the psychology of the protagonist and how she has come to feel
so alienated from her roots. The importance of her relationship with the
lover is evident from the way his character, once introduced, completely
overshadows the daily life dramas of the first section of the story and the
fact that his departure concludes the story itself.
The tension between feminine corporeality and intellectual or spiri-
tual pursuits dominates the lovers’ first meeting and is explored explicitly
and at length in the dialogue that establishes the basis for their relation-
ship. They first meet when he helps her up after she collapses due to
anemia brought on by menstruation. She is horrified that he has seen
her predicament—apparently she has dripped blood on his floor—and her
discomfort with her own bodily functions then becomes their first topic
of conversation. In fact, she seems to believe that having been “seen” as
feminine in such a decisively corporeal fashion is much more invasive than
being sexually violated, and she concludes that now that he has “known”
her in this sense, they might as well become lovers: “OK, look at me as
much as you want. I’ve been seen by you, and it seems that your eyes have
taken up residence inside my body” (231).4 It is interesting that although
she claims later to be infertile, here and elsewhere the image of being
“inhabited” or impregnated by his gaze is used as a metaphor for the
profound effect he would have on her later intellectual and psychological
development.
While the older man clearly seems to appreciate women’s bodies, and
her body in particular, he reveals himself to be less impressed with their
spiritual and intellectual potential. In the context of a conversation between
the lovers that is part argumentative and part flirtatious, she attempts to
earn his respect by appealing to his obvious penchant for intellectualism.
His response to her banter is more than a little patronizing:
“You’re a troublesome girl, aren’t you? Good girls don’t argue

like that. It just makes you look pouty and stern.”
“You don’t respect me for my mind, do you? You underes-
timate me. Even in this little body I harbor a soul and spirit and
intelligence about a meter long.”
“That’s adorable. Your intellectualism is part of your charm,
like the whiskers on a kitten.”
“Because cats have whiskers, they can catch mice even at night.”
“Catching mice is a trivial game so never mind that. But men

are stupid animals who will chase rats with such abandon that
they forfeit their lives. Men are made exclusively of spirit so they
can become as ugly as they want. Women don’t have that. Or
even if they do it’s one with their body. It burns inside their
bones and shines out beautifully from inside their flesh. It’s hard
to say whether it’s flesh or illusion or a ray of light.” (235)
While his reference to men as “stupid animals” would seem to suggest

some derision, thereby mitigating the double standard that underlines his
assessment of women’s potential, in fact the effect of this phrasing is to
posit men as rather heroic in their steadfast pursuit of a goal. Women, on
the other hand, are bound by their corporeal immanence, and to the extent
that they can be said to have a “spirit”—here a kind of code word for a
selfhood that transcends the mortal coil—it is inevitably trapped within a
physical package that although pleasing to the eye, is obviously understood
as inferior. This much is clear from the assertion that men can “become as
ugly as they want” in a corporeal sense, precisely because they possess spiri-
tuality, something that is implicitly more valuable than physical beauty.
The protagonist has evidently internalized these prejudices to some
extent because she continually attempts to distance herself from the kind
of corporeal experience that would bind her to the stereotype of femi-
ninity that her lover describes. She balks at his claim that she is “just a
woman” and insists on referring to herself as barren in an effort to disavow
distinctively feminine experiences like pregnancy and childbirth (233).
Likewise, as noted above, she also clearly harbors feelings of abhorrence
for her menstrual periods—understood not as a natural cycle of feminine
experience but as a corrosive force of decay that destroys from within:
“Menstruation. Yuck. I don’t use words like that. My ‘monthly guest.’
More like an angel of death that comes to pick the vines clean, who spits
out the dregs and then leaves. It makes the him inside of me particularly
testy” (233). Her reference to a male self that resides within the outer
feminine shell seems calculated to establish a kind of intellectual authority
defined along precisely the lines that he has laid out for her. If only men
can be said to possess “spirit” and if he insists on focusing on the feminine
exterior, then she must present herself as masculine on the inside, forcing
him to recognize her as an intellectual equal.
Furthermore, she is careful to distinguish her own implicitly mas-
culine persona from that of other girls, who only pretend at the sort of
philosophical inquiry that marks serious writing:
88 Chapter 3
“You said once that you wrote poetry and fiction, right? You
don’t anymore?”
“I don’t. No way. I’m not the kind of girl that pretends to be
a writer. Girls can’t become beautiful even if they write fiction. I
have some friends who are still writing, but it makes me sick to
see them writing out of such feelings of self-love. I can’t stand to
be near someone like that. I’ve given up looking in the mirror,
and at night, so I won’t touch myself, I keep my hands above the
covers. I don’t use makeup either. But the worst is women who
make themselves up using words.” (233–234)
It is interesting that her contempt for women’s self-expression, or “writing

with makeup,” is so intimately imbricated with both the beauty myth that
she is attempting to resist and with feminine sexuality. This is explicitly in
response to his repeated attempts to conflate “femininity” with physical
beauty. In a determined effort to distance herself from such stereotypes,
she disavows both concern for her own appearance, which would mark
her as a conventionally and exclusively feminine creature, and the kind
of “self-love,” whether explicitly sexual or expressed obliquely through
writing, that would validate a feminine perspective.
In fact, the protagonist tries so hard to distance herself from norma-
tive femininity that she, perhaps unwittingly, seems to internalize the very
misogynist discourse and attitudes that she is attempting to resist. She
does so by drawing a clear line of demarcation between herself and other
women, presenting herself as the exception to the rules that determine
gender normativity for him:
[Man:] “But aren’t women creatures who live on beauty? Every

woman lives thinking of herself as beautiful. If a woman were to
become unable to believe that, she couldn’t go on living another
day. They live praying to themselves to become more and more
beautiful. Even old hags.”
“That’s stupid.”
“You should think of it as tragic instead.”
“You should have said comic. It’s so amusing I can’t stand
it.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›If the kind of woman that fits your definition of ‘woman’ is
the most feminine type, then I can’t stand to be a woman. Women
who are the ugliest things in the world and yet pretend not to
see that and try to find something beautiful about themselves,
try to make themselves even 1 percent more beautiful, thinking
that if beautiful people are good and proper, then they’ll try to
be good and proper—women who live lying to themselves like
that should be raped and killed. Don’t you think you’d like to
exterminate all those lady teachers and PTA moms, female critics,
and Diet members when you see them?”
“Well, you just have to put up with them, don’t you? Anyway,
they’re incapable of doing anything important. Women don’t
have the power to destroy the world or anything.”
“Bear and raise children and build a family. The happiness
of domesticity. Peaceful daily life. It’s dull. Makes me yawn.”
(234–235)
The protagonist’s language here is shockingly misogynist and reminiscent

of her husband’s rhetorical attempts to discipline her during a telephone
conversation earlier in the story. Yet it is important to distinguish that
what she objects to here is the “good and proper” woman, one who aligns
herself with the status quo and/or conforms to normative expectations of
feminine roles.5 Clearly the protagonist sees herself as altogether outside
this paradigm and justifies her position by her own adoption of masculinist
contempt for such women.
“Castle of Bones”
As in “Like a Witch,” the female protagonist of Takahashi Takako’s “Castle
of Bones” is primarily influenced in her hatred of her own sex by a male
mentor, in this case a quasi-religious guru who initiates her into a set of
devotional practices designed to transcend the body by literally crushing
it underneath a giant roller. Women’s bodies are found to be particularly
unresponsive to this “training,” as they are intimately associated with the
realm of bodily existence, and the man is particularly keen on forcing those
women most clearly identified with the corporeal to submit to his rather
sadistic form of “training.” The protagonist, Watashi (“I”), admires this
man very much for his pursuit of pure spirituality, but she is seemingly
frustrated in her attempts to get him to take her as a serious candidate
for transcendence on account of the fact that she inhabits a female body.
She therefore sets out to prove to him that she is an exception to the rule
of feminine spiritual inferiority by voluntarily submitting herself to the
training. Her desire for validation by this man she admires thus leads her
to take a misogynist attitude toward other women and to abject her own
femininity in order to impress him.
90 Chapter 3
“Castle of Bones” opens with Watashi wandering through the back

streets of a large city, where she encounters a mysterious, mummy-like old
man in the process of “training.” Watashi expresses interest in the training,
so the old man takes her to a windowless room eight stories high that he
calls the “beauty parlor.” Here she witnesses armor-clad men who, on the
orders of the old man, force unwilling, naked female victims to submit to
the roller. According to the old man, the exercise results in failure because
the women refuse to accept the fact that their bodies are ugly.
Strangely enough, though Watashi is also female, the old man does
not attempt to train her, and it is this fact that brings Watashi to the
realization that she is not like other women. In order to trick the old man
into abducting her for training as well, she sets out on a quest to learn to
behave like a regular woman, and after much trial and error, she discovers
that the thing that most sets her apart from other women is her total lack
of concern with her appearance. After ducking into a beauty shop and
submitting to a lengthy makeover, which she describes as a “sacrifice”
willingly undertaken to qualify her for training, she is finally abducted and
taken to the old man’s “beauty parlor.”6
Here Watashi is stripped naked and submitted to the roller, but
unlike the other women, she resolves not to scream or betray pain or fear,
in an effort to prove her worthiness to the old man. Sure enough, the
old man notes with satisfaction that the shadow produced by Watashi’s
flattened body is black like his own, rather than oozing red like that of the
other women. Pleased with this measure of success, the old man favors
Watashi by leading her to the “Castle of Bones” denoted by the title of
the story. He explains that the castle is constructed of the whitened bones
and crystalline eyes of those who have successfully completed the training.
In attaining this inorganic state, the trainees do not die; they have merely
concentrated their life in their eyes in order to attain the power to see the
invisible—in effect achieving a god-like status. Unfortunately, the old man
continues, even though Watashi seems like a promising candidate, because
she is female it would be unsuitable for her to aspire to the Castle of
Bones. Upon hearing this, Watashi realizes that her vision of the Castle of
Bones was just an illusion and that she still has a long road to travel before
reaching it. Despite the old man’s efforts to dissuade her, in the end she
cannot bring herself to give up the quest.
In this story, Takahashi portrays an environment that is strictly demar-
cated into male space, from which women are excluded as unworthy, and
female space, in which women’s bodies are treated as abject and controlled
by men. Yet her portrayal of the protagonist undermines this structure,
as men are found to be less “pure” than they pretend to be, and women
are more “worthy” than they are purported to be. The result is a text that
subverts from within the very structure on which it is built. In the indoor,
female space of the beauty parlor, great attention is paid to women’s bodies
in an effort either to beautify them through the application of cosmetics
and hair care products or to emphasize their ugliness by mutilating them
through training. While the old man also undergoes training in an effort to
transcend the corporeal, it is important to note that for him, this process is
not only voluntary and meaningful, but also takes place outdoors in free,
open space. Similarly, the path to the Castle of Bones is of course also tra-
versed in open space, and it is taken for granted that the men who travel it
have the possibility of reaching their destination. By contrast, for the women
who suffer inside the old man’s beauty parlor, the training is nothing but
senseless torture and their failure to overcome it a foregone conclusion.
Furthermore, whereas the Castle of Bones is demarcated as male space into
which females must not trespass, within the supposedly female space of the
beauty parlor, women are clearly subjected to the control and abuse of men
who have absolute power over them. This power differential is underscored
by the hyper-masculine signifier of armor-clad men, versus the total vulner-
ability of women stripped naked and subjected to the male gaze.
In fact, this economy of the visual proves to be an integral part of
the geography of power articulated in “Castle of Bones.” The ultimate
form of power sought by the old man and his followers is the power to
“see the invisible,” which is defined in the text as a kind of cosmic truth at
the “center of the universe” available only to those who have successfully
completed the training (29). This power of vision is symbolized by the
crystalline eyeballs that cover the surface of the Castle of Bones. As if to
underscore his position as arbiter of power in this visual economy, the old
man has forbidden his armor-clad underlings from visually observing the
women’s training—they are allowed to participate but must wear helmets
that prevent them from seeing the women’s agony.
Thus, Watashi occupies an extremely problematic and disruptive
position with respect to the network of power relationships that structure
the world depicted in the story. Since she is allowed to witness the training
on her first visit to the old man’s beauty parlor, not only does she occupy
a masculine position with respect to the female victims, but according to
the logic of this world that denies the right of vision to all but the most
worthy, her status is actually superior in this scene to that of the old man’s
followers. Watashi initially is favored with the right to the gaze because the
old man approves of her utter lack of concern with the feminine objective
92 Chapter 3
of self-beautification (17). Yet precisely because of her cosmetophobia, she

fails to attract the attention of the old man as a potential target for train-
ing. In effect, she is invisible to him because though he knows that she is
not male, he cannot seem to see her as female either because she does not
fit his conception of femininity.
In order to attract the old man’s attention, Watashi is forced to
“perform” femininity in a way that is experienced by her as exceedingly
unnatural. On looking in the mirror, she describes the effect of her trans-
formation after the application of a “sticky film of gaudy makeup” (31) as
a moment of nonrecognition of a self that “did and did not look like her”
(21). But thanks to this makeover she is finally able to qualify for training.
In other words, in order to gain the old man’s recognition as an appropri-
ate candidate, she has to learn to perform the role of a woman obsessed
with her appearance—the type of woman that the old man himself iden-
tifies as simultaneously most feminine and, consequently least likely to
complete the training successfully.
Thus, Watashi’s gender acrobatics serve to cast suspicion on the old
man’s motives for attempting to train these women in the first place. He
claims to want to train them “just as he does himself,” in order to help
them to transcend the “ugliness” of the corporeal body in favor of an
inorganic and spiritual existence (11). Yet by deliberately choosing only
those women who he believes will fail to embrace this transcendence, he
preserves his position as sole possessor of the gaze while simultaneously
justifying his role as arbiter of power on the grounds that he is closer
to spiritual purity than anyone else. Furthermore, despite the old man’s
self-proclaimed holier-than-thou status, he seems to enjoy witnessing the
women’s torture, as is evident from Watashi’s description of her own expe-
rience during training: “Then I saw the old man’s eyes lose their gleam of
purity and burn with a strange greediness, just as they had done here the
other day. Because today I was in the opposite position of being punished,
I was able to see clearly what was in the old man’s eyes. Those eyes seemed
to express a cold pleasure at the women’s agonies” (24–25). So although
the old man suggests that he is able to renounce corporeal pleasure in
favor of a supposedly higher realm of knowledge, his eyes betray him—the
eyes, of course, being the vehicle by which such knowledge is attained,
according to the man’s own logic. It is Watashi’s renunciation of the mas-
culine role of possessor of the gaze, in favor of a feminine vantage point as
object of the gaze, that makes this fact clear to her.
To pursue the visual motif one step further, although the old man
bases his theory of knowledge acquisition on the power of vision, this
power is accompanied by a corresponding blindness to his own limita-

tions (and those of his world view). In contrast, Watashi’s deferral of the
masculine gaze in favor of a feminized visual position gives her access to a
different sort of knowledge, in effect making the hypocrisy of the prevail-
ing power structure fully visible for the first time. Furthermore, this role
reversal subverts the binary of male as subject of the gaze versus female
as viewed object by giving the “object” the power to see (and judge) the
“subject.”
In the end, however, Watashi is unable to renounce once and for all
her desire for the very sort of visual power that the old man describes, in
spite of her apparent understanding that the economy of the gaze is based
on a fallacious distinction between supposedly masculine and feminine
attributes. It seems clear that Watashi’s primary motivation here is not
a hatred of the corporeal or the feminine per se but a desire to earn the
respect of the old man, and her various sacrifices are undertaken precisely
for this purpose, as she states clearly during her own experience of train-
ing: “The screams and groans of the other women increased in proportion
to my own pain. But I made no sound. Yes, wasn’t that precisely why I
had come here? In order to show the old man that I could bear the pain,
for that reason only, I had spent days and days wandering around in places
I had not chosen at times I had not chosen, and finally through the great
sacrifice of that disguise, I had created the opportunity to be abducted by
the old man” (24). It would perhaps not be going too far to character-
ize the old man as a kind of father figure from whom Watashi is seeking
validation—so desperately, in fact, that she is willing to resort to self-abuse
to get it.
Sadly, in spite of Watashi’s attempts to prove her worthiness, the
old man seems unable to get past the fact that she is female. Though in
their first encounter Watashi and the old man seem to share a kind of
intimacy—both demonstrate an uncanny understanding of each other’s
motives7—the disguise she dons to recapture this intimacy actually makes
it impossible for the old man to see her as anything but a female body.
When she appears again at the old man’s beauty salon after her transfor-
mation into a visually recognizable female, he is unable to connect this
image of her with the person he met before.
Even after Watashi submits to his torture to prove that her shadow
is just as black as his, the old man at first offers her a vision of the Castle
of Bones only to retract it, accusing her of “arrogantly trying to invade
male territory” (30). At this accusation Watashi puts her hand up to
touch her made-over hair and face and reflects, “Oh, am I nothing but
94 Chapter 3
a woman, then?” (31) Given this Catch-22 situation, it is hardly surpris-

ing that Watashi is tempted by the old man’s notion of transcending the
body in favor of a purely spiritual existence. Regardless of her own image
of self, her female flesh marks her in the eyes of the fathers as “nothing
but a woman.” The “feeling of liberation” she experiences as her body is
transformed into a lifeless mass by the roller can be read not necessarily as
a hatred of women or corporeality per se but as a desire to be free of the
cage of binary male/female existence (25).
It is significant that while embracing this desire for transcendence of
the corporeal and the binary logic it invites, Takahashi’s text deconstructs
its own message by simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of such a
feat. Bodies subjected to the roller resume their original form when it is
removed. Visions of reaching the Castle of Bones prove to be nothing but
an illusion. For those, like Watashi, seeking a way out of the binary gender
trap, Takahashi’s text offers no solutions, only an invitation to rethink
that structure from within, by portraying a protagonist who is literally not
“visible” through the lens of conventional binary distinctions. In doing so,
Takahashi emphasizes the artificial and constructed nature of this differ-
ence between binary opposites, ultimately demonstrating the hypocritical
and self-contradictory logic whereby women are excluded from dominant
power structures.
We have seen that all three narratives discussed in this chapter trace a pro-
cess wherein women are seduced into complicity with the very structures
that render them inferior, in the context of affective relationships that
reward properly feminine behavior. Such complicity requires women to
accept relegation to the realm of corporeal immanence so that men may
pose as spiritually transcendent or intellectually superior beings. The female
protagonists depicted in these texts all learn to replicate this misogynist
philosophy in order to win the regard of male mentors or lovers whose
opinions they respect, with varying consequences. The main character of
“Bone Meat” seems to accept her inferiority at face value and even learns
to take a kind of masochistic pleasure in it, but this likely results in self-
destruction by the end of the tale. The protagonists of “Like a Witch” and
“Castle of Bones,” by contrast, provisionally accept this chauvinist logic in
an unsuccessful attempt to free themselves from the hierarchical structure
by proving that they are exceptions to the rule of feminine inferiority.
While their female characters are unable to overturn the ideologi-
cal structures that bind them, all three authors effect a powerful critique
of this misogynist attitude toward femininity by replicating and then
parodying it within their texts. The ritual nature of the sadomasochistic

role-playing depicted in Kōno’s story highlights the performative, and
therefore artificial, nature of constructions of feminine inferiority. Kura-
hashi encodes chauvinist dialogue into her story in order to allow her
heroine to explicitly refute it in arguments with her husband. Even as she
reproduces these attitudes in an attempt to distance herself from other
women who ostensibly resemble the stereotypes, the shockingly misogy-
nist tenor of her claims hyperbolically underscores their lack of truth value,
mocking while drawing attention to their artificiality and the self-serving
motivations of the men who attempt to enforce them. Finally, Takahashi
exposes the hypocrisy of the standards used to judge women as inferior by
demonstrating that women can display mastery of the standards used to
measure “masculine” excellence yet still be denied recognition for their
accomplishments.
Given that all three of these authors had to fight for inclusion in the
male intellectual space that the Japanese literary world represented, it is
perhaps no surprise that such themes reemerged in imaginative form in
their literature. Each story depicts a world ruled by networks of power that
structure human relationships according to positions of superiority/inferi-
ority, dominance/submission, intellect/body, transcendence/immanence,
and spiritual/material along strictly gendered lines. Each protagonist finds
that as a woman, she is automatically relegated to the negative side of each
binary opposition, whether she identifies with this position or not.
Each protagonist then faces a choice between complying with the
terms of her subordination, or attempting resistance. Kōno’s heroine
chooses compliance, only to discover that even playing by the rules does
not guarantee the security of the fragile identity that she has crafted for
herself, as this leaves her dependent on the cooperation of a male partner
who can capriciously withdraw his participation at will. Kurahashi’s main
character chooses resistance and attempts to justify a position for herself
on the opposite end of the binary. However, she discovers that only those
already in a position of authority have the power to grant inclusion and
that merely inhabiting a female body is enough to disqualify her. Taka-
hashi’s protagonist faces a similar situation, with the added indignity of
successfully passing the test for inclusion, only to be turned away at the
gates of the establishment.
The rhetorical power of each text, from a feminist perspective, thus
lies in its exposure of the hypocrisy of the “rules” whereby women are ren-
dered abject and subordinated to authorities who pretend to be superior,
only to reveal their own lack of credibility. These narratives demonstrate
96 Chapter 3
that under such a rigidly illogical system of value, neither compliance nor
resistance offers a tenable position for women to establish any kind of
feminine subjectivity. Indeed, there can be no possibility of subjectivity for
women so long as their only value is as a ground for the construction of
male subjectivity.
In the previous two chapters we have outlined some of the disci-
plinary mechanisms used to produce and enforce feminine behavior as
envisioned in these authors’ textual worlds. In the next chapter we will
encounter another persistent trope employed to critique restrictive gender
binaries—the “odd body,” or alternate forms of corporeality that resist
characterization as either male or female, masculine or feminine. These
bodies not only expose as false the dichotomy that underwrites such
binary distinctions, but further undermine this structure at its core by
“queering” the male body that forms the theoretical standard for binary
gender difference.
Chapter 4
Odd Bodies
The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of

which woman would be the subject or the object,
but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of
suspending its pretension to the production of a truth
and of a meaning that are excessively univocal.
â•…â•… —Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse”
As noted in the previous two chapters, women in the texts we have

analyzed so far can be said to be held accountable to norms of feminin-
ity, whether they identify with such constructions or not, based solely
on the fact that they inhabit female bodies. These norms are repeatedly
instilled by a masculine disciplinary gaze that continually reminds women
to “behave themselves” according to societal expectations. Women are
thus taught to embody and perform femininity so that men can define
themselves as masculine, according to gendered binaries that render these
two terms opposite and mutually exclusive. Masculinity can therefore be
understood as predicated on a profound disavowal of all qualities asso-
ciated with the realm of the feminine, in order to transcend this abject
position of corporeal immanence for the elevated plane of intellectual and
spiritual superiority.
Luce Irigaray describes such binary distinctions as operating accord-
ing to a logic of “sexual indifference,” whereby femininity is defined
according to its difference from masculinity, embodying everything that
men (would like to believe they) are not. While this would seem to yield
two distinct genders, in effect it reduces conceptions of masculinity and
femininity to one model of gender—the masculine—whereby femininity
becomes “non-masculinity”—that is, incomprehensible without reference
to its conceptual opposite.1 As we saw in chapter 1, this strictly gendered
binary division was underwritten by the exigencies of the high-growth
97
98 Chapter 4
economy of the 1960s, whereby the masculine ideal of salaryman was pos-
sible only through the creation of a feminine complement, the housewife/
mother who took full responsibility for the domestic sphere. Women’s
contributions to society were thus understood to encompass everything
that had been excluded from the masculine sphere—reproduction, care of
children and the elderly, domestic labor, and any other activities required
to support the total dedication of men to the world of work outside the
home. Women writers of the 1960s, particularly those whose works are
analyzed in this study, resisted such ideologies of gender through fictional
narratives that sought to expose such binaries themselves as fictitious, thus
“jamming the theoretical machinery,” in Irigaray’s terminology.
In this chapter we will examine one trope that is frequently used
to critique these binary models of gender—the “odd body,” or a pro-
tagonist whose physiology fails to conform to gendered expectations of
“normalcy.” The bodies examined in this chapter are perversely reproduc-
tive (or nonreproductive), deformed, or androgynous, covertly or overtly
defying prescribed patterns of difference between masculine and feminine
norms. In the process, they underscore the mutual imbrication of human
bodies and the societies that both produce and define them, highlighting
the fact that even though binary gender distinctions are fallacious and
constructed, society perversely insists upon enforcing compliance with
artificially crafted gender norms by assuming a one-to-one correspon-
dence between biology and behavior. These “odd bodies” therefore serve
as a subversive challenge to the logic of “sexual indifference” that would
confine women to the realm of the inferior so that men may envision
themselves as superior.
In the first story under discussion, Kōno Taeko’s “Toddler-Hunt-
ing,” we see a protagonist whose perverse attraction to little boys entails
a fantasy of violent inscription of “feminine” bodily characteristics upon a
male body. This produces a narrative that not only subverts assumptions
about the “naturalness” of maternal instincts, but furthermore calls into
question the integrity of gender norms themselves. Next, in Takahashi
Takako’s story “Secret” (Hi, 1973) we meet a protagonist who defies nor-
mative standards of “beauty” by crafting an alternate model of femininity
that is predicated on her own deformity. This new “feminine” ideal is then
ironically superseded by a male character who more successfully embodies
this combination of the sublime and the grotesque. Finally, in Kurahashi
Yumiko’s “Snake” (Hebi, 1960) we encounter a text that combines con-
ventionally masculine and feminine characteristics in ways that frustrate
any attempt to understand sexual difference through reference to a binary
O dd B odies 99
model of gender. In each story, the feminization of male bodies serves as a

vehicle for the subversion of both feminine and masculine norms, further
destabilizing conventional linkages between sex and gender.
“Toddler-Hunting”
Akiko, the protagonist of “Toddler-Hunting,” is a self-supporting single
woman with a fondness for little boys that goes well beyond what one
might consider to be “normal” maternal instincts. Although motherhood
was still very much the standard by which feminine maturity was judged
when this story was written—with the image of women as “naturally”
wives and mothers still definitive of “proper” expressions of feminine sub-
jectivity—Akiko is childless and infertile and seems quite content to stay
that way. Nevertheless, she is inexplicably drawn to little boys between
the ages of three and ten, yet thoroughly repulsed by little girls of the
same age.
Akiko’s hatred for little girls is explicitly linked to her own unpleasant
experiences of maturing into womanhood, evoking the abjection of femi-
ninity discussed in the previous chapter. In the very first pages of the story,
we learn that the feelings of constriction Akiko herself felt in the process
of developing into sexual maturity are displaced onto other little girls once
she has passed this stage:
Akiko could not bear to remember that she herself had once
been a little girl.
But in fact her childhood had been happier than other peri-
ods of her life. She couldn’t recall a single hardship; she might
have been the most fortunate child who ever lived, a cheerful
thing when she was young. But beneath the sunny disposition,
in the pit of her stomach, she’d been conscious of an inexplicable
constriction. Something loathsome and repellent oppressed all
her senses—it was as if she were trapped in a long, narrow tunnel;
as if a sticky liquid seeped unseen out of her every pore—as if she
were under a curse.
Once, in science class, they’d had a lesson about silkworms,
and with a scalpel the teacher had sliced open a cocoon. Akiko
took one look at the faintly squirming pupa—a filthy dark thing,
slowly binding itself up in thread issuing from its own body—
and knew she was seeing the embodiment of the feelings that
afflicted her.
100 Chapter 4
And then for some reason Akiko became convinced that

other girls her age shared her strange inner discomfort. Grown-
ups, however, did not feel this way, and neither did little boys and
older girls.
And sure enough, once she got past ten, the queasiness left
her. As if she had stepped out of a tunnel into the vast free uni-
verse finally she could breathe. It was at this time, however, that
she started to feel nauseated by any girl still passing through that
stage, and her repulsion grew stronger as the years went by.2
These descriptions of Akiko’s girlhood suggest that the sources of constric-

tion she experienced derive simultaneously from both within and without.
The girl-pupa is unquestionably surrounded by a cocoon-like shell that
both protects and confines her during this critical period of development.
Yet this protective enclosure is seen on some level as of her own making;
the “threads” that form the prison are produced directly from her own
body, an eloquent analogy to the way gender is internalized and produced
through performance by the subject in question as much as it is enforced
from without by societal forces.
It is interesting to compare this narrative of becoming-woman with
that of Kurahashi Yumiko’s protagonist in Blue Journey, discussed in chap-
ter 1. In Kurahashi’s text, the moment of initiation into puberty seems
characterized as a kind of fall from grace, when the protagonist is first con-
fronted with the “truth” of womanhood and wishes she could go back to
the idyllic ignorance of childhood. Akiko, on the other hand, isolates an
even earlier period of development as the source of discomfort. For her,
the prepubescent years of three to ten are described as far more oppressive
than the “freedom” that ironically coincides with a girl’s first menstruation.
The issue here seems to be not merely the process of biological maturity,
but also the way a young girl’s body is sculpted as feminine even before
her menarche in preparation for that transition into womanhood: “The
more typical a girl this age, the less Akiko could bear to be near her. The
pallid complexion; the rubbery flesh; the bluish shadow at the nape of
the neck left by the bobbed haircut; the unnaturally high, insipid way the
girl would talk; even the cut and color of her clothes: Akiko saw in all this
the filthy closeness she had glimpsed in the pupa” (46). The traits that
are listed as most disagreeably feminine here evoke not merely a sense of
an unfinished or immature physical form, but also the way the body in
question is packaged, through grooming and sartorial regimens considered
appropriate to a girl of this age. Even the child’s “pallid complexion” and
O dd B odies 101
“rubbery flesh” seem to signify not merely immaturity, but rather a body
that has been deliberately kept at a state of arrested development through
overprotection or confinement indoors—that is, in the dark cocoon of the
previous passage. It is perhaps not surprising then that to Akiko, this period
of becoming may have been more arduous than the entrance into puberty
that followed it; having struggled as a girl to internalize the self-disciplinary
mechanisms expected of a proper young woman, she may well have seen
the biological change known as menstruation as a fait accompli.
Little boys, on the other hand, are desirable to Akiko because they
represent freedom from such restrictive confinement. Several scenes in the
text depict Akiko’s interaction with boys of the “target age” of three to
ten, and in each case the child in question is charming precisely because
he represents the possibility of active subjectivity that in Akiko’s mind is
denied to girls.
She could just see a little boy, about four years old, pulling on
this cozy, lightweight shirt, his sunburned head popping up
through the neck. When the time came, he would definitely want
to take it off all by himself. Crossing his chubby arms over his
chest, concentrating with all his might, he would just manage to
grasp the shirttails. But how difficult to pull it up and extricate
himself. Screwing up his face, twisting around and wiggling his
little bottom, he would try his hardest. Akiko would glimpse his
tight little belly, full to bursting with all the food he stuffed in at
every meal. (48)
The overwhelming use of active verbs—“wiggling,” “twisting,” “grasp-

ing”—signifies a degree of self-expression and aggressive conduct that
contrasts noticeably with the depiction above of the “filthy closeness” that
is said to confine young girls. This robustness is fueled by a voracious
appetite, implied by the boy’s full stomach, and it seems directly opposite
to the situation of the girl-pupa, whose body seems on the verge of leaking
away as it continually produces the threads of its own constriction. Note
also that the boy is “sunburned,” apparently through vigorous outdoor
activity, whereas the world of little girls is dark, tunnel-like, and confining.
If this is Akiko’s perception of gender difference, then it is no wonder that
she has a preference for little boys to match her aversion to little girls—
they allow her to fantasize a possibility of transcendence of the restrictive
subject position to which she has been assigned by virtue of her inhabita-
tion of a female body that has forcibly been rendered feminine.
102 Chapter 4
Akiko’s attraction to male children is thus not due to any unfulfilled

maternal instinct—which she claims not to have—but rather to a percep-
tion of masculine subjectivity as offering an alternative to the confinement
of the gendered expectations placed upon women. On her inability to bear
children, we are informed that even before Akiko learned that she was
sterile, she balked at the notion of being tied down by the “long commit-
ment” required of women who rear children:
When she’d been younger, Akiko had been amazed by her

body—by its strangeness. Every month, over and over, it made
a little bed inside for a baby, unaware that none would be born,
and then took it apart again. And it had seemed to her a grave
matter that not one person on this earth was created yet out of
her own blood.
But she would always find herself wondering how, after giving
birth to the baby, she could get someone else to take care of it—
and whether there wasn’t some way she could reserve the right to
only occasionally oversee its care. She began to greatly envy men,
who could avoid parental tasks so easily. All this surely proved
how poorly she was endowed with natural maternal urges. (58)
A man’s absence from the home and site of child rearing would have
been considered socially acceptable at this time—even expected, given
the gendered division of labor that was normative in Japan circa 1961,
whereby men were assumed to work outside the home and support their
families while women took sole responsibility for domestic labor. Akiko
is keenly aware that her desire to evade the feminine side of this gender
binary and adopt a masculine subject position renders her abnormal by
the standards of common sense operative at this time. It is interesting
that Kōno’s protagonist never explicitly questions the naturalness of such
maternal desire or the way it is defined as total absorption in the care of
one’s children to the exclusion of all else. However, the narrative itself
places this “naturalness” under scrutiny by presenting us with an obvious
counterexample—a character who not only is unable and unwilling to
have children, but whose sexual proclivities in fact shock the reader by
confronting him or her with an antithesis to the stereotype of the nurtur-
ing and loving mother.
In addition to enjoying sadomasochistic sexual play with her partner,
Sasaki, Akiko experiences a recurring fantasy in which the beating and
whipping she begs from her lover is instead administered to a young boy
O dd B odies 103
of precisely the “target age” that fascinates her so. While it is clear that the
violent treatment is actually performed by a man, it is equally clear that
the female witness to the beatings, a stand-in for Akiko herself, directs and
orchestrates the performance. The text is quite graphic in its description
of Akiko’s fantasy, particularly with respect to the following two moments
of interest for this discussion:
More punishment. With every lash of the cane, there are shrieks and
agonized cries. The boy is sent sprawling forward, sometimes flat on
his face, but he struggles to get up each time, ready to receive the next
stroke, a course of action he carries out without being told.
—Look. Look at the blood. The woman’s voice again. There it is,
the red fluid trickling down over the child’s buttocks, over his thighs.
The blood is smeared over the surface of his flesh by yet more thrashes
of the cane. (60)
—You haven’t touched his stomach. The woman’s voice again,

insinuating. The child gets a few lashes on his belly, and suddenly,
his stomach splits open. Intestines, an exquisitely colored rope of vio-
let, slither out. (61; italics in translation)
As Gretchen Jones has noted in her insightful study of sadomasochis-

tic themes in Kōno’s work, the little boy is twice feminized in his encoun-
ter with the punitive father figure—first when the blood runs down his
buttocks and thighs, as if to evoke menstruation, and again when his
stomach bursts open, which is reminiscent of childbirth. Jones further
notes that “Akiko identifies with the little boy not only as a male, but, as
the menstrual and birth scene overlays suggest, the boy’s biology too is
also reversed at times, allowing Akiko to identify with the boy as female.
In a manner similar to the way in which a woman’s body boundaries are
frequently crossed or violated, in the fantasy, the boy’s body becomes a
site of transgression, of opening up—of blood, even of birth.”3 Thus,
feminine characteristics are in effect inscribed upon the body of the boy, in
a kind of hysterical parody of the gendering process to which young girls
are subjected.
As noted above with respect to the girl-pupa image, the transforma-
tion into womanhood is depicted in this text as a product of two mutually
imbricated processes—a combination of biological development and social
training that genders a young girl as feminine. The goal of this process
of socializing girls is to prepare them not just for the biological events of
104 Chapter 4
menstruation and (later) pregnancy, but also for the ways in which these
biological processes will be contained and structured by society in order
to craft them into future wives and mothers. Girls are therefore instilled
with behaviors that will facilitate this social use of their bodies—obedi-
ence, docility, dependence, self-ingratiation—and learn to replicate them
“voluntarily” through mechanisms of self-discipline. For Akiko, boys rep-
resent the absence of this exhortation to subsume oneself to the demands
of society. Throughout this story they are portrayed as vigorous, active,
expressive, petulant—and this behavior is accepted and considered nor-
mal.4 Yet the little boy in Akiko’s fantasy is not only corporeally but also
behaviorally inscribed with signifiers of femininity—he docilely accepts the
punishment meted out to him by his “father,” not once but repeatedly, as
he continues to rise after being knocked down to accept blow after blow.
As a result of this process of (self-)discipline, his body faithfully replicates
the physiological signifiers of femininity—menstruation and pregnancy—
that are expected of appropriately feminine subjects.
Thus, in “Toddler-Hunting” we are presented with a highly conflicted
narrative that upholds masculinity as a means of escape from restrictive
feminine models, even as it perversely reinscribes this body with the very
qualities it wishes to transcend. As noted above, though Kōno presents her
protagonist as ostensibly unaware of the contradiction inherent in accept-
ing maternal instincts as natural to women, the narrative clearly highlights
this disjunction for the benefit of the reader. Though Akiko may perceive
herself as abnormal for possessing desires that place her beyond the pale
of normative femininity, the reader, through her narrative alignment with
the protagonist, is encouraged to wonder about the naturalness of this
standard. Likewise, the author pointedly presents us with an irresolvable
contradiction in presenting masculinity, in the form of the little boy in
Akiko’s fantasy, as a transcendent state, on the one hand, while violently
re-engendering this same character as feminine—an obvious parody of the
process of gender production that highlights its artificiality.
Both Akiko and the boy in her fantasy, then, can be considered to be
“odd bodies” in the sense that they defy normative models of femininity
and masculinity respectively. That a woman can not only be diagnosed as
infertile but revel in this status, and furthermore harbor violent thoughts
against small children, is odd by the standards of normative femininity
that define women as naturally maternal. That a male can be made to
menstruate and give birth, through violent subjection to feminine disci-
plinary mechanisms that render him complicit in his own subordination is
likewise odd by the standards of normative masculinity that define males
O dd B odies 105
as aggressive, inviolate, and penetrative (rather than penetrated). Though

these narrative disjunctions go untheorized by the protagonist herself,
they force the reader to question the “naturalness” of the logic of “sexual
indifference” that underwrites such distinctions.
“Secret”
The protagonist of “Secret,” Asako, has a large birthmark that covers
the length of her back and upper arms, and she learns to hide it from
the censorious eyes of society. The reactions of other people to Asako’s
“deformity” profoundly shape her self-image in an emphatically negative
way; the boys across the street stare at her, a gang of boys at school bullies
her, and another neighborhood child quotes her mother as declaring that
Asako will never be able to marry because of it. She is very self-conscious
about this defect until she meets a much older man with a penchant for
oddities who helps her to see this abnormality as attractive rather than
hideous.
While on the one hand the man’s attraction to Asako helps to liber-
ate her from her self-described misanthropy—the result of years of being
made to feel ugly and deformed—her self-image becomes inordinately
dependent on his approval, and she is able to feel confident about herself
only to the extent that he validates this self-image. Excluded from the
category of “appropriate” femininity—defined as inhabitation of a body
that is conventionally desirable to members of the opposite sex and thus
marriageable—Asako is to some extent able to craft an alternative feminin-
ity for herself that is attractive within a certain limited sphere, that of men
with unconventional tastes in women. On the other hand, her dependence
on the man’s validation leads her to adopt a masochistic position that
allows him to use her in rather degrading ways—along with possibly a
large assortment of other “odd” women—and she learns to subordinate
her own pleasure to his.
This text obviously echoes some of the corporeal dynamics we have
seen in previous chapters. First of all, the role of the disciplinary gaze
in structuring feminine subjectivity, noted in chapter 2, is clear in the
way Asako is trained to see her body as freakish and shameful. She first
learns that there is something wrong with her physical form in sixth grade,
when the lady next door comes to inform Asako’s father that her sons
are inordinately interested in watching Asako from their upstairs window:
“[Until that time,] Asako had wandered about outside in a thin chemise,
frequently looking up with a puzzled feeling at the two junior high school
106 Chapter 4
boys staring down at her from the second-floor window.”5 It is interest-

ing that the boys’ desire to gaze at her body is apparently not questioned
or identified as a behavior that must be sanctioned. Rather, the offense
is Asako’s, and she is therefore the one singled out for discipline, both
because she is baring too much skin at an age when her body is beginning
to develop and because the body in question fails to conform to the type
that is most pleasing to the masculine gaze.
As a result of the negative reactions of those around her to her birth-
mark, Asako comes to disavow her own body (as discussed in chapter 3)
by developing patterns of behavior that conceal the offending deformity
from the disapproving gaze of others. It is therefore no coincidence that
as the story begins, we are introduced to Asako as she is shopping for a
blouse with sleeves long enough to hide her affliction. When accosted
by a saleslady who insists that sleeveless tops are “in” this year and that
a young lady should wear something more fashionable, she rebuffs the
woman with a firmness that conceals the sadness within (63). She then
catches sight of a mannequin wearing this summer’s approved costume,
and regarding the feminine perfection that this anything-but-natural
figure represents, she again experiences a sadness concealed within an
outward posture of strength (64). To add insult to injury, this icon of
femininity is rendered in Western form, further emphasizing that this
standard of beauty is thoroughly unattainable for her. At this point in the
text, Asako’s feeling of pathos is intimately linked with a sense of being
alone in her “abnormality”—that is, in spite of the unrealistic standards of
attractiveness to which women are trained to aspire, she believes that she
is alone in failing to achieve the anointed status of “beautiful” because of
her deformity. Asako therefore feels isolated not only because her body is
unlovable to men, but also because she is set apart from other women by
her difference—a feeling that is instilled by the reactions of those around
her and perpetuated by her own insecurities.
This feeling of isolation is immediately undercut by a narrative flash-
back to a high school field trip, when Asako first encountered another girl
who was likewise “deformed.” Reluctant to bathe with her schoolmates
for fear of their reaction to her birthmark, Asako sneaks into an empty
bathroom in another part of the inn where her class is staying. Just as she
settles herself into the tub and begins to relax, she hears the door to the
changing area open. She is horrified when the interloper reveals herself to
be another girl from her school, but then she is fascinated to notice that
one of the girl’s breasts is dramatically larger than the other. Their eyes
meet briefly, and the girl quickly moves to cover herself by entering the
O dd B odies 107
tub with her back to Asako: “The girl, showing her back to Asako, and
Asako, hiding her back from the girl, both sat in the tub facing the same
direction, each observing the movements of the other. When Asako real-
ized that she would definitely not turn around, she silently raised her body
from under cover of the water and escaped by backing out through the
door” (65). Asako is thus able to sneak away without having her birthmark
noticed by the girl.
As she slips into the changing room, Asako notices her reflection in
the full-length mirror and turns her back toward it in order to scrutinize
her “deformity.” She dresses and moves to leave, thinking about the girl
in the next room who suffers from the same sense of sadness as herself:
“In front of the mirror was a wet mark in the shape of Asako’s foot. She
had stood there with her back turned and her body twisted around, so the
footprint was at a diagonal. She imagined the girl getting out of the bath
and standing in the same place. She would probably face forward to gaze
at her chest, so that would result in her leaving a wet footprint that inter-
sected crosswise with Asako’s. Asako thought vaguely about the sadness
of those two footprints” (65). It is remarkable that although Asako clearly
senses a similarity between herself and the girl, this does not seem to yield
a sense of solidarity by virtue of their shared affliction. Rather, the crossed
footprints, one girl facing forward and the other facing the opposite direc-
tion, echo the scene in the bath when each girl is so concerned with hid-
ing her own abnormality that she avoids the gaze of the other. Neither
has the courage to reach out to the other and attempt a connection, in
spite of the fact that they share the same pain. Both girls have apparently
learned to privilege self-protection above all else as a means of coping with
the disciplinary gaze of society. Furthermore, the protagonist has clearly
internalized the gaze to the point that she uses it against other women
whose bodies are similarly non-normative; knowing that the girl will not
turn around as long as she fears Asako’s gaze, Asako uses this knowledge
as a means of protecting her own secret from discovery.
Asako consequently learns to disavow her own corporeality, at least
until she discovers, thanks to her older and rather unconventional lover,
that this “odd body” itself presents her with an alternative to normative
femininity. However, this alternative fails to offer Asako complete libera-
tion from convention; it is at best a variation on the same gendered binaries
that render women subordinate and passive objects of the masculine gaze.
This much is clear during the episode that ostensibly signifies Asako’s con-
quest over her self-consciousness about her birthmark.
In this scene, she visits her lover one day to find him conversing
108 Chapter 4
with a friend. This young man invites both Asako and her lover to attend
one of his upcoming performances—an interpretive dance entitled
“Androgyny”—where he will apparently perform in the nude. Asako’s
lover challenges her by asking if she would have the courage to reveal her
own body in such a public way, and both men encourage her to take off
her clothes. Asako speculates that her boyfriend might enjoy the “immo-
rality” of “exposing the naked body of his own woman to another man.”
The young man, noticing a bronze cross lying on the table, further sug-
gests that she arrange her body in that position.
The room was filled with silence. Asako could feel on her skin
that the man and the dancer were waiting. The mass of hesitation
inside her unfolded layer by layer as Asako, basking in the gaze of
the two men, removed layer after layer of her clothing.
“It’s not really a body worth showing to you. I have a really
large birthmark,” Asako said as she stood completely naked, held
out her arms, and turned around once. Strangely, there was no
trace of hesitation left. (74–75)
This scene could be read as a kind of liberation in the sense that Asako
seems no longer paralyzed by shame at her own body. However, there is
also a rather blatant undercurrent of masochism underlying Asako’s will-
ingness to expose herself as an object of visual gratification before the
men. Her subordinate status is underscored by the fact that as she stands
there, in the position of Christ on the cross, the men quickly lose interest
in her and become absorbed in a totally unrelated conversation. She waits
in that position, patiently, for them to take notice of her again, and they
do so only when the young man realizes that the holes drilled into either
end of the bronze cross are perfectly positioned at the same interval as her
breasts. He has her hold the cross in front of herself as he pulls her nipples
through the holes in the metal, which is sharp enough to cut her flesh,
and she begins to bleed: “At this unexpected result, the men looked at her
with a sublime glint in their eyes, but their expressions gradually returned
to normal.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Asako herself was moved by the phenomenon that her body
displayed. But she was silent because she felt that if she were to raise her
voice, it would destroy the pleasure of the men.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›She sensed that she was
being enjoyed [by the men] as an object. Objects must remain silent. Asako
rather enjoyed the fact that the men demanded this” (75–76). Asako has
clearly submitted herself entirely to the desires of her male audience—by
allowing them to manipulate her body as they please, by remaining passive
O dd B odies 109
and silent before their gaze, and by subordinating her own impulses and
desires to theirs.
In addition to yielding to her lover’s demands to subordinate herself
to his gaze, Asako also clearly internalizes this gaze to the point of wield-
ing it not only against herself, but against other women as well. Asako
has long suspected that the man is having relationships with other “odd”
women besides herself, yet rather than feeling jealous, she derives a kind of
pleasure in imagining these other women and the types of deformities they
have that might titillate him. She begins to scrutinize the crowds that cross
her path each day in search of women like herself whose bodies harbor
such secrets, and when she finds them, she subjects them to various fan-
tasies of the ways “a man” (such as her lover) might take pleasure in their
oddness. Adopting the point of view of her lover and identifying with his
pleasures and proclivities, she even imagines her own type of “deformity”
as projected upon these other women:
Asako realized suddenly that she was searching for women with
the eyes of a man. Looking at women with those special eyeglasses
that the man had loaned her, she was now aware of previously
unseen vistas. Walking alone through the streets where she passed
innumerable women, Asako little by little became enthralled by
visions of birthmarks. A birthmark in the shape of a butterfly in
the middle of a woman’s chest, its wings extending left and right
onto each breast, fluttering whenever those breasts jiggled. Or
if it’s in the shape of a butterfly, one that extends left and right
from the woman’s crotch, so that you couldn’t see it unless she
opened her legs—that would be good.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Asako walked along
enchanted by the dark visions produced by the birthmark fantasy.
She thought of such birthmarks underneath her own clothes and
underneath the clothes of the women she passed by, and enjoy-
ing herself in this way, she felt as if the spring heat of the streets
exuded the hidden pleasures of women. (72–73)
As with the crucifixion scene above, here the power dynamics gov-
erning the relationship between subject and object of the gaze are exceed-
ingly complex. On one level, Asako is clearly objectifying these women,
just as her lover and his friend have done to her, on the basis of the same
standard of value—the eroticism of “oddness”—that they employ to judge
her attractiveness. The passage even specifies “the man” as the authority
who determines such criteria of desirability, and therefore Asako is merely
110 Chapter 4
“borrowing” his way of looking at women to achieve the same purpose.

On the other hand, not only does Asako seem to take pleasure in this
form of erotic ventriloquism, but also the knowledge that other women
may harbor the same sort of “secret” as she does helps her to conquer her
feelings of isolation. In a sense it is liberating for her to know that there
may be many women like her who defy standards of normative femininity
and are loved for it.
One might even construe this knowledge as a nascent sense of con-
nection between Asako and these other women—except for the fact that
as in the bath scene, any similarity she observes between herself and these
other women remains tightly contained within her own mind. That is to
say, it does not translate into friendships or support structures based on
relationships among women who perceive themselves to have something
in common. This is underscored in a scene in which Asako pursues a fellow
“oddity” down the street, absorbed in fantasies about how a man might
find the difference in length and size of the woman’s legs to be erotically
stimulating. Though her mind is abuzz with titillating visions throughout
the “encounter,” she never actually makes contact with the woman. Con-
tent with a single glance at the anonymous woman’s face, Asako is satisfied
and moves on, as if the woman merely provided an expedient vehicle or
screen for the projection of her (lover’s) desires.
What these women represent for Asako, more than anything, is a
fantasized alternative to both the “properly” feminine physical form and
to the kinds of pleasures and desires that are sanctioned within the conven-
tional society that structures them. “Women with proper bodies probably
experience proper forms of pleasure. Though in the past Asako had envied
such pleasures, now she didn’t care for them. Rather, she walked about
searching for women with secrets hidden under their clothing” (72). While
this attitude poses an obvious challenge to the oppressiveness of feminine
training and gender role restrictions, it is important to remember that this
alternative expression of femininity is itself still subordinated to the desires
and pleasures of men and derives its legitimacy from the fact that (some
unusual) men find it attractive.
The variant construction of femininity embodied by Asako and
these other women is distinguished within the text itself from androgyny,
which is defined as a state of being “both man and woman, neither man
nor woman” and is clearly privileged as a superior form of transcendence
of gender norms (81). It is furthermore implied in the conclusion of the
story that only men, not women, are capable of attaining this privileged
state. Women, by implication, are thus irrevocably bound by the limita-
O dd B odies 111
tions of a feminine gender identity that is grounded in their physical

form, and even unorthodox versions of this feminine subjectivity are
presumed to be inferior to the type of gender bending of which men are
capable.
The androgynous ideal that is privileged by the text, and conveyed
through the authoritative judgment of Asako’s lover, is represented not
by Asako but by his friend, the young male dancer whose triumphant
transgression of gender brings the story to its climax and conclusion. As
the final scene begins, Asako is on her way to meet her lover at the theater
where the young man’s performance is to take place when she discovers
that she has started her period. She is supposed to spend that night at her
lover’s place, and remembering this, she sets off on a frustrating quest for
a piece of vinyl sheeting. It is implied that capitalizing on his pleasure in
the perverse, she intends to use this to display her menstrual blood for her
lover in much the same way as she was able to titillate him with the blood
from her nipples during the crucifixion incident. As in that previous scene,
it is clear here too that Asako derives pleasure from displaying her body for
her lover, reveling in his enjoyment of her as a perversely erotic “object.”
At several points during this final episode, Asako’s desire to objectify
herself through erotic performance for her lover is contrasted with the
onstage spectacle of the androgynous male dancer in ways that make the
superiority of the latter type of performance abundantly clear. This link-
age is first suggested when Asako notices the lurid color of the tickets for
the recital: “The tickets were printed with red lettering like the color of
fresh blood, against a gray background. There was also a photograph of
the dancer, but it too was the same color of red. That color made Asako
remember the blood that dripped from her nipples the other day, as well
as the blood of her menstrual cycle” (77). This is also the moment when
she remembers that she will stay the night with her lover and sets off on
the quest for the vinyl sheeting; the connection is further underscored by
the blood red costume worn by the dancer onstage. The young man has
painted his body white and draped himself in a loose and flowing red cloth
that does not conceal his nakedness underneath.
When Asako catches sight of the beautiful youth in full display, it
excites fantasies within her of the possible effects on the dancer if a simi-
larly scantily clad young woman should emerge as his partner. It is as if
she is rehearsing in her mind the entertainment that she and her lover
will enjoy that evening and anticipating the reaction that her performance
might have on him. This impression is further underscored when the man
seems to guess her intentions:
112 Chapter 4
Asako then felt shame echo noisily throughout her body. It was
because the man had articulated what she had only faintly sensed.
Losing her composure, she glanced at the stage, and the red cloth
that the dancer was waving about took on the color of blood and
covered Asako’s field of vision.
The red cloth danced above his head and seemed to separate
from his hands and float in the air. Looking up at it, he seemed
for a moment to thirst for blood and then in that moment melted
into a frenzied dance, the red of the cloth and the white of his
body delicately intertwined. Asako thought of a piece of vinyl
sheeting painted with blood and thought that it had been pre-
pared for her own pleasure tonight. She put her hand into her
raincoat pocket and made sure the small folded piece of vinyl was
still there. Then, as she stared at the dancer on the stage, who
had converted the thing she had sought so insistently into a red
cloth and was waving it about in a frenzy, she felt suffocated by
feelings of oppression.
“It’s all right.” Asako heard the man’s voice as if it emanated
from some place far away.
“What is?” she responded vaguely.
“He wouldn’t respond even if there were a woman there,”
the man said as if joking. Those words entered Asako’s body
like a foreign object. Stunned, she looked at the man and then
looked at the dancer on stage. (80–81)
Asako then experiences a vision of the dancer flying higher and higher
through the air, parting the layers of clouds stained red by the evening
sun, “as if his life were nothing but the beauty of flight” (81). This vision
of transcendence prompts her to remember her lover’s claim that the most
sensual type of beauty is “neither male nor female, both male and female”
and that only men can convincingly pull off this sort of “self-intoxicated”
performance (79). In the final lines of the story, as the dance comes to
an end, Asako experiences a sensation of sinking down into the depths of
herself, looking up at the heavens into which the dancer has ascended.
In the beginning of this final sequence, Asako at first seems embar-
rassed about having her secret fantasy discovered. But this embarrassment
quickly turns to dismay and even oppression as she realizes that the dancer
has not only stolen her idea—at this point she has to check and make sure
the vinyl sheeting is still there—but has managed to turn it into a form
of performance that is even more pleasing to her lover. While Asako had
O dd B odies 113
thought to excite her lover through the perverse display of her own men-
strual blood, the dancer has transformed this crude literal interpretation
of the man’s desires into a highly aestheticized and artistic representation.
Furthermore, he manages to achieve through this performance what Asako
cannot—a beautiful and harmonious blending of masculine and feminine,
symbolized by the white of his body as it mingles effortlessly with the red
of the costume.6
In fact, there is no place at all for Asako in her lover’s fantasy of
androgynous perfection, as she discovers to her horror when her lover
reveals the young dancer’s “secret.” Asako has fundamentally misunder-
stood the process by which this transcendence is achieved, according to
the man. While in the beginning of the sequence she envisions a man and
a woman in a dance that elevates both of them onto a plane of ecstasy, she
learns to her dismay that women are in fact irrelevant to this process. Tran-
scendence, as defined by the climax of this story, is embodied in a single
“male” character that beautifully fuses both masculine and feminine in a
purely self-contained performance of androgyny—what her lover refers to
as a state of “self-intoxication” that requires no outside assistance. Asako,
who has attempted to escape normative femininity by producing an alter-
native subjectivity that nevertheless depends on male validation, discovers
in the end that her new persona is insufficient to this task.
As in “Toddler-Hunting,” internal contradictions in Takahashi’s text
likewise create a space for criticism of the sexual politics espoused by its
characters. Though Asako is clearly willing to subordinate herself to her
lover’s somewhat sadistic desires in exchange for the validation that prom-
ises to “liberate” her from normative femininity, the narrative makes clear
that this strategy offers merely a false vision of transcendence. As in Kōno’s
story, much of the criticism of gender norms is inherent in the description
of the process of engendering as a form of “discipline” that limits and con-
stricts the protagonist. In Asako’s case, the negative reaction of members of
her community to her physical “deformity” is directly cited as the reason for
her low self-esteem and consequent willingness to so debase herself before
her boyfriend and other men. Takahashi’s story, like Kōno’s, therefore
underscores the mutual imbrication of corporeality and society in creating
and producing such restrictive models of gender—while the “oddness” of
Asako’s body is ostensibly the reason for such treatment, the birthmark itself
has no significance outside of the meanings ascribed to it (“unattractive”
equals unmarriageable), and these are determined by gendered norms.
In “Secret,” Takahashi has therefore crafted a protagonist whose “odd
body” renders her incapable of conforming to conventional standards of
114 Chapter 4
feminine beauty. Yet as Irigaray’s “law of the same” would suggest, she is
still held to this feminine standard since by virtue of being not-male she
must represent everything the not-male side of the gender binary repre-
sents. In the course of her narrative, Takahashi exposes the way normative
concepts of feminine beauty render women dependent on the approving
gaze of the Other, thereby constructing feminine subjectivity as opposite
and complementary to an autonomous masculine subjectivity that is indif-
ferent to the responses of others. This is represented within the story by
a second “odd body,” that of the young male dancer whose triumphant
performance brings the story to its conclusion. Disciplinary regimes of
beauty therefore conflate the terms “female” and “feminine,” “body” and
“gender,” defining both as not-male according to a logic of sexual indif-
ference that allows men to rhetorically transcend all of the above in favor
of an autonomous existence.
But even as she highlights the oppressiveness of this logic of sex-
ual indifference, Takahashi narratively undermines it by presenting the
“transcendent” vessel of masculine superiority as corporeally and sexually
ambiguous. As in Kōno’s story, we are met with two “odd bodies,” one
male and one female, and in this case too the male body is privileged as
the site of transcendence of gender norms, even as it is inscribed with
signifiers of femininity that yield an eerily androgynous form. If the goal of
androgyny is the harmonious combination of both masculine and feminine
qualities, then why should male bodies alone be characterized as privileged
sites of transcendence? By underscoring the hypocrisy of this illogical set
of standards, Takahashi’s narrative performs a powerful critique of the
gendered discourses that render women inferior.
It is also striking that in both stories, menstrual blood serves as a
prime signifier of femininity, even as it is ironically attributed to male bod-
ies. In Kōno’s story it is produced through physical violence, albeit only
in the fantasies of the protagonist. In Takahashi’s story it is transformed
from (fantasized) literal display to aestheticized performance in the form
of the red gown worn by the dancer. But in each case, the ascription of
such a quintessentially “feminine” physiological phenomenon to a male
body radically destabilizes conventional distinctions not only between
“masculine” and “feminine” (that is, binary gender), but also between the
sexed bodies that are said to ground such distinctions. We will see much
the same process at work in the next story, wherein not only menstruation
but also pregnancy is parodically attributed to male bodies in ways that
thoroughly subvert gendered binaries on multiple levels at once.
O dd B odies 115
“Snake”
Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Snake” is an absurdist farce that begins with a male
university student, K, waking from a nap to find a giant pink snake attempt-
ing to enter his body through his open mouth. The snake takes up residence
inside K’s belly, and the story centers on the reactions of various sectors
of society as they try to find some way to account for this bizarre incident
according to their own prejudices and presumptions of “normalcy.” While
on one level this story can be read as a thoroughly irreverent portrayal
of the ANPO-era political landscape7—Diet politicians, student activists,
university administrators, academics, members of the medical establish-
ment, and business moguls are only some of the authorities that come
under fire in this text—there is also a distinctively gender-bending subtext.
This particular narrative produces an “anti-world” that consistently blurs
the boundary between sex and gender by reassigning or subverting many
of the “commonsense” distinctions between male/masculine and female/
feminine subject positions.8
The protagonist, K, is napping in his dorm room when he awakes
to an uncomfortable sensation and discovers the snake in the process of
inching its way down his throat. By the time his friends notice the prob-
lem, it is too late and they are unable to remove the snake, which lodges
itself inside his digestive tract. Fellow dormitory residents, led by a student
activist, S, who has recently been released from police custody, insist on
viewing the invasion by snake as part of an evil plot by the “powers that
be.” Though S and other dormitory residents clearly witness K in the pro-
cess of “swallowing” the snake, they need to find some way of presenting
K as the victim of government oppression in order to be able to use this
episode to “mobilize the masses.” They spread the word that K has in fact
been swallowed by the snake because the alternative cannot be theorized
and fails to yield a viable strategy for revolution. When K attempts to argue
the facts of the incident with S, he is accused of “false consciousness” for
failing to see society as the agent of his victimization and for neglecting to
recognize the revolutionary potential of his situation.9
Subsequently, Okusan, the housewife who employs K to tutor her
children, notices his distended belly and worries that he might be preg-
nant. While at first K reasons that there should be no “scientific basis” for
this theory about his condition, his certainty soon wavers and he begins
to worry about the question of “legal responsibility” and whether or not
he would be able to afford an abortion (88). He even refers to himself
116 Chapter 4
as pregnant later in this scene (90), and when it becomes clear that his
“condition” has begun to interfere with his job, he is informed that his
services are no longer needed. Apparently he has proved himself thus far
to be more useful to the housewife as an unwitting sex toy than as a music
teacher for the children. She has evidently been drugging him and taking
advantage of him after each lesson, but this time the usual plan goes awry
as the snake, whose head has lodged itself in his throat, consumes the
“hormone” cocktail meant for K, and he is unable to perform because of
the heavy weight in his stomach.
A visit to the hospital to determine the exact nature of K’s condition
results in further confusion, as none of the medical authorities seem able
to determine how best to deal with the “foreign body,” much less the
question of whether or not K might be pregnant and what if anything
can be done about that. The first doctor K sees is determined to gut him
like a fish in order to remove the snake, until the nurse reminds him that
there would be legal implications attendant upon performing surgery on a
pregnant patient, should that turn out to be the case. The second doctor
uses an X-ray-like machine to produce an image of the patient’s condition,
only to blur the boundary further between “foreign body” and host:
“Don’t move. I see. It’s definitely a snake. However it seems

there’s still quite a bit of human remaining.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›That means that
the snake hasn’t completely digested the human yet. Hm, it looks
as though humans are difficult to digest.”
“What’s happening? Certainly it seems that the snake hasn’t
dissolved completely. Sometimes it moves, so it’s probably still
alive,” K started to say.
“Of course,” the doctor said in an irritated tone of voice.
“The snake is still alive. What’s strange is that there is any human
left.” (100)
In spite of the fact that K seems to all observers to be intact and function-
ing and by all scientific logic should be in the process of digesting the
snake, the doctor’s diagnosis “demonstrates” that it is in fact the other
way around—K has been “assimilated” by the snake, which has irrevocably
fused itself to his skeletal structure and is in the process of “digesting” him
from within.
K’s unfortunate condition further complicates his engagement to his
fiancée, L, as she refuses to take “responsibility” for the fact that he might
be pregnant, and both are concerned about the impact the snake incident
O dd B odies 117
may have on the process of negotiating the marriage contract. K is taken

to the headquarters of a large corporation to talk to someone whom he
assumes to be L’s father, although L refuses to acknowledge a blood rela-
tionship and persists in calling him her employer. K’s largest faux pas in
the course of the discussion, however, turns out to have nothing to do
with the snake—he insists on discussing his feelings for L, which both she
and her “employer” consider irrelevant, and they cannot seem to make K
understand that L is nothing but a “proxy” in the negotiations that should
properly be conducted between K and the “boss” himself (102).
The snake in fact turns out to be useful to the discussion, serving
as K’s only collateral—though not a very stable form of capital, as the
“employer” sympathetically explains (103). While K manages to conclude
this stage of the negotiations successfully—with the snake in fact accord-
ing him a kind of celebrity status due to the fact that it has attracted the
attention of the authorities and earned K an invitation to testify before the
Diet—it ultimately puts an end to his relationship with L when it eats her
during the course of their lovemaking.
The story climaxes with K’s visit to the Diet to testify, accompanied
by his academic adviser, a very large, hairy, and pregnant man known as
Professor Q. They travel to the legislative assembly via a long, snake-like
pneumatic tube that drops them into the mail room, whereby they are
whisked into the main hall and K is immediately taken into custody. Vari-
ous “experts” are called to give their opinions on K’s condition and what,
if anything, should be done about it. However, as each “expert” tends
to approach the problem from a radically different set of presumptions
and concerns, their testimonies diverge into an incoherent cacophony that
produces no real conclusion. The legal scholars question the legitimacy of
the proceedings themselves, the biologists stress the need to study K as an
example of the future of human evolution, the sociologists are concerned
about how they might craft a new set of policies to account for such an
eventuality, and so on.
The proceedings are interrupted twice—once when the snake, which
has not been fed since digesting L, swallows the microphone, forcing them
to wait until the laxative K is given has produced the object (along with a
shiny black piece of excrement). The second time, student activists storm
the building, and the scene descends into a free-for-all. This seems to
antagonize the hungry snake, which emerges from K’s throat once again
and frightens the assembly before consuming the protagonist and ending
the narrative, a neat resolution to a messy problem that seems to satisfy
everyone concerned.
118 Chapter 4
It is tempting to read the invasion by snake as a metaphor for preg-

nancy; such a reading would imply that the male protagonist is subjected
to a straightforward experience of gender role reversal. In some ways Kura-
hashi encourages this interpretation, portraying K as increasingly identify-
ing with the “invader” to the extent that by the end of the story, he appears
to be a nurturing and loving parent who is so concerned with the welfare
of his “child” that he willingly allows the snake to feed on him. However, a
clear distinction is drawn in the story between “male pregnancy”—which
is taken for granted to be “normal” (that is, within the realm of possibility
according to the laws of Kurahashi’s alternate universe)—and the unusual
experience of K as he is “penetrated” by the snake. Other male characters,
such as Professor Q, are said to be pregnant or potentially pregnant, and
this is not treated as aberrant in any way. Only K’s body is invaded by a
snake, and this invasion is depicted as so extraordinary that a special Diet
session must be called to investigate it.
In fact, the snake image itself seems to signify different things at
different points in the story and is portrayed alternately as embodying
consumptive, excretory, sexual, and reproductive functions. The snake
rises from K’s throat whenever he becomes excited, as if to signify erec-
tion, and the description of it within the text as long, pink, and penetra-
tive gives it a distinctly phallic character. On the other hand, several
characters in the story make a point of noting that K is “penetrated” not
genitally but orally, and the snake attaches itself primarily to K’s digestive
tract while consuming people and things in place of K. Toward the end of
the story, though, when the snake swallows the microphone during the
Diet session and is forced to expel it with the aid of laxatives, its function
is clearly excretory, as its tail end protrudes from K’s anus. And yet K’s
fascination with the shiny black ball of excrement it deposits alongside
the microphone—he is so absorbed with it that he polishes it lovingly
and to distraction, completely oblivious to the proceedings that will sup-
posedly decide his fate—once again evokes an impression of a doting
parent.
Obviously, then, the implications of K’s relationship to the snake
are more complex than a simple gender role reversal that “feminizes” a
male protagonist by rendering him pregnant. In fact, “Snake” features
a subversion of gender roles that does far more than merely reverse the
masculine and feminine sides of a simple binary opposition; rather, it
destabilizes the very foundation upon which such distinctions of gender
or sex are predicated. Through the creation of a bizarre “anti-world” that
nevertheless operates according to surprisingly familiar human dynamics,
O dd B odies 119
Kurahashi deliberately subverts an array of gendered binaries—subject/

object, active/passive, masculine/feminine, and even male/female—in
ways that call into question the “logic” according to which women and
men are seen as differentiated into opposite and complementary roles in
contemporary Japanese society.
From the beginning of the story, the boundary between subject and
object is rendered indeterminate by the question of K’s relationship to
the snake. In the opening pages of the story K clearly resists the snake’s
attempt to forcibly enter his body; however, the incident is so absurd and
unexpected that those around him—even the roommates who witnessed
the event—have trouble describing what actually occurred. The problem
of whether K should be understood as an active agent or passive victim
of this incident is openly discussed among the dormitory residents. While
K consistently uses the active voice “I swallowed” to describe his role in
ingesting the snake, his friends seem unable to accept this explanation and
at first refer to him in the passive voice as having “been swallowed” by the
snake. However politically expedient the friends’ viewpoint might be as
an explanation, it unfortunately fails to correspond to observed reality,
so they eventually arrive at the conclusion that K has instead become a
snake:
“Oh, that was you, the one who became a snake yesterday?”
“No, he’s the one who was swallowed by the snake.”
“Same difference. Essentially, he is a snake.” (94)
By positing the ontological unity of K and the snake, they are able to
avoid the thorny problem of who swallowed whom and furthermore are
able to characterize both K and the snake as being “sacrificed” to estab-
lished authority structures. However, K objects to the use of this term to
describe his situation:
“Actually, I don’t think of myself as a sacrifice. Since, after all, I

swallowed the snake.” However, his explanation was drowned
out by the overwhelming power of S’s voice.
“No, he’s not a sacrifice; he’s a victim—the snake, I mean.”
“The snake?” K cried, confounded.
“Right, the snake. K is a victim who was swallowed by the
snake, and that makes it clear that he is essentially a snake. He is
a snake, and therefore that means that we have to call the snake a
victim.” (106)
120 Chapter 4
Through this simple mathematical substitution, S has apparently “logi-

cally” concluded that if K = victim and K = snake, then it must also be true
that snake = victim. This not only rationalizes K’s usefulness to the stu-
dent movement, but also reduces what might pose a difficult philosophical
problem of agency and heterogeneity to a matter of simple equivalency.
If K and the snake can be considered to be one and the same, then both
can be construed as “victims” of a near metaphysical system of authority
without a need to grapple with the politically uncomfortable possibility
that one might be seen as “victimized” by the other. Not surprisingly,
the elegant simplicity of this explanation catches on, and other charac-
ters come to the same conclusion that K’s uneasy coexistence with the
snake within can be most expediently dealt with by assuming that he must
“essentially” be a snake.
The tendency of the characters to paper over questions of agency
is underscored by the fact that the invasion by snake can be envisioned
only according to a binary choice between “swallowing” or “being swal-
lowed.” Either K has swallowed the snake or the snake has swallowed K;
there apparently is no other logical alternative that can be understood by
these characters. But since both terms prove inadequate to describe the
complexity of the phenomenon in question, the subject/object dilemma
is ultimately reduced to a metaphysically vague notion of “becoming.”
It is interesting that the causative-passive form, “was made to swallow,”
is never once used in this text to describe K’s condition. By withhold-
ing this option, which would seem to blur the line between victim and
oppressor relative to the neat passive/active binary of “swallow/be swal-
lowed,” Kurahashi highlights the tendency of her characters to subordi-
nate the delicate indeterminacy of power dynamics in this “anti-world” to
a false dichotomy-cum-unity. On an extradiegetic level, then, the narrative
makes it clear to the reader that these binary simplicities are inadequate
to describe K’s condition, creating an implicit tension between narrative
inside and outside that opens a space for critique of the characters’ reduc-
tive logic.
In other words, the language employed by the characters through-
out creates a set of binary options that oversimplify the “reality” of K’s
dilemma. The two possibilities offered by the text effectively mirror each
other, such that one may be seen as the precise opposite of the other—K
either “swallows” or “is swallowed” by the snake. Given that one alterna-
tive essentially defines the other through a relationship of pure opposition,
one might say that “swallowing” and “being swallowed” are therefore two
sides of the same coin—one cannot exist without the other and derives its
O dd B odies 121
identity from the necessary presence of the other, to the extent that they
might even be reduced to the same basic process known as “swallow,”
which encompasses both subject and object. It is no wonder, then, that in
Kurahashi’s text the two entirely different entities of K and the snake are
ultimately reduced to a simple mathematical unity (K = snake).
Luce Irigaray has traced the same process at work in Western philoso-
phy with respect to our conceptualization of gender, and she attacks it as
implying a “logic of the same” that reduces gender difference to a single
model that cannot understand femininity without reference to masculinity.
In other words, masculine subjectivity is taken as the norm against which
femininity is defined and understood to represent all that masculinity is
not. In her critique of Freud, and by extension the Western philosophy
upon which his theories of sexuality rest, Irigaray writes as follows:
Himself a prisoner of a certain economy of the logos, [Freud]

defines sexual difference by giving a priori value to Sameness,
shoring up his demonstration by falling back upon time-honored
devices such as analogy, comparison, symmetry, dichotomous
oppositions, and so on. Heir to an “ideology” that he does
not call into question, Freud asserts that the “masculine” is the
sexual model, that no representation of desire can fail to take it
as the standard, can fail to submit to it. In so doing, Freud makes
manifest the presuppositions of the scene of representation: the
sexual indifference that subtends it ensures its coherence and its
closure.10
By “sexual indifference,” Irigaray implies that to the extent that we are

dealing with a model of gender that envisions femininity merely as the
antithesis of masculinity, we are able to envision only one gender rather
than two: masculinity and non-masculinity, both of which take the male
subject as their model and point of reference. Feminine difference is there-
fore subsumed beneath an “indifference” to femininity as a separate and
distinct category.
Irigaray is frequently attacked by critics for forwarding an “essential-
ist” model of femininity that places unwarranted emphasis on women’s
“difference” from men. It is important to stress here, though, that pos-
iting women as “different” from men (in the sense meant by Irigaray)
is not the same thing as characterizing women as opposite to men in
every way. In fact, this misunderstanding of woman as man’s opposite is
clearly something that Irigaray wishes to correct. Rather than understand
122 Chapter 4
femininity through contrast with masculinity, she is effectively arguing

that women should be understood on their own terms without reference
to some sort of spurious conceptual opposite. In the sense that Irigaray
wishes to discredit the binary model of masculine/feminine as opposing
and mutually exclusive terms, her theory has much in common with Kura-
hashi’s attempts to subvert any conception of gender as a stable and neatly
bifurcated category.
In her pathbreaking dissertation on Kurahashi’s narrative style, Atsuko
Sakaki demonstrates that a subversion of binary models of gender was a
conscious and deliberate part of the author’s literary agenda. Sakaki sees
the relationship between the “anti-world” of Kurahashi’s literature and
that of the “real” world as analogous to that between women and men in
society in that while the former is subordinated to the latter, it also serves
as a potent site of critique. She further quotes Kurahashi as follows:
This world has the sign of sex. Just as we forget that the numbers
we deal with in our daily life have a positive [plus] sign, so we
forget the sexual sign, the male sign, which exists in this world.
Women are shut in the world of the negative [minus] sign, or
the Anti-world in the [actual] world, so to speak. In short, this
[actual] world belongs to men. In it, women are regarded as
nothing but those who have the other sex of female, as opposed
to male. As Beauvoir points out, women belong to the category
of “the Other.”11
Thus by narrating the “anti-world,” Kurahashi in effect envisions herself as

giving voice to an alternate (feminine) logic that questions the legitimacy
of subordinating women as man’s “Other.”
Kurahashi’s project in “Snake” thus seems to be to force her audience
to question binary models of gender by presenting the reader with an
“anti-world” that subverts the reader’s desire to make sense of the distinc-
tions between male and female, masculine and feminine, as portrayed in
the text—either through direct analogy with the “real” world or through
relationships of clear contrast with what is familiar. In spite of the term
that the author herself uses to describe her narrative universe, Kurahashi’s
“anti-world” does not seem to operate according to a logic that func-
tions in direct opposition to that of mundane reality. In fact, it is strik-
ing how much her “anti-world” resembles what we know as “reality” in
terms of the sociodynamics of the relationships among characters and the
organizations that structure their lives. In fact, the dynamics of her “anti-
O dd B odies 123
world” seem less a contradiction of everything we know to be “true” than

a hysterical mimicry of the “real world” that highlights its hypocrisies and
logical fallacies.
Thus, the gender roles in Kurahashi’s narrative universe are inflected
by power dynamics that seem remarkably consistent across the “anti-
world”/“reality” divide, even as the author deliberately frustrates our
desire to understand the gender difference between her characters accord-
ing to a coherent set of rules that either replicate or contradict conven-
tional models of gender difference. She does so primarily by reinscribing
traits characteristic of one sex or gender upon the other yet refusing to
do so in a consistent or fully reciprocal fashion. In other words, men are
“feminized” but not entirely so, while women embody some masculine
traits yet preserve something of conventional femininity, yielding a dizzy-
ing array of possible gendered and sexed subject positions that refuse to
conform to any predictable pattern.
Bodies are rendered sexually indeterminate particularly by ascribing
ostensibly “feminine” bodily functions to men. For example, the young
male pupil that K tutors is described as feeling listless because it is “that
time of the month” for him (89). K routinely worries that he might become
pregnant in scenes where he is sexually involved with a woman, and this
concern is taken seriously by both the medical establishment and other
characters within the text (91, 96). I use the expression “feminine bodily
functions” advisedly because although the term “feminine” is convention-
ally used to refer to behavior rather than physical sexual differences, facile
distinctions between gender and sex are refuted by Kurahashi’s subver-
sive narrative tactics. Although the bodies in Kurahashi’s “anti-world”
can apparently perform some functions conventionally attributed to the
opposite sex, men are not exclusively “feminized” or women exclusively
“masculinized” on the plane of either sex or gender. Men may become
pregnant, but they still exhibit some physical and behavioral characteristics
associated with “masculinity.” Professor Q, for example, is pregnant yet
described as a large man with a hairy chest who physically overpowers K
during their first meeting (113) and conducts himself authoritatively in
official situations, such as the Diet testimony scene.
Likewise, both women in the text, L and Okusan, are described as
conventionally feminine in some ways, yet both serve as active agents in
their sexual involvement with K, in contradiction to the “feminine” passiv-
ity expected of women in contemporary 1960s Japan. The housewife who
employs K to tutor her menstruating son is sexually aggressive toward K
and physically subdues him (with the help of a spiked cocktail) in order to
124 Chapter 4
take advantage of him, yet she is described as otherwise conducting herself

in a deferential manner by serving him at dinner and adorning herself in
a very feminine dress made of exquisitely thin material (89). L also treats
K primarily as a sexual object; when they meet, she is so eager and force-
ful in her desire for sexual relations with him that she mostly ignores his
attempts to make conversation. However, K is expected to take the lead in
negotiating with her “boss” for her hand in marriage, and the fact that K
is expected to produce evidence of financial solvency as the primary basis
for legitimating the contract sounds very similar to what is conventionally
expected of a young man attempting to establish his readiness for marriage
to his fiancée’s family.
In other words, “traditional” signifiers of masculinity and femininity
are combined and subverted with wild abandon in this text to produce a
narrative that not only troubles the distinctions between these gendered
ideals, but furthermore radically destabilizes any attempt to link gendered
behaviors with the sexed bodies to which they purportedly correspond.
Male bodies are alternately feminized and re-masculinized, both through
atypical sexual characteristics and behaviors, whereas female characters are
likewise presented as both “feminine” and “masculine” at the same time. It
is interesting that the author of “Snake” seems more intent upon disturb-
ing commonsense notions of masculinity than femininity, if the amount
of attention devoted within the text to male bodies and genders is any
indication. Only two female characters receive any significant attention in
this story, and L and Okusan are marginal entities in comparison with K
and his comrades.
In fact, as noted in the discussion of the previous two stories, all
of these authors seem particularly interested in depicting the male body
as a site for troubling gender norms. This fascination with “queering”
male bodies is intimately related to the ideological struggle that was taking
place in Japanese society during the 1960s, when conventional models of
femininity came increasingly into conflict not only with the forces of social
and historical change, but also with an emerging second-wave feminist
discourse that sought to destabilize the logic of sexual indifference that
underwrote such binary models of gender.
While we have seen a variety of “odd bodies” in this chapter, it is strik-

ing to note the frequency with which male bodies are chosen to signify
transgression of gender norms. The hyperbolic and violent feminization
of the male child in Kōno’s text dramatically underscores the artificiality
of the process of engendering female bodies and problematizes “natural”
O dd B odies 125
linkages between sex and gender. Takahashi’s text also troubles the sex/
gender divide by presenting the reader with a male body that supposedly
transcends gender entirely, even as his “male” body is inscribed with mark-
ers of feminine corporeality. In the process, Takahashi further critiques
the hypocrisy of standards of beauty that render women dependent on
male validation so that men may view themselves as having transcended
gender altogether in favor of an autonomous subjectivity. Kurahashi goes
even farther, frustrating any attempt to impose a logic of sexual indiffer-
ence upon the constellation of bodies, genders, and sexualities that coexist
within her literary “anti-world.” But why this obsessive focus on male
bodies?
The remarkable prevalence of this literary trope had much to do with
the tension between conservative pressures on women to conform to a
strictly gendered division of labor and legal and societal transformations
that opened a space for transgression of conventional gender roles. The
process of renegotiating feminine identity was already well under way in
Japan during the 1960s, with women increasingly venturing into the pub-
lic sphere in various capacities as students, workers, and political agents
even as they continued to perform the “traditional” roles of wife and
mother. On the other hand, masculine gender ideals remained stubbornly
fixed around the model of salaried work, which contributed to the process
of national rebuilding and reinvention of the corporate society known as
“Japan, Inc.”
While women’s roles and identities were undergoing a rapid process
of change as the result of the new opportunities that were just beginning
to open to them, men were resistant to such changes not only because
change would require them to accept new roles for women, but also
because it would require corresponding alterations to male gender iden-
tity. The authors represented in this study seem to have sensed that rede-
fining femininity would require a reinvention of masculine gender roles as
well. If male subjectivity is the ground upon which conventional gender
norms are based, as Irigaray and others have argued, then destabilizing the
conceptual foundation of masculinity would offer the most effective chal-
lenge to the existing structure of gender roles. This seems to be precisely
what these authors had in mind.
In this chapter, we have seen how these authors have attempted to
problematize the binary logic that underlies the strict policing of gen-
der norms. Having attacked the disciplinary mechanisms and the logic of
normative gender that undergird relationships between women and men,
these authors further turn their attention to relationships among women.
126 Chapter 4
One common thread in the literature of these writers is a profound pes-

simism about the possibility of solidarity among women, and women in
these texts tend to serve variously as figures of longing as well as fear or
resentment. In the next chapter, we will explore the function of the body
of the Other Woman as a trope for expressing this highly ambivalent atti-
tude toward intimacy among women.
Chapter 5
The Body of the Other Woman
“When I first saw you on the street, I had this nos-

talgic feeling like I’d seen you somewhere before, or
rather I had the impression that there was no one in
my life more familiar than you. The person I feel clos-
est to, the person I know better than anyone, for some
reason that was how I felt about you. Who are you?”
â•…â•… —Takahashi Takako, “Majiwari”
In previous chapters, we have explored the ways Kōno, Takahashi, and

Kurahashi used literature as a means of exposing, critiquing, and then
subverting binary models of gender that sought to confine women within
restrictive stereotypes of femininity. In chapter 4, we saw that this binary
structure is problematic in part because it is predicated on a logic of
“sexual indifference.” In other words, this model of gender difference is
able to conceptualize femininity only as masculinity’s logical opposite so
that women are assumed to embody only those qualities that men lack (or
disavow as “unmasculine”). Aside from the psychological violence such
a model inflicts on women, who must strive to excise those proclivities
deemed unnatural for their sex, it also presumes a consistent and uni-
form set of characteristics that “naturally” define “woman.” That is, it is
predicated on the assumption that women everywhere are similar to one
another while being radically different from men.
As we will see in this chapter, the authors addressed in this study
took issue with this presumption, and many of their narratives work to
highlight the differences among women as a counterweight to hegemonic
discourses of gender that emphasized the differences between women and
men. In light of their personal histories, this should not be surprising. We
saw in chapter 1 that each of these authors’ educational experiences and
life trajectories set them well apart from the mainstream model of postwar
127
128 Chapter 5
wife and mother and that these experiences may be seen as motivating
not only their attacks on normative discourses of femininity, but also their
refusal to adopt an appropriately “feminine” style of writing. In short, they
were exceptional women for their time who found it difficult to identify
with women who complied with gender norms, yet they also found them-
selves to be outsiders vis-à-vis the male homosocial networks to which
they sought entry.
In this chapter, we will discuss three works of fiction that explore
the loneliness of such a position through narratives of female homoerotic
desire that is fraught with conflict due to incommensurable differences
among women. These authors seem highly ambivalent about the potential
for true intimacy between women, even as their narratives express a clear
desire for such closeness. The stories discussed in this chapter all employ
the trope of the body of the Other Woman as a means of working through
the problems and possibilities of relationships between women, embedded
as they are in networks of power and disciplinary regimes that operate
according to a patriarchal logic that divides women against one another
and against themselves. The notion of a member of one’s own sex as a
kind of constitutive Other that is radically different from oneself serves as
a direct challenge to discourses of gender that treat Woman as a singular
and coherent ontological category.1 These stories highlight the fact that
the differences among women may be just as insurmountable as the dif-
ferences between women and men, and in doing so, they fundamentally
question the integrity of the category of “woman” itself as a coherent and
unitary signifier.
It is important to keep in mind that due to the specific sociohistori-
cal context for expressions of homoerotic desire in modern Japan, these
narratives would not necessarily have been understood as “lesbian” in the
sense of implying the expression of a specific type of sexual identity. In
fact, these authors are commonly understood to have been “heterosex-
ual,” meaning that they are known only to have been erotically interested
in men in their personal lives, and indeed the vast majority of their literary
works are concerned primarily with heterosexual relationships.
In fact, in Japan during the time these women were growing up,
passionate friendships between young girls were tolerated as more or less
normal and did not indicate the expression of any sort of identity (sexual
or otherwise) that would preclude future heterosexual attachments.2 Both
fictional and autobiographical writings by these women indicate that such
homoerotic friendships were a familiar part of the landscape of their per-
sonal experience. Subsequently, the first decade following World War II
T he B ody of the O ther W oman 129
witnessed an explosion of narratives that explored various sexual desires

and activities, including female homoeroticism. As documented by Mark
McLelland in his study of the “perverse press” at this time, readers were
able to enjoy a wide variety of erotic pleasures in fictional form without
identifying themselves as possessors of a specific “type” of sexuality.3 It
seems that it was not until the “women’s lib” movement of the 1970s
that awareness of “lesbianism” as a politicized sexual identity permeated
mainstream Japanese consciousness.4 The 1960s may therefore be seen
as a time of flux, when in spite of increasingly conservative social mores,
a variety of possible sexual behaviors and desires might still be imagined
without necessarily identifying the subject of those fantasies as possessing
a specific “type” of sexual identity.
In each of these texts, the protagonist and the Other Woman are
bound together by a complex of emotions that blurs the distinction
between desire and identification. Whether this is expressed through the
protagonist’s envisioning of the Other Woman as a surrogate or replace-
ment, as a complement to oneself, or as a more perfect vision of the self
that one might have been, the protagonist simultaneously sees herself in
the Other Woman even as she desires her as an Other that is external to
the self, and in no case is she successful in either possessing or internal-
izing her. The Other Woman therefore serves as a figure of desire that can
never be fully satisfied, a fantasy of wholeness and fusion that is perpetually
frustrated, highlighting the boundaries that separate women even as they
struggle to bridge the gaps between them.
In the literature of Kōno Taeko, homoerotic desire frequently takes
the form of erotic substitution of one woman for another through part-
ner-swapping arrangements that allow for women to experience physical
intimacy indirectly by sharing the same man. We will see this dynamic
operative in the short story “On the Road” (Rojō, 1964), where the pro-
tagonist’s fantasy that her sister might take her place as her husband’s
sexual partner is just one example of the kind of substitutional logic that
governs relationships among women. Kurahashi and Takahashi also have
produced texts that employ themes of erotic substitution of one woman
for another in relationships with men in ways that involve an identification
of one woman with another through a merging of their sexual subjec-
tivities.5 However, in other texts they take the homoerotic trope one step
further by portraying the sexual desire of one woman for another more
explicitly through scenes of erotic gratification between women that do
not involve the mediation of a man. In these texts, too, the Other Woman
frequently appears in the guise of a doppelganger or alternate self for the
130 Chapter 5
protagonist, once again highlighting the mutual imbrication of identifica-

tion and desire in these narratives. The two examples we will see of this
type of story are “Intercourse” (Majiwari, 1966), by Takahashi, and “Bad
Summer” (Warui natsu, 1966), by Kurahashi.
“On the Road”

This story begins on an ostensibly auspicious note with the marriage of
protagonist Tatsuko’s younger sister Kimiko, yet fissures soon develop in
this picture of perfect happiness as we learn that the bride would have
preferred another groom. Kimiko’s confession, just before her wedding,
that she wanted to marry “a man like [Tatsuko’s husband] Kanō” sets
the tone for the rest of the story, told mostly in flashback; it chronicles
the complex web of relationships between the protagonist and various
other women who present themselves as potential replacements. From
her mother to her sister to a stranger on the train, these other women
serve variously as figures of desire, fear, and identification, threatening
to destabilize Tatsuko’s existential integrity in ways that are alternately
pleasurable and frightening.
This principle of substitution seems to operate with alarming regularity
in Tatsuko’s family, beginning with her mother’s early death and replace-
ment by the stepmother who raised her. Tatsuko was six when her birth
mother died and has few clear memories of her. Although she claims to have
grown up in this household without feeling overly sentimental about the
early loss of this parent, she clearly felt a bit of an outsider in her new family,
in spite of the efforts of her parents and half-sisters to include her.
She only vaguely remembered her [mother’s] face. When she

looked at a photograph, all she felt was a sense of “Right, that’s
what she looked like.” She never felt like going out of her way to
look at such pictures either. As a girl, when she would finish her
homework and go downstairs, upon hearing the loud laughter
of her parents and sisters coming from the living room, she did
feel a stepchild’s hesitation to open the door, but it wasn’t so bad
that she wanted to cry before her mother’s photograph.6
While Tatsuko claims not to have suffered much from her family situ-
ation, it is obvious that she has never felt herself to be an equal member of
the household and that this feeling of alienation from her family has stayed
with her until the present. Early in the story, when her husband encour-
ages her to stay overnight with her parents the night of Kimiko’s wedding,
thinking that they might want one child nearby to console them in light
of this new empty-nest situation, Tatsuko at first demurs because she does
not think her presence would be as welcome as that of her other half-sister
(8). From the beginning of the story, then, it is clear that Tatsuko views
herself to be easily replaceable, just as her own mother was replaced by the
stepmother who raised her.
Tatsuko’s sense of being superfluous to her family only increases as
she grows up and at last begins to feel an increasing sense of connection
to her own mother. She recalls that a year after her marriage, on a visit
home to see her stepmother, she had been given a photograph of her birth
mother in her early twenties, before she fell ill. Seeing the photo, Tatsuko
is shocked not only to recognize herself in her mother’s image, but also
to realize that she would soon be the age her mother was when she died.
Examining the woman in the picture carefully, Tatsuko reflects:
She must have been about twenty. Maybe it was because Tat-
suko herself had already lived well past that point, but in the
image of her mother in the photograph, Tatsuko unexpectedly
felt the youth of that age. When she thought that her mother
had that photo taken at an age that she herself had experienced
and remembered clearly, Tatsuko had the sensation of being able
to touch the fabric of the old-fashioned parasol [that her mother
held in the picture]. She realized that until now, even when she
had occasion to think about the fact that her mother had died
long ago, she had never really felt that she had once had a real
mother. When she realized this, for the first time she longed for
her dead mother. (19)
From this point on, Tatsuko begins to fear the possibility that she too
might die young, as though the emotional connection that has been estab-
lished between them creates a channel for inheriting the woman’s fate.
Tatsuko grows to identify with her mother, but this is initially experienced
as a fearful and inauspicious sense of foreboding.
The situation changes, however, with Kimiko’s sudden confession of
feelings for Kanō. In the first pages of the story we learn that Kimiko, the
youngest of the three sisters, has been unlucky in love. After two of her
suitors die within a year of one another, she gives up on dating and then
eventually consents to an arranged marriage after coming dangerously
close to becoming “Christmas cake.”7 While she had not particularly
132 Chapter 5
cared for the first man who proposed to her, the second was a boyfriend
whom she very much hoped to marry, but her family’s disapproval pre-
vented their engagement, and eventually she broke off the relationship.
Although by the time she learns of his death she seems unaffected by it,
when she realizes that both men died in such quick succession, she begins
to believe she is cursed and will never marry happily. While she consents
to the match arranged for her out of a sense of responsibility to her
parents—they require one daughter to bring a son-in-law home as suc-
cessor to the head of the family home—her outburst just before her wed-
ding makes it clear to Tatsuko that Kimiko is not entirely happy with her
choice.
As Tatsuko lies in bed the night after the wedding, thinking about
her younger sister’s unfortunate situation, she begins to wonder if perhaps
Kimiko’s words might not have been prophetic. If it is true that Kimiko
has been cursed to find marriage partners with early expiration dates, then
what might happen to the man she just married? And what if Tatsuko
herself has been cursed with the misfortune of carrying on her mother’s
legacy of early death? In that case, might not her younger sister and Kanō
have the opportunity to marry after all? Curiously, Tatsuko seems neither
jealous nor disturbed by this prospect. The more she thinks about it, the
more she even seems to relish the idea, and she lies awake that night fanta-
sizing about Kanō killing her during a violent bout of lovemaking before
taking her younger sister as a second wife:
Tatsuko often dreamed of death. Bound ever tighter by the rope,

when her body would fall over with a thud, or when she felt her
fingertips—the only part of her body that she could still move—
grow cold behind her back, she felt as though she experienced
the pleasure of death.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›She lost herself in dreaming of the plea-
sure of a death bestowed upon her by Kanō. She would definitely
die young. Then perhaps Kimiko really would marry Kanō. But
the only way Tatsuko would set him free would be if she met that
kind of end. Thinking about that, Tatsuko felt warmly towards
Kimiko. But if Kimiko knew how she had died, she might hesitate
to marry Kanō.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Pursuing such thoughts endlessly, Tatsuko’s
eyes glinted ever more fiercely in the dark. (20–21)
Tatsuko and Kanō, it seems, have long enjoyed sadomasochistic sex play,
and this fantasy is depicted as not atypical of their usual bedroom antics,
with one important exception—the addition of younger sister Kimiko.
This seems only to add to Tatsuko’s pleasure in the anticipation of death

at the hands of her husband. It is implied that they have enacted this sce-
nario together many times, coming close to the ultimate climax of death
but stopping just short of satisfaction. The fantasy of a substitute allows
Tatsuko to imagine having it both ways, attaining the objective of death
yet not really dying. The possibility that Kimiko would take her place
therefore gives her the sense of endlessly renewable pleasure.
In the final pages of the story Tatsuko meets with yet another dop-
pelganger, who gives her a prescient glimpse into her own possible future.
On the train as she is returning home from her parents’ house, Tatsuko
encounters a pair of older ladies chatting together and pays little attention
to them until she overhears one remark, perhaps in the context of a con-
versation about health care remedies: “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were
you. Look at me. I didn’t even think I would make it to forty. My mother
died young, you know” (22). From this moment on, Tatsuko becomes
fascinated with the woman and cannot stop observing her, carefully noting
her clothing and hairstyle, trying to imagine her daily activities and her
destination, and repeating her words over and over in her head. When the
woman gets off at Tatsuko’s station, she follows her, trying to determine
if she lives there or is simply visiting someone she knows and feeling an
eerie sense of connection with her as strangers who might possibly share
the same fate. Just then, in the final lines of the story, the woman is run
over by a speeding truck right before Tatsuko’s eyes.
The interlocking set of substitutions—Tatsuko for her birth mother,
Kimiko for Tatsuko, and even Tatsuko for an anonymous stranger—implies
a complex web of emotional investment by the protagonist in the body of
the Other Woman. Her encounter with her mother, mediated by the pho-
tograph that she receives from her mother’s surrogate, is bittersweet. As
Tatsuko searches the picture eagerly for clues to her own forgotten past,
her mother’s image evokes recollections of her own experiences at that
age, as Tatsuko begins to identify with her even to the extent of imagining
herself in her place, holding the parasol in the photo. While this sense of
identification with an intergenerational body double is pleasurable in that
for the first time she is able to feel a sense of connection with this long-lost
member of her family, it also provokes feelings of dread at identifying so
closely that she might literally repeat her mother’s unfortunate history.
Even a stranger on the train can apparently serve this dual function—prof-
fering a kind of privileged self-knowledge, only to threaten the transmis-
sion of a horrifying fate. The desire for intimacy with the Other Woman
here is therefore tempered by a fear of the same.
134 Chapter 5
Ironically, though the protagonist is able to resolve these fears on one

level by shifting the object of identification to younger sister Kimiko, this
strategy is likewise fraught with pain and danger to self. While Tatsuko
thinks of this shift as an opportunity to satisfy her rather unconventional
sexual desires, implicating Kimiko in an erotic triangular relationship with
herself and her husband, such a scenario can obtain only so long as it is
preceded by the protagonist’s own physical experience of pain, and death,
at the hands of her husband. But why would Tatsuko consent, or rather
insist, on such an outcome? Why would she wish to be replaced by her
younger sister?
Just as with her birth mother, intimacy between women here too
seems permeated by a logic of substitution that punishes as much as it
rewards. In addition to an obvious wish to see her younger sister happy
after so many disappointments in love, it is also implied that Tatsuko feels
superfluous and inferior to the members of her father’s family. She even
begins to feel that after learning of her sister’s desire for her husband,
she no longer has the “right” to feel frightened of her mother’s legacy
of death, and it is this thought that prompts her violent fantasy of dying
at Kanō’s hands in order to be replaced by Kimiko (20). The baby of the
family, Kimiko has always been indulged by her parents and sisters, and it
seems that Tatsuko here feels obligated to continue this tradition not only
out of feelings of love for her sister, but out of a distinct sense of inferiority
as well.
Rather than warm havens of emotional support, families in Kōno’s
literature seem more like unsympathetic machines composed of a set of
interlocking yet easily replaceable parts, and “On the Road” is clearly no
exception. Women are particularly susceptible to the logic of substitu-
tion, as they seem continually to replace or be replaced by other women
through adoption, remarriage, and even death.8 Kōno’s female protago-
nists are thus haunted by a sense of existential instability, and they struggle
to establish a basis for autonomous subjectivity. Other women thus serve
to both facilitate and impede this process of subject formation, acting as
sites of privileged self-knowledge even as they also present themselves as
potential rivals or threats.
“Intercourse”
The first-person protagonist of this story, known to the reader only as
Watashi (“I”), is fond of wandering aimlessly through the streets of unfa-
miliar places. She is evidently experiencing some sort of existential crisis
because she says this type of activity is “her only consolation.” She finds
the visual stimulation of these unknown environments to be pleasurable
because it overwhelms her sense of self in a kind of flânerie-induced obliv-
ion that “numbs her soul.”9 One day, as she is walking through the dingy
back streets of the old part of town, she encounters a mysterious woman,
roughly the same age as herself, and is convinced that she somehow knows
this person but cannot remember how. Watashi is attracted to the woman
because in spite of her shabby appearance, she seems to harbor a light
within that is invulnerable to the ravages of time: “Her dark kimono was
made of silk but seemed to be more than ten years old, terribly threadbare,
and the sleeves were ragged. Her whole appearance gave off the shadow
of decay, the mark of erosion of forty years of life. But somewhere inside
her there appeared to be a core that glowed dimly, emitting a faint light
from the depths of her existence” (149). Watashi decides to follow the
woman but then loses sight of her as a strange dark fog suddenly descends
upon her.
The next time she encounters the woman, it is in the thoroughly dif-
ferent environment of brand-new high-rise apartments in a more modern
section of town. The woman’s dark and dingy appearance contrasts shock-
ingly with the clean white concrete walls of the maze-like apartment dis-
trict, and yet Watashi feels the same eerie nostalgia as before. The woman
seems to remember her from their previous encounter and speaks to her.
This startles Watashi because the woman had not seemed to notice her that
day or even look in her direction. On the other hand, her intuition tells
her that she has known this stranger from somewhere else, even though
the woman seems to refute this by suggesting that they had only met that
one time. Just as confusion begins to set in, Watashi’s doubts are abruptly
erased by the woman’s touch: “Her thin dry hand extended out from her
threadbare sleeves and rested on my shoulder. Something like a pleasant
electric sensation flowed from her hand, and my body tingled slightly. The
atmosphere enveloping us instantly sparkled and gave off a clear light”
(151–152). They begin to reminisce about their earlier meeting, and the
woman again surprises Watashi by appearing to know things about her
that she should have no way of knowing. However, the woman remains
a mysterious figure to Watashi, one who thwarts her attempts to know
more about her. When Watashi asks questions about her life, the woman
merely smiles and gives her a coral hairpin as a token of remembrance. The
two begin to walk together through the “hypnotically white” landscape,
which seems to have something of a trance-like effect on Watashi, and she
eventually loses sight of the woman again. Returning home, Watashi tries
136 Chapter 5
on the hairpin and discovers that it suits her perfectly, as if it had been hers
all along (154).
In subsequent encounters the woman continues to deflect Watashi’s
desire to know more about her and their strange connection. When
Watashi presses her on the question of whether they had known each
other from before, she merely responds that the question is unimportant
because “lovers” always feel that way, and she adds, “As long as we are able
to share this happiness together, isn’t that enough?” (155). When Watashi
persists, the woman again distracts her with physical intimacy:
My voice that had questioned her single-mindedly faded and was

overcome by the force of the sensation that communicated from
her to me. Even though we were linked by nothing more than
her thin hand placed on my shoulder, we experienced a deep
intercourse during which our whole bodies were abuzz in a con-
fusion of sensation. In that moment, the signs of decay that had
covered her disappeared, the shadow of decline that had clung to
her fell away, and the dim flame that had until now burned faintly
deep inside her flared up suddenly. That faint glow within that
had been her hallmark ascended vibrantly to the exterior of her
being, became pure light and shone brilliantly. (156)
From this point until the end of the story, the woman becomes
Watashi’s frequent companion on her walks through the cityscape, a
journey that takes them alternately through the “land of shadows”—their
name for the dark back streets—and the “land of light,” or the sparkling
new high-rise district. While Watashi had been accustomed to wandering
about in isolation, she seems gratified by the intimacy and companionship
the woman offers her, though she is still disturbed by her frequent disap-
pearances and eerie familiarity and is curious to know more about her—a
curiosity that is never satisfied.
Whether they are wandering through the land of shadows or light,
the space the women traverse during the course of their walks together
is portrayed as occupying a different plane of existence from the mun-
dane world. These worlds of shadow and light in fact seem more like
states of emotion or sensation rather than physical spaces per se—modes
of experience whose undulating rhythm gives structure to the narrative
and mirrors the tension between youthful purity and physical decay that
the women embody. Watashi and her companion seem strangely insulated
from contact with other people so long as they inhabit this psychic space,
and indeed at one point Watashi wonders aloud why no one has appeared
to intervene in their relationship. In fact, they have become so absorbed in
one another that other people have literally become invisible to them.
There is only one point in the story where the two women, while
wandering together in their isolated haven, are forced to “turn their eyes
to reality” (157). They encounter a ferocious bulldog that threatens to
attack, and though they pass some scary moments as they walk by him,
they are able to escape without incident. This experience reminds the
woman of something that happened to her when she was a girl, and she
tells Watashi the story about a “big, ugly man” who once attempted to
take her pet dog. She successfully beats the dogcatcher off with a stick,
but in the process he swells to “three or four times his size” and takes on
a monstrous appearance. This story sounds familiar to Watashi, and this
collective memory functions as another clue to the unusual bond between
the women.
In spite of the fact that the women seem to present a picture of per-
fect harmony, Watashi cannot help but be suspicious about the woman’s
origins and identity, and her desire to solve this mystery intensifies even
as their intercourse reaches ever greater heights of intimacy and sensation,
ultimately propelling the story to its disastrous conclusion. During one
erotic encounter the scent the woman gives off smells just like the new
perfume that Watashi is wearing for the first time, and Watashi again can-
not resist asking her why she seems so familiar. As the woman appears to
achieve some sort of climax, Watashi presses her for an answer:
“When I first saw you on the street, I had this nostalgic feeling
like I’d seen you somewhere before, or rather I had the impres-
sion that there was no one in my life more familiar than you. The
person I feel closest to, the person I know better than anyone, for
some reason that was how I felt about you. Who are you?”
I pulled out a knife I had slipped into the sleeve of my kimono.
“At least let me tell you my name. Let me carve my initial into
your brilliant white shoulder with this knife.” She was still trem-
bling with pleasure. I cut the letter F deeply into her white left
shoulder. The pleasure of giving and receiving pain converged
beneath the tip of the knife as if inscribed there. Instantly blood
spurted out, coloring the letter and the woman’s skin red. Before
my very eyes a mist the color of blood rose and quickly grew
dense. As my vision grew foggy, our friendship dissolved like a
receding tide. (163)
138 Chapter 5
The last lines of the story leave Watashi wandering aimlessly through
the streets, isolated and alone, with a wound in her left shoulder to match
the one inflicted upon her companion and a knife “weighing heavily” in
her sleeve. Her desire to define her relationship to the Other Woman—
either through knowledge of her identity or by ascribing her own identity
to the woman—has not only destroyed their relationship, but has also
resulted in a self-inflicted wound that mirrors the psychic damage done to
the protagonist through the loss of her “lover.”
The conclusion of the story, in addition to the various similarities
between the women that are underscored throughout the text, strongly
indicates that the Other Woman may simultaneously be read as a dop-
pelganger for the protagonist. Watashi’s persistent sense of nostalgia upon
seeing the woman, as well as the woman’s eerie knowledge of aspects of
Watashi’s life history to which she should logically have no access, sug-
gests a series of encounters that verge on self-knowledge or recognition
of suppressed aspects of her own personality. But in spite of the many tex-
tual clues that indicate the identity of protagonist and Other Woman, the
woman nevertheless remains Other until the very end. Watashi’s attempts
to force a convergence of self and Other, first through the relentless pur-
suit of knowledge about her double and then through the inscription of
her own identity upon the body of the Other Woman, irrevocably destroys
the harmony between them. Maintenance of this tension between self and
Other would thus seem crucial to the preservation of the intimacy between
them. So long as Watashi is able to accept the otherness of her companion,
she can continue to enjoy the feeling of nostalgia for the second self that
the woman represents for her, but the moment she attempts to resolve this
dichotomy by enforcing a kind of totalistic identification with her double,
the bond between them is broken.
From the first lines of the story, Watashi seems to identify strongly
with the Other Woman. They are roughly the same age, around forty,
and Watashi appears profoundly moved by the woman’s aura of having
suffered through accumulated years of struggle and decline. The light
that she senses within the woman, which is likened to a core of youthful
purity that has resisted the ravages of time, is echoed in Watashi’s own
bodily experience: “My face and hands had grown dark with decay, but
for some reason only my shoulders preserved a youthful whiteness, and as
if she had known this already, she [slipped my kimono off and] stroked
my bare left shoulder, saying ‘Just this part is pure white’â†œ” (161). The
women seem instinctively to sense and seek out this inner beauty in one
another, and their “intercourse” serves to release this light within, as the
erotic climax of the Other Woman is always accompanied by a moment

when this hidden light emerges to the surface and permeates her being. In
bringing forth the light deep within her companion, Watashi is also able
to access her own inner beauty through the body of the Other Woman. In
recognizing and drawing forth the beauty of the Other Woman, Watashi
is rewarded with recognition of her own beauty, such that knowledge of
and communion with the Other provides a channel for expression of one’s
own inner self.
This sense of communion with the Other Woman is facilitated by
their isolation from “reality,” as their bond is described as creating a world
of two that is immune to outside interference. The Other Woman declares
that there is “no greater love” than the one they share, and until the very
end of the story, their intimacy seems to offer the purest and most com-
plete type of love imaginable between two people: “In any relationship
between lovers, one person loves and the other is loved, one loves more
and the other less, but between us there was absolutely none of that sort
of discrimination. It was all intoxication and no anguish whatsoever. It was
just like she said: ‘There is no greater love than this’â†œ” (161). Their rela-
tionship is therefore characterized by a remarkable degree of harmony and
equality that is predicated on a delicate balance between the two women,
and they marvel that no one has attempted to come between them to
disturb this balance. The Other Woman surmises that this is because their
love is of a “special quality” and that the rest of the world seems to have
disappeared because their love “shines so brilliantly” that other people
are no longer visible to them. Furthermore, because their intimacy can
be achieved through such unobtrusive means as the touch of a hand on a
shoulder, they can have “intercourse” wherever they like without arousing
the suspicions of passers-by (160).
Though Watashi says that their “intercourse” consists only of this
kind of slight physical contact, it is obviously and explicitly erotic. The
woman even refers to their relationship as koi, a word denoting erotic
feeling as opposed to spiritual love, and she refers to the two of them
as “lovers.”10 This aspect of their intercourse is evident through its elec-
tric effect on the protagonist and the feelings of intimacy that arise as
a result of their mutual response: “Our intercourse was complete with
just the touch of her thin dry hand on my shoulder. Her total existence
was directed toward me, and my total existence was directed toward her,
and since her existence and mine were each like a delicate chord waiting
fervently for the hand of that one person to play us, just a slight touch was
enough to make our total existences tremble in response to one another”
140 Chapter 5
(160). Yet it is interesting that the eroticism of these encounters between

the women is not expressed in genital terms but rather through a diffuse
sort of sexual expression that can be achieved through any kind of physical
touch.11 In fact, bodily contact seems secondary to the mutual response
of each woman’s “total existence” toward that of the other. By the end
of the story, it is implied that they are able to feel the electric current that
presages such encounters without even being in the same place, indicating
that the two women’s intimacy has intensified to the point of near fusion
between self and Other.
In fact, given that we may read the Other Woman in this story as a
doppelganger for the protagonist, these encounters may be understood
as simultaneously homoerotic and autoerotic. The references to the
notion that there is “no greater love” than the type they share can of
course be read as indicating self-love rather than feeling that is other-
directed. This tension between self- and other-directed love mirrors the
tension between identification with the Other and desire for the Other
that structures the relationship of these two women. One may of course
read the Other Woman as a double for Watashi, but this does not mean
that they are the same person, and to the very end of the story aspects of
the Other Woman (most prominently her identity) remain inaccessible to
Watashi. She is similar, but she is not the same, and she cannot be made
to be the same, as Watashi unfortunately discovers in the final lines of the
narrative.
One might say the same is true of all relationships between women,
erotic or otherwise. There may be as many differences among women as
there are between women and men—and this seems to be precisely Taka-
hashi’s point. Though women may long for the kind of total intimacy that
bars all outside intervention, in reality there are many barriers that serve
to keep women apart—among them class, race, age, experience, and edu-
cation, not to mention rivalries over men and the access to power or privi-
lege that they represent.12 Takahashi’s protagonist, isolated and lonely at
the beginning of the story, encounters another woman with whom she
feels a profound connection. Through this relationship each woman is
able to bring out the beauty in the other, in the guise of the light within,
and Watashi cannot help wanting to push that feeling of connection to
its logical extreme through possession of her “lover,” expressed through
a radical desire for total identification between self and Other. Yet she
finds at the end of the story that this only exacerbates, rather than cures,
her sense of loneliness as the Other Woman literally evaporates before
her eyes.
“Bad Summer”
The protagonist of this story, known only as L, is an established novelist
at the pinnacle of her success who is suffering from an unnamed illness.13
As the story opens, she is on her way to a party in honor of the publica-
tion of her collected works, where she meets M, a young girl of seventeen
or eighteen who has just made her debut on the literary scene. Even at
such a young age she is considered by the literary world to be a genius,
and L soon becomes attracted to her. After the party she sends M signed
copies of her collected works but is disappointed to find that M is out of
town and unable to receive them. Overdue for a change of scene, suf-
fering from writer’s block, and wanting to evade the doctor’s diagnosis
of her medical condition that is expected the following week, L decides
to journey to a remote island resort that is, not coincidentally, near M’s
birthplace.
Although L hopes that this island sojourn will pull her out of her
artistic impasse, she instead finds that each time she attempts to produce
“fruit of her creativity,” it fails to “implant itself in her womb.”14 Even the
“orthodox novel” she has grudgingly agreed to write, after years of avoid-
ing what she sees as a hackneyed genre, fails to come to her. Though she
has built her career on writing avant-garde fiction that some critics con-
sider brilliant and others eccentric or downright disturbing, writing only
during the wee hours of the night “like an insect excreting poison,” here
she finds herself sleeping and waking early like a normal person (155).
Ironically, while her physical health seems to have returned, she now suf-
fers from an indefinable spiritual illness. Since she cannot work, she instead
begins writing love letters to M at her home address, confessing her desire
to “consume” her and, failing that, to read her work. After many weeks
pass and she still has received no response from M, L decides to travel to
her hometown on the chance that she might be visiting her family there.
Though she thoroughly exhausts herself in looking for M, no one seems
to have seen her or know her whereabouts. Then one day, about a month
after their first meeting, M unexpectedly turns up at the hotel where L is
staying. L immediately has M move to the room next to hers and takes
upon herself the dual role of M’s “guardian” and “lover.”
The majority of the story, then, is devoted to L’s unsuccessful pursuit
of M, and even when she finally finds her and manages to keep her close,
L is frustrated by her inability to completely possess the girl. Rather, L is
described as the one who is “captive” to M’s charms, as in a scene where L
watches her brush her hair: “M faced the mirror in her pajamas, brushing
142 Chapter 5
her long hair as if to deliberately tease L, and turning around, once more
gave L a meaningful smile. But it was a cruel smile, the kind a person gives
when she is certain that she is loved, a smile as if to lightly claw at prey that
has already been captured” (170). The text is quite clear on the homo-
erotic bond between the women, as they are explicitly described at various
points kissing and caressing each other. L’s description of her feelings for
M includes references to love both in a spiritual, idealistic sense and as
physical, carnal desire. However, it is equally clear that L’s feelings are
more intense than those of M, and it is even implied that M deliberately
manipulates L and toys with her affections. Furthermore, in a conversa-
tion between the two women where they compare their love to the love
of men, M is emphatic that what L has to offer her is vastly inferior to the
heterosexual alternative (172).
Complicating this tale of unrequited love is the fact that with the
exception of M and apparently herself, L obviously has a very low opinion
of other women. In a familiar conflation of women with the body and
men with the mind, L eschews anything that relates to bodily necessity in
favor of intellectual pursuit. This is explicitly stated in the text as follows:
“In her opinion, womanly things were lacking in absolute beauty; they
were nothing but elements plucked down from the altar of spirituality to
the marketplace of the terrestrial world” (167–168). In comparison to
the transcendent standard of “absolute beauty,” femininity thus occupies
a substandard position as denizen of the mundane world. If spirituality is
visualized as an “altar” that is literally elevated above this mundane world,
then its opposite, the corporeal realm to which women are relegated,
is implicitly inferior, having been “plucked down” to a position that is
beneath this exalted world of the spiritual. Such a conclusion suggests that
the body, coded as feminine, is little more than a commodity to be traded
in the terrestrial “marketplace” and that in order to transcend this realm of
crass materialism, a woman must deny her corporeality in favor of purely
intellectual or spiritual concerns.
L therefore suppresses her physical needs and nurtures her intel-
lect. She eats sparingly and sleeps less, staying up late into the night to
devote herself to her writing, which she describes tellingly as a kind of
creative process of impregnation and birth. However, she is careful to
distinguish this from the kind of biological pregnancy that other women
experience—indeed, anything associated with the female reproductive
system is described as “vulgar,” distasteful, and “empty” (143–144). She
even despises other women writers, scorning them for being no different
from ordinary middle-aged women in their concern for clothing and
makeup and implying that they are worse than prostitutes (135–136).
Clearly, L perceives herself to be different from other women, and M
even asks at one point if she might not in fact be a man (173). Yet L
seems profoundly drawn to M, who is described throughout the narra-
tive as thoroughly feminine and seductive in all the ways that L appears
to despise.
In fact, there are clues throughout the story to suggest that M can
easily be read as a doppelganger for the protagonist. Having reached a
plateau, or perhaps even a stumbling block, in her career at the age of
forty and further suffering from physical deterioration in the form of
an unnamed and possibly fatal illness, L seems to see in M a younger,
healthier, more vibrant version of herself. There are physical similarities,
such as the fact that M’s hands are identical to those of L, in addition
to a revealing conversation between the two women where L asks M to
“become her” when she dies. M demurs, reminding L that if she dies, they
both will (169–170). This “second self” motif is further underscored by
Kurahashi’s playful mention of titles published by both women that are
identical to titles of works published by herself. This opens up the possibil-
ity of reading M and L as younger and older versions of the author, even
as an autobiographical reading of this story is deliberately refuted within
the text itself.15
Taking into account this doppelganger motif opens up the possibil-
ity of reading L’s obsessive desire for M as an attempt to recuperate the
femininity that she has discarded in order to pursue the path of pure intel-
lectual creativity. While L is clearly ambivalent about her gender identity, if
not downright misogynistic, M seems to have been able to establish herself
as a writer of great reputation without casting off her feminine traits or
conducting herself in a “vulgar” manner like the other women writers that
L so despises. While L seems to be something of a shut-in, isolating herself
in order to concentrate on her craft and avoiding contact with others, M is
able to come and go freely between L’s claustrophobic world of introver-
sion and the outside world of everyday life. M represents what L has lost
in the process of becoming an androgynous intellect, and her elusiveness
frustrates L, who attempts unsuccessfully to possess her.
In a pivotal scene of conflict between L and M, we learn that L has
rejected heterosexual love in the course of denying her own femininity, as
part of the process of becoming the androgynous intellectual that she is
now. In her youth L had fallen in love with a male artist who insisted on
turning their relationship into a “game of imagination,” apparently in spite
of her own desire for physical intimacy. While she had experienced this
144 Chapter 5
initially as a kind of loss, she eventually internalized this way of thinking

and in doing so, she completed her own “transformation” into an artist.
The text then contrasts her situation to that of other women as follows:
L was aware that women tried to become artists not through love
of art but through love of artists, which in the end came close to
the common opinion that women could not become real artists.
Certainly L had become a poet through her discovery of love for
a poet. But this love was not directed at those parts of man that
were made from clay. If L had not succeeded at stripping her
spirit from her flesh through love—and this was something that
was essentially difficult for the female sex to accomplish—her
“transformation” [into an artist] would probably have failed. By
renouncing her sex, she had liberated her spirit and her imagina-
tion. From that time on L had not loved another man.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›
However, now circumstances had changed. At a time when
L had neared the end of her life, she had begun to love M. Of
course, given that M was not a man, this didn’t really constitute
a sudden and inexplicable change in the fact that L could not
love men. And what about M, who was bundled up in L’s love?
One afternoon, M lay her head on L’s back, who was lying face
down on the beach, and suddenly declared, “Hey, are you really
a woman? I wish you were a man.” Chewing on her own hair, M
turned her head to peer at L’s face. Clearly she realized that she
had wounded L’s love, and her posture indicated that she was
prepared to flee quickly if L lashed out in anger at her.
L asked gently, “What do you mean?”
“If you were a man, I would let you inside of me. It’s a shame
you aren’t a man.”
L resolved never to speak to M again. (171–172)
This passage begins with a meditation on L’s own personal history, as

a woman who learns to idealize her love of men into a purely intellectual
form and of her eventual transformation into a “woman writer.” The two
parts of this term are seen to be inherently in contradiction to one another,
requiring the female subject who aspires to a life of the mind to make a
choice between the two. Most women, in L’s opinion, are inadequate to
the task of “stripping spirit from the flesh”—that is, renouncing one’s
corporeal femininity in favor of pure intellectualism—that is required to
resolve the contradiction. In successfully navigating this difficult challenge,
L clearly sees herself to be exceptional vis-à-vis ordinary women, who are

unable to embrace art in its pure form and therefore settle for the sexual
embrace of artists—a love that is “directed at those parts of man that
[are] made from clay.” In contrast to ordinary women, who settle for a
relationship to art that is mediated by heterosexual desire, L has bypassed
this form of embrace for a “love” of male artists that is expressed as purely
intellectual. She has therefore successfully cast off her feminine gender
identity, which is intimately imbricated here with heterosexual desire, for
an androgynous subjectivity that allows for the love of men only insofar
as these feelings are abstracted into an idealized and disembodied form of
intellectual admiration. Consequently, she learns to despise other women
precisely because they represent the subject position of corporeal imma-
nence that she has worked so hard to transcend.
The text then quickly turns to a meditation on L’s relationship to
M and how this fits in with L’s refusal of heterosexuality, strongly imply-
ing that both phenomena are linked to her existentially unstable status of
“woman writer.” Her love for M is clearly differentiated within the text
from heterosexual desire, but from L’s perspective this is a positive thing.
Heterosexuality, which in this text is intimately bound up with “femi-
ninity” as an inherently inferior subject position, clearly endangers the
persona of disembodied intellectual that L has crafted for herself. In L’s
mind, for a woman to take up a place in the heterosexual matrix means
to accept a position whereby one cannot produce art and must settle for
loving it indirectly via the body of a man. By refusing the love of men, L
has cast off her feminine gender identity and resolved the contradiction
between “woman” and “writer,” terms that come laden with an enormous
amount of cultural baggage that implies the gendered and mutually exclu-
sive nature of these subject positions.
Yet L’s renouncing of her femininity is clearly accompanied by feel-
ings of loss, judging by the way she arrived at this decision in the aftermath
of a troubled and unsatisfying heterosexual relationship and by the way
she is clearly drawn to M because she embodies those qualities that L was
forced to reject. By loving M, she is able to recapture something of her
lost femininity while remaining safely distant from those elements of it
that threaten her status as androgynous intellect. Therefore, while many
clues within the text suggest that M serves on one level as an extension
of self, it is simultaneously crucial for L that M remain Other, preserving
the tension between auto- and homoeroticism within the text. This ten-
sion cannot and must not be resolved in order for M to fulfill her role as
surrogate feminine self, embodying those qualities that L has had to reject
146 Chapter 5
in herself in order to complete her “transformation” into a disembodied

intellect. The homoerotic relationship with M therefore offers itself as a
solution to L’s dilemma between complying with normative constructions
of heterosexual womanhood, which would force her to abandon her status
as artist, and renouncing femininity entirely by accepting a subject posi-
tion that is implicitly masculine.
However, it is clear that while L seems satisfied with their arrange-
ment, M is not, apparently because she has not experienced her own status
as woman writer to be riddled with contradiction. M seems thoroughly
comfortable with her own femininity even as she has established her cre-
dentials as an up-and-coming artistic phenomenon. Though she acqui-
esces to L’s desire for her, perhaps for the strategic advantage of having
an established writer’s support—and in fact L does offer her professional
backing—M still seems to be sexually interested in men and obviously
believes L’s love to be inferior to that of men. The generation gap in
self-perception between these two women, such that L sees a contradic-
tion between femininity and professional goals whereas M does not, is
evocative of the actual differences in experiences of Japanese women born
before or after the war. The former group, having had to navigate a sea
change in expectations of their purpose in Japanese society due to post-
Occupation changes in educational, legal, and social structures, seems to
have struggled with questions of gender identity in ways that the postwar
generation of women, who grew up taking these new opportunities for
granted, did not.
Because L’s longing for M is motivated by both personal and profes-
sional desires and because these desires are experienced by L as inseparable
impulses, she experiences M’s rejection of her love as a rejection of her as
both lover and mentor. After the fight discussed above, L goes to some
trouble to order a copy of M’s collected works and finds that the young
woman’s vibrant and powerful literary style only heightens her erotic desire
for the girl. Inspired by admiration for M’s intellectual gifts, L presents M
with a volume of her own literature but is wounded to discover that the
girl is unacquainted with her work and finds her expression of enthusiasm
for the gift to be perfunctory and shallow (174–175). This merely adds
insult to the injury inflicted in the scene described above. M’s suggestion
that L is not a proper woman yet simultaneously lacks the qualifications to
perform satisfactorily as a man can thus be interpreted as both an attack
on her suitability as a lover and a suggestion that her “transformation”
into a genderless intellect is incomplete. Depressed at the personal and
professional impasse at which she has arrived, L begins to feel as though
what she intended to be a short island vacation has in fact committed her
to a path that can end only with her death and that perhaps the only way
to avoid this fate is to kill M first (181–182).
The ending of the story highlights the contradictions between femi-
nine and masculine that L embodies in a surreal and shockingly violent
denouement. One morning, while M is still asleep, L gets a ride on the
hotel motorboat out to a deserted island nearby where she and M had
previously shared many intimate encounters. She takes with her a volume
of M’s collected works, reading it with a bittersweet combination of admi-
ration for the girl and painful feelings of unrequited love. She begins to
feel drowsy and experiences a sensation as if her “existence” were melting
away into the ocean, and she likens it to the feeling of “blood like black-
ness itself flowing ceaselessly out of her womb.” She feels “pinned down”
by an intense feeling of lethargy. The story ends as follows:
Just then, the world became tinged with an inauspicious shadow

and filled with a roar like a large flock of birds flapping their
wings. These strange birds, flocked together in the sky, had long,
bald, pink heads, and just like so many phalluses, they descended
upon L in unison. Their lewd cries resounded terrifyingly in her
ears.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›L screamed just as the naked boys leapt at her. Countless
sharp nails ripped off her clothes, and L’s body, thin but retain-
ing the form of untarnished sex that belied her age, was exposed
to the sun. Her face was covered with a straw hat as her body was
rent apart by their evil blades.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›
It was just before noon when M arrived by motorboat.
Strangely, L’s consciousness was floating above the ground
at a height that allowed her to look down on everything. For
example, she could clearly see her own body lying on the sand
like a weird hieroglyphic. L understood it as her own dying body
gushing blood from where it had been rent apart. M removed
the straw hat covering the face of the corpse. The small ivory face
was contorted as if in pleasure, its upper lip curled. She could
hear M’s sweet voice calling, “Sensei, sensei. The results of your
medical exam came just a little while ago from a Tokyo hospital.”
Above her own face, L saw a face like a sunflower with a row of
cruel teeth. (182–183)
It is unclear whether L’s experience is real or a dream or some kind of hal-

lucination. She seems to be dozing off just prior to this event, and despite
148 Chapter 5
the fact that after the attack her perspective hovers above the scene like
that of a spirit leaving the body in its death throes, in the final line of the
story L is once again gazing up at M while lying on the sand, suggesting
that she does not actually die.
The nature of the “attack” she experiences on the island is as unclear
as whether or not it actually occurred. Prior to this scene, a gang of malev-
olent-looking teenaged boys had arrived at the hotel, and L sensed trouble
the moment she saw them. Several times their potential for dangerous or
malicious mischief is hinted, including one scene in which they show up
to a musical concert and appear to L to be wielding knives. These scenes
foreshadow the final attack on L, and it bolsters an interpretation of the
ending that indicates that actual violence was done to the protagonist. On
the other hand, L’s altered state of drowsiness just beforehand and the
fantastic nature of her perception of the incident, whereby a flock of birds
turns into a gang of attacking phalluses, creates the possibility that this was
simply a dream or hallucination. Nor is it clear whether they raped her or
stabbed her or perhaps both—the blood flowing from L’s body, assum-
ing it is in fact real, may emanate from one or more unspecified wounds,
depending on how one reads the original text.16 The “blades” in this pas-
sage may refer to the knives that L thinks she sees them carry earlier in
the story; alternately, they may be a metaphorical expression for the male
sexual organ that is more explicitly referenced as a “phallus” elsewhere in
the passage.
Regardless of how one interprets this final scene, the imagery
employed further elucidates the conflicted relationship between L’s pro-
fessional and gender identities. Having renounced heterosexual femininity
in favor of an androgynously intellectual subject position, L has created a
tenuous position for herself between genders that is perhaps impossible to
maintain. Though her love of M hints at the possibility of resolving this
tension between her desire for femininity and her desire for art, M’s failure
to return her affections suggests the fragile nature of such a compromise.
M represents for L all the feminine qualities that she desires but cannot
allow herself to express, and while attributing these traits to the body of
another woman allows her to protect herself from the cultural baggage
they carry, by externalizing them onto the Other Woman, she has placed
them outside her own control. M may represent what L desires for herself,
but though L sees something of herself in this Other Woman, in the end
she remains Other and therefore outside the realm of L’s control.
L’s strategy of abjecting her own feminine qualities onto the body of
the Other Woman apparently solves one problem only to create others.
The final scene, in which L is raped either literally or metaphorically by a

gang of young men who wield knives like phalluses—or perhaps phalluses
like knives—therefore suggests a forcible reintegration of L into the het-
erosexual economy. Her untenable compromise between femininity and
masculinity is clearly aberrant and societally unacceptable, and from the
perspective of normative structures of authority, it must not be allowed to
continue.
While the denouement of this story is shockingly violent, the strange
smile of pleasure on L’s “corpse” indicates that it may on another level
represent a welcome reprieve from the tension of attempting to maintain
this impossibly androgynous subject position. In Kurahashi’s text, then,
the body of the Other Woman may be understood not only as a physical
embodiment of feminine qualities that intellectual women of her genera-
tion were forced to renounce, but also as a metaphor for the problem of
oppressive structures of binary gender norms themselves. “Bad Summer”
may be read as a critique of these structures, highlighting as it does the
impossible position in which women who attempt to encroach upon tradi-
tionally masculine fields of endeavor are placed.
It is striking that all of the stories discussed in this chapter feature protago-
nists whose subjectivity is predicated on a profound sense of existential
instability. Kōno’s protagonist feels only a tenuous connection to her own
family, given her status as stepdaughter and half-sibling, and she conse-
quently feels that her place in that fundamental institution is insecure. Fur-
thermore, her preoccupation with her birth mother’s early death appears
to threaten not only her position in the family but also her life itself, as
she lives with the constant sense of foreboding that she will inherit her
mother’s fate. Takahashi’s main character clearly suffers from some sort
of psychological distress, and her engagement with reality is questionable,
as she spends most of the story insulated in a world of two that allows
no outside interference, obsessed with her relationship to a mysterious
Other who seems to offer access to a privileged sort of self-knowledge.
Kurahashi’s L is fractured from the beginning, having pared away ele-
ments of herself in an effort to deny her own femininity, yet determined
to reclaim these qualities through physical possession of a younger woman
who reminds her of what she has lost. Each of these characters, feeling her
connection with the world around her to be shaky and unsatisfying, seeks
in another woman what she perceives is lacking in herself.
Although there is a strong sense of identification between the pro-
tagonist and her double, the doppelganger must remain Other to the self.
150 Chapter 5
The Other Woman in each case serves as a screen for the projection of the
protagonist’s hopes and fears regarding her own identity and therefore
must be held at a distance to be of any use in this quest for self-knowledge
or exploration of her inner fantasies and desires. Maintenance of the ten-
sion between self/Other and desire/identification is therefore crucial both
to the protagonist’s quest and to the structure of these narratives, even as
this distance creates frustration in the main character, whose desire for the
Other is continually deferred.
The tension between self and Other (or identification and desire) is
one reason that these narratives of female homoeroticism are permeated
by an undercurrent of hostility toward other women. Tatsuko of “On the
Road” clearly feels warmly toward her sister when thinking of her as a
medium for her own desire, and this identification between self and Other
creates a pleasing sense of intimacy. Yet this fantasy of homoerotic fusion
requires distance between self and Other to be preserved, through a tri-
angular relationship that is mediated by Tatsuko’s husband. Furthermore,
this fantasy is predicated on a structure wherein Kimiko takes her place in
a masochistic and potentially fatal relationship to her husband—an experi-
ence that she senses would be unpleasant or shocking to the girl, given
her worry that Kimiko would refuse if she knew the truth of the situation.
At least some of Tatsuko’s pleasure in this scenario seems to come from
envisioning the girl as object of the same potentially painful and humiliat-
ing treatment that is meted out to her by her husband.
Likewise, “Intercourse” ends with a violent climax wherein the pro-
tagonist literally destroys her doppelganger in a failed attempt to possess
her completely. Fusion of self and Other, figured here as a “convergence”
of the woman who inflicts pain with the woman who is the recipient of
it, results not in a sensation of wholeness or healing of the division within
herself but rather in a sense of loss of a beloved companion whose very
otherness alone preserves the integrity of the relationship.
Finally, L of “Bad Summer” learns to despise not only other women
but the woman within herself as well, and her efforts to reconcile the
contradiction inherent in her status of “woman writer” place her in the
impossible position of attempting to disavow her own femininity while
projecting it onto another so that she can then embrace it as external to
herself. The intensity of L’s love for M binds her to a relationship that
can never satisfy her needs, threatening to destroy her if she does not free
herself first—an escape that she believes can be achieved only through the
death of one of the lovers. Thus, while these homoerotic relationships
seem predicated on a preservation of tension between self and Other and
between desire and identification, the eroticism of these bonds is simulta-

neously permeated by feelings of antagonism and aggression that might be
described as feminine misogyny.
The undercurrent of hostility toward the Other Woman seems to
result from the fact that these relationships between women are never-
theless embedded in heteronormative structures of power, resulting in
narratives that reinstate familiar gendered binaries even as they appear to
trouble them on other levels of analysis. While the protagonists may long
for harmonious communion with the Other Woman, fundamentally these
relationships are still predicated on assumptions of a binary opposition
between active and passive positions, roles that are implicitly gendered as
masculine and feminine, even when both parties are biologically female.
Thus, while male characters remain peripheral to each of these narratives,
heteronormative structures of power clearly complicate the relationship
dynamics between the protagonist and the other woman.
A heightened awareness of the differences and power structures that
separate women from one another, preventing real communion or solidar-
ity among them, seems accompanied by a haunting sense of sadness as
well. Each of the protagonists of these stories seems profoundly lonely in
some way—Tatsuko because she is an outsider in her own family, Watashi
because she is isolated and alone in a forbidding and sterile environment,
and L because in striving to transcend the paradox of her status as “woman
writer,” she has taken up a subject position so anomalous that there now
appears to be no one, male or female, with whom she can identify.
This sense of loneliness is perhaps not surprising, given that the
authors of these texts, in their efforts to challenge hegemonic common
sense regarding gender roles and discourses of “appropriate” femininity,
seem to have been somewhat ahead of their time. Precisely because the
gendered division of labor against which they struggled, in life and litera-
ture, had come to seem not only natural but necessary to Japanese society
in the 1960s, founded as it was on a culture of high economic growth that
produced national and individual prosperity, it was an exceptional woman
indeed who dared to question the “logic” of dominant ideologies of gen-
der. Unable to acquiesce gracefully to the models of femininity presented
to them, these authors may be understood as having occupied a position
in Japanese society that was as anomalous and gender indeterminate as
their fictional protagonists.
Their life and works thus posed a profound challenge to the hege-
monic discourses of gender that structured the high-growth period of
Japan in the 1960s. It would be another decade—after the foundation
152 Chapter 5
of growth began to crack due to international economic events that

forced Japanese to question the wisdom of a single-minded pursuit of
prosperity—before Japanese society began to take this challenge seriously.
As we will see in the conclusion, the “women’s lib” movement of the
1970s openly debated many of the same problems of feminine subjectivity
that preoccupied women writers of literature during the previous decade.
These fiction writers may therefore be understood as working through the
theoretical foundations of a feminist philosophy that would later emerge
as an explicitly political movement.
Conclusion
Power, Violence, and Language in the
Age of High Economic Growth
G ender, as envisioned by the Japanese women writers of fiction addressed

in this study, is a form of power that disciplines bodies to produce certain
types of behaviors and desires that are seen as advantageous to national
and societal goals. In the 1960s, the goal was economic growth, and prop-
erly gendered bodies facilitated this project through total devotion either
to the world of work outside the home or to roles that were supportive
of such work, such as domestic labor. When bodies failed to produce the
requisite behaviors and desires, “gender trouble” ensued, which threat-
ened not only the binary model of gender that had come to seem normal,
but also the national projects that were predicated on these disciplinary
regimes.
The work of Michel Foucault suggests that there is no tenable posi-
tion outside of power so that any resistance to disciplinary regimes must
be attempted from within, through the very microchannels of power that
would enforce such discipline.1 Evidently these women writers perceived
a similar dynamic in the workings of gender so that resistance to gender
norms could be envisioned only from a position within the very structures
that bound them to normative femininity. Literature proved to be a pow-
erful weapon in this project of resistance, and many of these narratives
reenact the process of forcible inscription of gender upon their charac-
ters so as to expose the violence and hypocrisy inherent in this process of
engendering. They thus effectively parody such disciplinary mechanisms,
revealing them to be void of the “natural” logic to which binary structures
of gender pretend.
In this conclusion, I will highlight some of the theoretical implications
of these women writers’ contributions to incipient second-wave feminist
discourse, comparing their work to that of prominent feminist theorists of
the following decade and beyond. I hope to demonstrate that both groups
153
154 Conclusion
were motivated to resist normative constructions of femininity imposed

upon them by the gendered division of labor. In the following sections, I
will outline the roles that power, violence, and language play in the theo-
retical architecture of these Japanese feminisms. These three categories
of analysis are significant for the ways in which they constrain feminine
subjectivity (and feminist expression) in some ways only to open up other
possibilities for expression. Subjects are thus envisioned as engendered
within networks of power, through violence that shapes their expression
in language.
Power
In previous chapters we have seen the impossibility of occupying a subject
position outside the structures of normative femininity, which assume a
straightforward correspondence between body and gender. While all three
protagonists of the stories discussed in chapter 2 may attempt to present
themselves as gender-neutral, they are quickly reinscribed as feminine by
the masculine gaze, a potent disciplinary mechanism that these women
learn to internalize and replicate against themselves and other women.
In chapter 3, although the protagonists of “Castle of Bones” and “Like a
Witch” identify with their male mentors and attempt to establish them-
selves as provisionally “masculine,” their efforts are disavowed or ridiculed
by the men they strive to impress. In chapter 4, Asako of “Secret” learns
that only men may transcend gender norms, just as boys in “Toddler-
Hunting” represent to Akiko an ideal of freedom from the suffocating
strictures of gender to which girls are subjected. On the other hand, in
chapter 5, L of “Bad Summer” tries to have it both ways and possibly pays
for it with her life. Although L briefly enjoys the sexual and intellectual
privileges of men while keeping her feminine side close in the guise of M,
this balancing act proves untenable and she is forcibly reinscribed into the
heteronormative system of patriarchy in the final scene of the story. In all
cases, these characters are subordinated to a disciplinary process of engen-
dering as feminine, based solely on their occupation of female bodies. In
other words, society assumes a direct correspondence between the terms
female/feminine and male/masculine, regardless of whether or not these
ideological concerns conform to the personal experiences and preferences
of the subject in question.
Society, identified in these texts as the agent of the engendering
process, is implicitly or explicitly figured as masculine, placing women in
a subordinate position vis-à-vis structures of power. The term “society”
P ower , V iolence , and L anguage 155
therefore gestures toward the bodies of authority that administer and

reinforce the disciplinary mechanisms of engendering and takes many
guises in these stories. In “Broken Oath” it is represented by the legal
system; in “Castle of Bones” it takes the mantle of religious author-
ity; and in “Snake” it alternately figures as the medical establishment,
the business world, the educational system, the political factions of the
student movement, and even the Diet building and its representatives.
In numerous stories “society” is conflated with the male-dominated
intelligentsia and may even be seen as embodied in specific authority
figures that hold power over the female characters—fathers, mentors,
husbands, and lovers. Women are therefore understood in these stories
to be embedded in asymmetrical power networks that permeate all levels
of society, from the highest legislative body in Japan down to the level
of the most intimate personal relationships. Precisely because these net-
works of power are so pervasive, cutting across all sectors of public and
private life, it is difficult to resist internalizing the disciplinary mecha-
nisms administered therein.
Japanese women faced such disciplinary mechanisms in the 1960s as
they struggled with the various demands placed upon them during the
era of high economic growth. Encouraged to aspire to become upwardly
mobile middle-class wives and mothers, they were simultaneously
exhorted to pick up the slack in the workforce as the increasing urgency
of labor shortages induced both government and business interests to
promote labor force participation even by married women with children.
Ever greater levels of financial investment in children’s education added
to women’s incentive to seek employment, yet they were nevertheless
expected to continue to carry the full burden of domestic labor in addition
to their work outside the home. In order to make outside employment
compatible with their domestic responsibilities, women sought part-time
positions, which were accompanied by low status and low wages. Femi-
nist Ueno Chizuko has criticized this new model of the working wife and
mother as follows:
This “new sex-role division” is double-edged for women: it has

affected the traditional power relationship between husbands
and wives, but women have ended up being doubly exploited
by men, both at home and at the workplace. As both part-
time workers and housewives, women must be content to be
“second-class citizens,” while feeling guilty for being neither
sufficient workers nor perfect mothers-wives. In short, “dual-
156 Conclusion
role” has not solved the “women problem.” It is simply a new

compromise between capitalism and patriarchy in the developed
stage of capitalism.2
Thus, work outside the home was not experienced by Japanese women to
be liberating in either a personal or economic sense, as they were effec-
tively required to carry a double burden of labor while still remaining
economically dependent on their husbands.
Within both public and private spheres, therefore, women were multi-
ply subordinated as supportive members of highly structured organizations
that placed men (whether husbands or male co-workers) in privileged posi-
tions over them. This double burden was seen as a direct result of the social
and economic transformations brought on by the high-growth economy of
the 1960s. As Ueno notes, challenging this structure, and the sexual divi-
sion of labor upon which it was predicated, became a defining characteristic
of the “second-wave” feminist movement of the following decade:
What made the second wave [of feminism] different from the
first is that it questioned the sex-role division itself. Sex-roles in
the modern urban nuclear family setting were seen to be the very
cause that prevented women from attaining real equality despite
the attainment of legal equality. This sex-role division between
worker-husbands and homemaker-wives is in fact imposed on
men and women by modern industrial society. To question this
modern sex-role assignment is to question the modern industrial
system in which we live.3
In this sense, then, both women writers of fiction in the 1960s

and the feminist activists of the 1970s may be seen as motivated by a
similar project—to challenge the ideologies of gender that form a cru-
cial structuring mechanism of modern industrial Japanese society. Both
groups understood women to be subordinated to men and highlighted
the fact that this subordination was reinforced through multiple networks
of power that permeated every level of society. By implication, rectifying
such power imbalances would require a profound transformation of the
economic structure itself. While the fiction writers focused their attention
on exposing the devastating psychological impact of these gendered dis-
ciplinary mechanisms, the women’s liberation activists attacked the social
and economic contradictions that both facilitated and resulted from the
engendering process.
Violence
The process of engendering in the stories we have discussed is fig-
ured as permeated with violence—sometimes horrific in its effect on
the protagonist—that is subsequently internalized and reproduced by
women against themselves and other women. L’s forcible reinscription as
female by a gang of knife/phallus-wielding men in the final lines of “Bad
Summer” is an obvious example of this kind of violence. However, as
elaborated in chapter 2, the masculine gaze itself may be seen as violently
penetrative, as is evident from the scenes of scopic rape in “Getting on
the Wrong Train” and Blue Journey. Such violence is echoed in “Secret”
when Asako displays herself before the gaze of her lover and his friend,
keenly sensing herself as an object that must passively submit to that gaze
and so hesitating to speak up regarding her own desires. She is therefore
effectively deprived of language just like the protagonists of chapter 2,
when they are subjected to the engendering masculine gaze.
These narratives make clear that engendering is a process rather than
a single event, and its successful outcome is predicated on the extent to
which it is internalized and reproduced by the subject herself. The sub-
ject’s complicity is evident in all the stories in chapter 2, particularly in
“Getting on the Wrong Train,” where the protagonist is literally inhabited
by the masculine gaze in the final lines of the story. Furthermore, the
protagonist in “Castle of Bones” seeks out and voluntarily submits to the
torturous “training” that is imposed upon other women. Likewise, Akiko
from “Toddler-Hunting” solicits violent treatment in her sexual encoun-
ters with her boyfriend, willingly adopting a masochistic position vis-à-vis
this embodiment of masculine authority. Asako from “Secret” seems to
revel in her own quasi-crucifixion, as she stands before the two men with
blood running down her breasts and is moved by the masochistic spectacle
that she presents to them.
As so many of these stories indicate, women’s acceptance of a position
of corporeal immanence is a crucial component of this process of engen-
dering. Such acceptance requires women to identify themselves with their
bodies, or rather identify themselves as bodies vis-à-vis men, who are then
able to disavow the body in order to adopt an elevated position as subjects
of intellectual or spiritual transcendence. The protagonist of “Bone Meat”
therefore learns to identify with the discarded possessions that her former
boyfriend left behind when he abandoned her and possibly destroys herself
along with the rest of the “trash” in the final lines of the story. The main
character in “Castle of Bones” is forced to accept that she is “nothing but
158 Conclusion
a woman” in order for the man she admires to even acknowledge her,
and her reward for this assumption of a subordinate status is mortifica-
tion of that body through the self-induced punishment that the “training”
represents. Asako in “Secret” learns not only to identify herself with her
body, but also to feel ashamed when that body fails to prove pleasing to
the masculine gaze. In many stories, a loathing of the body is explicitly
directed toward the female reproductive functions so that characters in
Blue Journey, “Toddler-Hunting,” “Like a Witch,” and “Bad Summer”
view menstruation and pregnancy as negative or empty experiences, seem-
ingly repulsed by their own ability to reproduce.
Finally, a hatred of the feminine is directed not only internally but
also externally, in the form of female characters who express chauvinism
or violence toward other women. The main character of “On the Road,”
having adopted a masochistic position vis-à-vis her husband during their
lovemaking, subsequently fantasizes about implicating her sister in this
violent arrangement, which may possibly result in death. L in “Bad Sum-
mer” seems to despise other women—with the exception perhaps of the
feminine side of herself, which she nevertheless disavows by projecting
these characteristics onto a second self in the form of M. The protagonist
of “Intercourse” has internalized the phallic principle to such an extent
that she destroys the Other Woman in a metaphorically self-inflicted ges-
ture of reinscribing the law of the father upon a fragile space of homoso-
cial and homoerotic communion. Having struggled and failed to prove
herself as provisionally masculine to her mentor and lover, in order to win
his admiration and approval, the protagonist of “Like a Witch” declares
that women who comply with feminine stereotypes should be “raped
and killed.” By highlighting the masochistic and self-destructive effects
of the engendering process, the authors implicitly protest the insidious
and violent consequences of normative structures of gender that induce
women to denigrate themselves and other women so as to elevate men as
“naturally” superior.
Women’s liberation activists likewise protested the violence inher-
ent in gendered power structures, a problem with which many of these
women had personal experience during their participation in the student
movement of the 1960s. Historians of the women’s liberation movement
in Japan have cited women’s experience of chauvinism at the hands of
male comrades as a primary motivating factor for women who broke away
from the New Left to form their own “lib” groups in the 1970s. Setsu
Shigematsu describes the nature and extent of this chauvinist behavior as
follows:
Women did not break away simply because they were stuck mak-
ing rice balls, or felt slighted when they were put at the rear of
the marches or put in charge of first aid at the demonstrations.
The sexist discrimination was also a productive part of the com-
mon sense that produced a typology of leftist women, ranging
from the theoretically sophisticated “Rosa Luxembourg” types,
to the beautiful Madonnas and “cute comrades,” and extended
to what some leftist men would refer to as those who were passed
around like “public toilets.”4
Thus, even radical student activists reproduced the engendering mecha-

nisms of the dominant society within their own organizations, disciplining
women to perform as maternal, nurturing figures or sexual objects whose
primary purpose was to service male needs—even when those women
proved themselves to be committed agents of social change.
Furthermore, women’s lib activists were quick to point out that the
pervasive sexual objectification of women within the New Left was inti-
mately related to its dominant logic of violence, whereby male activists
proved their masculinity through aggressive physical attacks on members
of their own or other sects or through street battles with riot police during
demonstrations. “For many New Leftists, whether or not some one [sic]
could take up the gebabō [a shaft or pipe used in combat] and engage
in battle became the measure of one’s revolutionary intent and commit-
ment.”5 That this employment of violence as a means of political praxis
frequently took the form of misogynist treatment of women is evident in
the insidious tactic of raping the women of rival sects.6
Such violence was then internalized and replicated by women, particu-
larly those who remained within the New Left movement and attempted
to prove themselves worthy as activists according to this masculinist logic.
A striking example may be seen in the case of Nagata Hiroko, a key figure
in the Japanese Red Army whose terrorist activities led to its downfall in
1972 and the arrest or death of many of its top leaders. At the height of its
orgy of violence, the United Red Army lynched fourteen of its own mem-
bers, including a woman who was eight months pregnant—an offense that
earned Nagata a death sentence for her role in ordering the purge.7 Shige-
matsu summarizes the reaction of Tanaka Mitsu, one of the most prominent
theorists of the “women’s lib” movement, to this event as follows:
The death of the pregnant woman in the United Red Army named
Kaneko Michiyo has been remembered as the most tragic of the
160 Conclusion
killings of the United Red Army. Tanaka wrote about the corpse
of Kaneko Michiyo—a woman she had met before face-to-face.
Her corpse—burdened with an unborn child—signified the logi-
cal outcome of the misogyny of the logic of death [that perme-
ated the New Left]. The leaders of the United Red Army (Mori
Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko) discussed keeping the child (for its
productive potential), but decided to kill the mother because of
her lack of pure revolutionary intent. Within the United Red
Army, the expression of traditional femininity or any sexual and
erotic desire was deemed “anti-revolutionary.”8
Given the maternalist ideology that structured conventional

assumptions of femininity, it is hardly surprising that the body of Kaneko
Michiyo—“burdened with an unborn child”—would be singled out
by Nagata as representative of those suffocating norms. For a woman
like Nagata, who was struggling to define and prove herself according
to a masculine logic that denigrated femininity and all conventional
expressions of feminine identity and desire, Kaneko must have seemed
an embodiment of the failure to transcend woman’s “inferior” status,
implicitly threatening Nagata’s own fragile position within this masculine
hierarchy. Nagata’s personal experience of rape and sexual abuse at the
hands of members of her own sect may well have contributed to her
conflicted mindset regarding feminine gender identity.9 In this sense,
Nagata’s violent actions may be seen as consonant with the feminine
misogyny—a product of the violent process of engendering—expressed
by the protagonists of “Like a Witch,” “Castle of Bones,” and other sto-
ries analyzed in previous chapters.
Even those women who broke away from the New Left to form
the women’s liberation movement of the early 1970s had to deal with
its legacy of violence and misogyny, as the work of Tanaka Mitsu makes
evident. Violence is in fact a cornerstone of Tanaka’s theory of a “disor-
derly women’s lib,” and her controversial support for Nagata Hiroko as
herself a victim of the internalized misogyny of the New Left—not to
mention the double standard by which she was portrayed in the media
at the time—speaks powerfully to the embeddedness of “women’s lib”
within the very structures of power that it sought to resist. While Tanaka
criticized the murder of Kaneko Michiyo as an abhorrent example of the
misogynist excesses of the New Left, she simultaneously identified with
Nagata, seeing her as “an ordinary woman who was symptomatic of all
women who act in such a way to flatter men to gain male recognition.”10
Thus, while a desire for solidarity among women clearly permeated lib
discourse, it masked a deeper anxiety as to how this might be achieved in a
society where gender difference was predicated on a misogynist logic that
was frequently internalized even by women themselves.
Consistent with the lib movement’s emphasis on consciousness-
raising, so as to recognize the individual’s role in internalizing and repro-
ducing the gendered ideologies that confined her to hegemonic sex roles,
Tanaka urged women to recognize the Nagata Hiroko within and to
connect this potential for violence with the institutionalized sexism that
permeated Japanese society:
The ribu [lib] women decided to explicitly support the “women

defendants” of the United Red Army, because they knew that
the criminalization of women who engaged in violent action
was inextricably linked to the ideological policing of women
as “passive, peace-loving, and non-violent” subjects, who were
rewarded for their compliant support of a masculinist social
order.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›They understood that Nagata was being condemned
not simply because of her actions, but because she was caught
acting violently as an onna [woman], outside of the acceptable
boundaries for women to act.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Ribu women recognized the
sexist and repressive logic that permitted men to express violent
aggressive behavior, but viewed the violent actions of women as
necessarily aberrant and pathological.11
Rejecting the master narrative of the maternal feminine that structured

conventional roles for women, Nagata had attempted to establish an alter-
nate identity for herself within a revolutionary organization that sought
to transform Japanese society, only to find that this organization operated
according to the same sexist power structures as the world outside. Sub-
jected to disciplinary mechanisms that sought to reinscribe her as feminine
through sexualized violence that was intended to relegate her to subor-
dinate status, her only choice to transcend this abject state and assume a
position of leadership was to redefine herself as provisionally masculine by
denying those characteristics that threatened to expose her as feminine.
Within this revolutionary sphere, mastery of the language of violence
was a necessary precondition for leadership. But such mastery ironically
also led to Nagata’s downfall, as she was subsequently convicted in the
court of public opinion as a “menacing crazy-woman motivated by spite
and jealousy,” in contrast to her male colleague Mori Tsuneo, who was
162 Conclusion
depicted merely as a “political leader whose plans went astray.”12 Even as

she was sentenced to death for her assumption of the male prerogative
of violence, she was reinscribed as feminine through the stereotypically
“female” characteristics of spitefulness and jealousy. It is no wonder that
the women’s liberation activists, who had fought their own battles with a
mass media that sought to trivialize their demands for social change, could
identify with her plight.
The example of Nagata, and those like Tanaka who rose to her
defense, poignantly underscores the double bind faced by women who
struggled against “femininity” as the logical opposite of an ideology of
masculine superiority. Stereotypical constructions of women as “naturally”
passive, maternal, and inferior to men were clearly abhorrent, both to the
participants in the women’s liberation movement and to the writers dis-
cussed in this study. However, the binary logic that confined women to
the negative side of this polarity made it difficult to attack ideologies of
maternal femininity without appearing to also lash out at those women
who complied with existing gender norms. The only position one could
occupy within this structure, once one had rejected feminine inferiority,
was a provisionally “masculine” subject position that carried its own chau-
vinist baggage. The persistence of this binary logic accounts for much of
the “feminist misogyny,” expressed by both writers of fiction and women’s
liberation activists who strove to extricate themselves from a model of
femininity that rendered them mute, passive, and inferior. Just as Tanaka
expressed solidarity with Nagata, seeing her as emblematic of the devastat-
ing effects of an engendering process that denigrates half of humanity,
women writers of fiction likewise produced dystopic narratives of female
misogyny, both self- and other-directed, that exposed this self-abnegation
as a product of the misogynist logic of hegemonic gender roles.
Language
If there is any way out of this “prison-house” of gender, it seems to be
through language. When the protagonists of “Broken Oath” and “Get-
ting on the Wrong Train” finally submit to the process of engendering,
the moment is signified by their loss of language, implying that they are
rendered defenseless and incapable of further resistance to the disciplin-
ary mechanisms that would contain them. On the other hand, while the
protagonist of Blue Journey is likewise silenced during her traumatic expe-
rience of scopic rape, she is able to regain a position of empowerment
by literally becoming the author of her own story. This character even
explicitly articulates her intention to subvert gender norms through a per-

fect performance of them, effectively enunciating a posture of resistance
through parody.
Subversion of gender norms is achieved on a metatextual level as well,
as other narratives reenact the process of engendering so as to draw the
reader’s attention to the catastrophic costs of conforming to the structures
that discipline and enforce such norms. The scene in “Toddler-Hunting”
when the little boy is forcibly inscribed with markers of femininity may
be read as a sort of hysterical parody of the disciplinary mechanisms that
produce femininity in young girls. In Blue Journey, Kurahashi exposes the
violence and cruelty of this experience of feminization by directly interpel-
lating her audience through the second-person pronoun “you,” effectively
placing the reader in the position of the object of scopic rape. “Castle
of Bones” reveals the hypocrisy of the double standard that discursively
constructs women as inferior to men even when they demonstrate them-
selves capable of passing the tests that would prove their “worth” on par
with men. Finally, “Snake” parodies gender norms by rendering them
unnatural and incomprehensible, frustrating any attempt to align bodies
with behaviors and desires that are understood to be normative. Through
narratives that disturb or challenge the reader to reexamine her own pre-
conceptions about “natural” distinctions between the sexes, these authors
trouble gender norms in ways that echo the consciousness-raising tactics
of the women’s liberation movement of the following decade.
The purpose of consciousness-raising was to encourage women to
recognize the gendered structures that confined them, toward finding
practical ways of articulating new and less restrictive models of femininity
in their lives. This method of praxis may be seen as similar to the project
of the fiction writers we have analyzed in the sense that fiction served as a
medium for exposing gendered networks of power and the violence done
to women in being forced to comply with such structures. Such narra-
tives indeed seem intended to shock women (and men) into recognizing
the asymmetrical power relationships in which gender in Japanese society
was embedded. But while the intent of these two groups may have been
similar, their use of language to achieve this end seems to have yielded
somewhat different results. Rather than parodying or disrupting existing
structures of gender from within, by reenacting their effects in order to
critique them, the women’s lib movement sought an “authentic” feminine
voice with which to articulate feminine experience as fundamentally differ-
ent from that of men (yet no less valuable).
This project of articulating an “authentic” femininity, freed from
164 Conclusion
the strictures of the dominant masculine paradigm, is evident in many

of the publications of the women’s lib movement. Minikomi, or
“mini-communication” publications—in opposition to the masukomi,
or mass-communication, large-circulation periodicals of mainstream
society—were one important way that activists of various lib groups
communicated with each other, particularly during the 1970s. As San-
dra Buckley notes, these minikomi tended to employ characteristically
feminine language as a means of creating a feminine discursive space.13
This rhetorical strategy was then adopted by larger-circulation feminist
journals such as Onna erosu, one of the most important periodicals to
have emerged from the women’s liberation movement. Buckley explains
the effect of this rhetorical style as follows:
In a review some years later one Japanese feminist who had been
an avid reader of the journal recalled how important it had been
to her that the language used in Onna Erosu was less stiff and
academic than that of the U.S. feminist works translated into
Japanese or the publications of the growing number of Japanese
academic feminists. The frequent use of the feminine first-person
pronoun (watashi) and the sense of familiarity created by a more
colloquial or informal language was a direct carry over from the
style of the minikomi.14
Academic styles of writing were indeed associated with masculine speech

at this time—and to some extent today as well—and the attempt to create
a language for feminism that spoke directly to the heart of women was a
prime objective of the Japanese lib movement of the 1970s.
Innovative use of language was also evident in the project to translate
the landmark American feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves into Japanese.
Feminist activists who participated in this project recall struggling to find
a language that women could use to describe their bodies without shame
and without the distancing effect that medical terminology brought, along
with substantially chauvinist implications.15 For example, Chinese com-
pounds used to represent female reproductive organs frequently employ
the characters for “dark/negative,” “shame,” and “blood,” all of which
traditionally connote “impurity” in Japan.16 Feminists at this time recog-
nized that “standard” Japanese was in fact “masculine” speech, permeated
with sexist terms for anything associated with the feminine, and it would
have to be rewritten before women could speak of female bodies and expe-
riences in positive terms. In this context, “feminine” speech signified the
creation of a linguistic community among women that was separate from

and opposed to dominant masculine discourse.
In the realm of literature, however, women had long been confined
to the separate sphere of “women’s-style literature,” which was seen as
inherently inferior to the dominant masculine discourse. This ideological
categorization of men’s and women’s literature was supported by a set of
binary oppositions that aligned the feminine with “popular,” “autobio-
graphical,” and intellectually and artistically inferior, as opposed to main-
stream (that is, malestream) literature, which was purely artistic, confes-
sional, and intellectually superior. While the fascination with confessional
literature had generally fallen out of fashion by the 1960s, the qualitative
distinction between “feminine” and “masculine” spheres remained.17
Keenly aware of these distinctions, the women writers who made their
debuts during the 1960s boom in women’s literature explicitly sought to
inhabit this “masculine” sphere so as to disrupt it from within, challenging
its privileged claim to artistic and intellectual authenticity. All of the writ-
ers analyzed in this study were considered by contemporary critics to write
intellectually sophisticated stories, but Kōno’s writing in particular has
been described as “cerebral” and “difficult to comprehend.”18 Kurahashi
goes so far as to employ that most “masculine” of discourses, mathemat-
ics, to describe her own literary style: beginning with a “hypothesis” or
“axiom,” she introduces several “variables” (that is, characters) and allows
the plot to play out according to the logic that governs the “anti-world”
that she has created.19 Both Kurahashi and Takahashi have been described
as “masculine” or “androgynous” writers for their so-called unfeminine
literary styles and themes.20 For women writers of the 1960s, the term
“women’s style literature” was a restrictive category ideologically imposed
upon them by male conceptions of the way women “should” write, and
many were therefore motivated to resist this categorization by deliberately
employing language that was encoded as “masculine.” In this context,
then, “feminine” language signified not a liberatory expression of an
authentic female self but rather a false and sexist ideology of female intel-
lectual inferiority imposed upon women so as to characterize women’s
writing as second class.
There are a striking number of conceptual similarities between the liter-

ary feminism of the 1960s, and the feminist discourse of the women’s
lib activists of the 1970s. There are also a few differences in emphasis
and articulation, most particularly having to do with generic differences
between literature and political speech as modes of discourse. Literature,
166 Conclusion
unbound by the requirement to “make sense” or forward a coherent

political message, is in some ways freer to subvert dominant hegemonic
paradigms with impunity. In the realm of fantasy, it is perhaps easier to
imagine alternatives that subvert or challenge the status quo, while absolv-
ing oneself of the thorny question of how to put those ideals into practice.
On the other hand, one has to first be able to envision an alternative
before the status quo can be changed. Women writers of literature during
the 1960s took on the difficult task of challenging gender roles that had
come to seem natural and inevitable and were furthermore enforced by
disciplinary mechanisms that penetrated all levels of Japanese society. The
women’s liberation activists of the 1970s may therefore be said to have
picked up where these writers of literature left off.
The emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s had an extraor-
dinary impact on the tone and content of discourse on gender and sexual-
ity in Japanese society. In the early part of the decade, the “women’s lib”
movement sought to open up the field of possible expressions of feminine
identity to include greater acceptance of female sexuality on its own terms
and questioned conventional assumptions about the “naturalness” of gen-
dered divisions of labor that structured public and private life. In the latter
half of the 1970s, this led to the creation of “women’s studies” as an aca-
demic field of study, as well as the increasing influence of female scholars
and bureaucrats on government policies to promote gender equality. The
explosion of political protest by women in the early 1970s could certainly
be seen as one catalyst for the institutional and legal reforms of subsequent
decades that opened the door to women’s participation in ever broader
sectors of Japanese society.21 However, judging by the obvious feminist
theoretical relevance of the authors addressed in this study, it may be time
to rethink histories of feminism that privilege explicitly political speech
over other methods of feminist discourse.
It is also important to stress the role of historical, economic, and
social forces in shaping the forms of feminist resistance that were possible
in each decade. The time frame covered by this study was designed to
coincide with the end of the high economic growth period for this reason.
The early 1970s saw the onset of a recession brought on by changes in the
exchange rate and an international oil crisis caused by the OPEC embargo.
These shocks to the economic foundation of Japanese society, in addition
to increasing concerns regarding the environmental and human costs of
prosperity, prompted Japan to rethink its total commitment to economic
growth at the expense of other measures of quality of life.22 In this context
of soul searching and forced paradigm shifts, it became possible to credibly
challenge the status quo, including the gender roles that formed the bed-
rock of such social structures, in ways that would have been significantly
more difficult during the prosperous and freewheeling economic growth
era of the 1960s. Perhaps, then, it is no wonder that feminist discourse
during this period took the form of imaginative subversions of gender
norms.
What a difference a decade makes.
Notes
Introduction
1.â•‡ Takahashi Takako, “Onnagirai,” in Tamashii no inu (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
1975), 231. For a complete English translation of this essay, with commentary, see
chapter 2 in Julia C. Bullock, “A Single Drop of Crimson: Takahashi Takako and
the Narration of Liminality” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2004).
2.â•‡ Kathleen S. Uno, “The Death of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’?” in Postwar
Japan as History, edited by Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).
3.â•‡ By “radical feminism,” I mean attempts to remake social or ideological
structures that define normative gender roles, with the intent of altering Japanese
society at its core. This distinguishes it from the “housewife feminism” of the same
period, which advocated for certain social reforms (such as consumer protection)
that would benefit women through an improvement of family life. Housewife-
feminist activists tended to work within, rather than against, normative construc-
tions of gender by emphasizing their moral authority as mothers. As this study is
devoted to discursive attempts to alter gender roles and identities beyond that of
the “good wife, wise mother,” I am obviously more concerned with radical femi-
nist discourse. For a thorough study of the historical development of housewife
feminism in prewar Japan, see Akiko Tokuza, The Rise of the Feminist Movement
in Japan (Tokyo: Keio University Press, 1999). For the early postwar decades, see
chapter 6 of Vera Mackie’s Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment,
and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4.â•‡ For a thorough account of the student-movement origins of “women’s
lib,” see chapter 1 in Setsu Shigematsu, “Tanaka Mitsu and the Women’s Libera-
tion Movement in Japan: Towards a Radical Feminist Ontology” (PhD disserta-
tion, Cornell University, 2003).
5.â•‡ For example, Kurahashi Yumiko, one of the most important and critically
acclaimed writers of this generation, wrote scathing critiques of the intellectual
paucity of New Left political movements, even as she attempted in her own way
to force readers to question reigning common sense about properly masculine and
feminine gender identities.
169
170 Notes to Pages 5–15
6.â•‡ For an overview of the theoretical concerns of “women’s lib” activists of

the 1970s, see Ichiyo Muto, “The Birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement in
the 1970s,” in The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise, and Resistance since 1945,
edited by Joe Moore (Armonk, NY: East Gate/M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
7.â•‡ Kurahashi debuted in 1960 with the short story “Partei” (Parutai).
Kōno had been writing for some time before this but did not earn much critical
attention until the publication of her short story “Toddler-Hunting” (Yōjigari)
in 1961. Takahashi first began publishing in 1965 with the story “Glitter”
(Kirameki). All three of these stories are available in English translation (see the
works cited).
8.â•‡ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New
York: Random House, 1990), 139–145.
9.â•‡ Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 5–6.
10.â•‡ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1999),
171–180.
Chapter 1: Party Crashers and Poison Pens

1.â•‡ This historical survey has been compiled primarily from information in Elise
K. Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (New York: Routledge,
2002), and Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to
the Present (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2.â•‡ The United States had begun pressuring Japan to remilitarize even before
the Occupation ended, resulting in the creation of a National Police Reserve that
evolved into what is currently known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in 1954.
This U.S. pressure for remilitarization was highly ironic in light of the fact that the
new (American-authored) Japanese constitution prominently featured a renuncia-
tion of all forms of aggressive military force (Article 9).
3.â•‡ Socialist Party members who tried to obstruct the vote were physically
removed from the Diet building on the orders of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke,
and when the rest of the socialists boycotted the session, the LDP passed the bill
anyway over strenuous protests not just from the opposition parties, but also from a
large portion of the Japanese citizenry. Large-scale riots ensued, and Kishi was forced
to step down as the news media criticized him for precipitating this “crisis for par-
liamentary democracy.” Takafusa Nakamura, A History of Shōwa Japan, 1926–1989,
trans. Edwin Whenmouth (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1998), 347.
4.â•‡ Early postwar victories by organized labor had been undermined first by
the Occupation’s “reverse course” and then by increasingly cozy relations between
the Japanese government and business interests throughout the 1950s. As Japan
transitioned from coal to oil as its primary source of fuel for industry, there was
a rash of mine closures and cutbacks. At Miike these included the involuntary
“retirement” of selected workers. When it became evident that a disproportionate
Notes to Pages 16–23 171
number of union leaders had been targeted for retirement, a strike was called,
leading to a lockout of unionized workers.
5.â•‡ Tipton, 166.
6.â•‡ Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, 279. Ikeda’s plan cannot be solely
credited for these changes, as the trend toward high economic growth actually
began in 1950, with the onset of the Korean War. Japan’s strategic location, not
to mention its role as subordinate nation under the Occupation by the United
States (and later as ally under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty), made it the logical
choice as a supply base for U.S. troops during that conflict. Japan’s growth should
also be seen against a backdrop of global economic growth facilitated by booming
international trade. See ibid., 246.
7.â•‡ Tipton, 169, 177.
8.â•‡ Ibid., 170, 182.
9.â•‡ Ibid., 167–168.
10.â•‡ Shōwa niman’nichi no zenkiroku: Anpo to kōdo seichō, vol. 12 (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1990), 206–207.
11.â•‡ Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, “College Women Today: Options and
Dilemmas,” in Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and
Future, edited by Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (New York:
Feminist Press, 1995), 126–132.
12.â•‡ For more on this ideology of femininity, see Uno.
13.â•‡ For a thorough explanation of this term, see Foucault, The History of Sex-
uality, 139–145.
14.â•‡ Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, 214–215.
15.â•‡ Andrew Gordon, “Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life
Movement in Postwar Japan,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by
Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005), 428.
16.â•‡ Tiana Norgren, Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction
in Postwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 56.
17.â•‡ Ibid., 5–6.
18.â•‡ See ibid., chapter 5, for an overview of these movements.
19.â•‡ Ibid., 56, 96. On “purity education,” see chapter 3 in Sonia Ryang, Love
in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex, and Society (London and New
York: Routledge, 2006).
20.â•‡ See Norgren, chapter 7, on the politics surrounding legalization of the pill.
21.â•‡ The cooperation of the male partner is obviously true of condoms because
of the nature of the method. Additionally, a male partner’s consent was legally
required before an abortion could be performed.
22.â•‡ Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in
Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 159.
23.â•‡ Ryang, 69.
24.â•‡ Ibid., 88.
25.â•‡ Donald Roden, “From ‘Old Miss’ to New Professional: A Portrait of

Women Educators under the American Occupation of Japan, 1945–52,” History
of Education Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1983): 471.
26.â•‡ Ibid., 471.
27.â•‡ Ibid., 476.
28.â•‡ See, for example, her reminiscences of this time in Takahashi Kazumi no
omoide, discussed below under “Texts and Contexts.”
29.â•‡ For example, Atsuko Kameda finds that as late as 1975, Japanese school
textbooks in various subjects were riddled with portrayals of boys and girls in
stereotypically gender-coded behavior, informally indoctrinating students into
their future roles as appropriately gendered men and women. See Atsuko Kameda,
“Sexism and Gender Stereotyping in Schools,” in Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda,
Japanese Women, 112–113.
30.â•‡ Ibid., 111. As Sally Hastings notes, girls growing up in the United States
at this time would have experienced a similarly sex-segregated vocational curricu-
lum (personal communication).
31.â•‡ Kameda, 112.
32.â•‡ Hiroko Hirakawa, “Maiden Martyr for ‘New Japan’: The 1960 Ampo and
the Rhetoric of the Other Michiko,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 23 (2002):
95.
33.â•‡ Yoko Kawashima, “Female Workers: An Overview of Past and Current
Trends,” in Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda, Japanese Women, 276.
34.â•‡ Ibid., 281.
35.â•‡ Eiko Shinotsuka, “Women Workers in Japan: Past, Present, Future,” in
Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and Change, edited by Joyce Gelb and
Marian Lief Palley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 115.
36.â•‡ Ibid., 102.
37.â•‡ Gordon, “Managing the Japanese Household,” 425.
38.â•‡ Ibid., 447.
39.â•‡ Jan Bardsley, “Discourse on Women in Postwar Japan: The Housewife
Debate of 1955,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 16 (1999): 8–9.
40.â•‡ Ibid., 11–12.
41.â•‡ For a history of the bundan prior to the end of World War II, see Irena
Powell, Writers and Society in Modern Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International,
1983). For a variety of perspectives on the genre of shishōsetsu, see Edward Fowler,
The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Fic-
tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); James Fujii, Complicit Fic-
tions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); and Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese
Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
42.â•‡ “Ichiyō had to rewrite her submissions until they struck [mentor Nakarai]
Tōsui as appropriately feminine.” Rebecca Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers
of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 44.
43.â•‡ Joan Ericson, “The Origins of the Concept of ‘Women’s Literature,’â†œ” in

The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, edited by
Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 101.
44.â•‡ The characterization of Sono’s writing is taken from Sachiko Schierbeck,
Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th Century (Copenhagen: University of Copen-
hagen, Museum Tusculanum, 1994), 133.
45.â•‡ Chieko M. Ariga, “Text Versus Commentary: Struggles over the Cultural
Meanings of ‘Woman,’â†œ” in Schalow and Walker, The Woman’s Hand. Ariga demon-
strates that kaisetsu, or explanatory essays appended to the paperback editions that
were responsible for bringing women’s work to a mass audience, frequently served
to neutralize feminist literary challenges to the status quo. She specifically addresses
kaisetsu that accompanied the publication of the work of Takahashi and Kōno.
46.â•‡ Chieko M. Ariga, “Who’s Afraid of Amino Kiku? Gender Conflict and the
Literary Canon,” in Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda, Japanese Women. Ariga dem-
onstrates how such gendered expectations of women’s literary production worked
to exclude one popular prewar writer from the canon. According to Ariga, Amino
Kiku (1900–1978), a writer of “semi-autobiographical fiction” and a contemporary
of more well-known writers like Miyamoto Yuriko, was apparently quite popular
with mainstream audiences and was rewarded with literary prizes and critical acclaim.
Yet today she is largely unknown because she was almost uniformly excluded from
all the major volumes of collected works that have secured the lasting reputations
of many of her contemporaries. Ariga attributes this neglect to Amino’s consistent
portrayal of female protagonists who are completely independent of relationships
with men, as well as her depiction of female bodily experiences in frank, unsenti-
mental, and sometimes grotesque ways that alienated male critics.
47.â•‡ The term zenshū refers to any collection of works by a single author or
group of authors, but here I am referring to large anthologies such as Nihon kindai
bungaku taikei. These collections present themselves as a selection of the best
literature published during a period of time (anywhere from specific eras such as
“Shōwa literature” to all-inclusive periods like “modern Japan”). As such, they
purport to determine for posterity which works of literature survive as “timeless”
and which ones are quickly forgotten.
48.â•‡ Margaret Hillenbrand, “Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and the San Francisco
System: The Occupation Narratives of Ōe Kenzaburō,” Journal of Japanese Studies
33, no. 2 (2007): 399.
49.â•‡ Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa:
Literature and Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 132.
50.â•‡ Douglas N. Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (London and
New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 35–36.
51.â•‡ Susan J. Napier, Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism
in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
52.â•‡ Ibid., 92–93.

53.â•‡ To the End of the Heavens is one obvious example of this type of story.
54.â•‡ Atsuko Sakaki, “Kurahashi Yumiko’s Negotiations with the Fathers,” in
The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father,
edited by Rebecca L. Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).
55.â•‡ Biographical information on Kōno has been compiled from Kōno Taeko,
“Kōno Taeko nenpu,” in Shōwa bungaku zenshū, edited by Yasushi Inoue (Tokyo:
Shōgakukan, 1987).
56.â•‡ Davinder L. Bhowmik, “Kōno Taeko,” in Modern Japanese Writers,
edited by Jay Rubin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 171. Enemy
cultural products were banned during the height of the Pacific War conflict. The
work of the Brontë sisters, in particular, would profoundly influence her later
development as a writer.
57.â•‡ The decision to draft young unmarried women was also consistent with
government policy to preserve the integrity of the family unit by keeping married
women with children at home. See Sandra Buckley, “Altered States: The Body
Politics of ‘Being-Woman,’â†œ” in Postwar Japan as History, edited by Andrew Gor-
don (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 365.
58.â•‡ For a brief account of such disciplinary regimes, see “Japan in Wartime,”
chapter 12 of Gordon, A Modern History of Japan.
59.â•‡ For readers who cannot read Japanese, see “Full Tide” (Michishio, 1964),
translated by Lucy North, in Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (New York: New
Directions, 1996). Other stories that treat this topic are “Inside the Fence” (Hei
no naka, 1962) and “Distant Summer” (Tōi natsu, 1964). Both are included in
volume one of Kōno’s untranslated collected works, Kōno Taeko zenshū (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1994).
60.â•‡ Indeed, most families saw college attendance for young women as a
means of improving their marriage prospects rather than preparing them for
any sort of career, and in this sense Kōno’s family may be seen as typical of
the mainstream opinion regarding gender-appropriate life choices. See Chizuko
Uema, “Resisting Sadomasochism in Kōno Taeko” (PhD dissertation, University
of Oregon, 1998), 9–10.
61.â•‡ In English, see “Crabs” (Kani, 1963), “Toddler-Hunting” (Yōjigari,
1961), and “Ants Swarm” (Ari takaru, 1966) in North. “On the Examining
Room Table” (Utena ni noru, 1965) and “The Next Day” (Akuru hi, 1965), in
volume two of Kōno’s collected works, also deal with these themes.
62.â•‡ Uema, 3.
63.â•‡ Kōno, Kōno Taeko zenshū, vol. 2, 143.
64.â•‡ Several scholars have noted a progression in Kōno’s literature from
protagonists who play the masochist role in her early works to those who take
up the role of sadist in later stories. Some interpret these themes as a metaphor
for women’s subordinate role in Japanese society and see her heroines’ eventual
assumption of roles of power (as opposed to submission) in later works as a kind of

literary closure of this theme, illustrating women’s liberation from the bounds of
patriarchal oppression. One example of this type of interpretation is Uema.
65.â•‡ Other prestigious prizes included the Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Award (for
Ichinen no bokka, 1980) and the Noma Literary Award (for Miiratori ryōkitan,
1991). Kōno’s work has appeared in anthologies such as the Nihon bungaku
zenshū (Collection of Japanese Literature, Kawade shobō shinsha, 1971); Gen-
dai bungaku taikei (Compendium of Contemporary Literature, Chikuma shobō,
1968, 1977); and Shōwa bungaku zenshū (Shōwa Era Literature Collection,
Shōgakukan, 1987).
66.â•‡ Yonaha Keiko, Gendai joryū sakkaron (Tokyo: Shinbisha, 1986), 7.
67.â•‡ Bhowmik, 170.
68.â•‡ As recalled in Takahashi’s 1975 essay, “Coeducation” (Danjo kyōgaku), in
Kioku no kurasa (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 1977). This is echoed in other essays in this
volume and in Takahashi Takako, Tamashii no inu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1975).
69.â•‡ Takahashi, Takahashi Kazumi no omoide, 92. Unless otherwise indicated,
all translations in the book are mine.
70.â•‡ This information is compiled from anecdotal evidence in Takahashi
Kazumi no omoide (ibid.), a memoir recounting their married life together until
Kazumi’s premature death from cancer in 1971, and from Takahashi’s self-authored
personal chronology at the end of her selected works: Takahashi Takako, “Jihitsu
nenpu,” in Takahashi Takako jisen shōsetsu shū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1994).
71.â•‡ See, for example, “Doll Love” (Ningyōai, 1976), “Secret Rituals” (Higi,
1978), and The House of Rebirth (Yomigaeri no ie, 1980). While the stories that
depict Takahashi’s fascination with this particular theme fall temporally outside
the parameters of this study, Maryellen Mori has published extensively on this
topic; see “The Quest for Jouissance in Takahashi Takako’s Texts,” in Schalow
and Walker, The Woman’s Hand, and “The Liminal Male as Liberatory Figure in
Japanese Women’s Fiction,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60, no. 2 (2000).
72.â•‡ Having completed a graduation thesis on Baudelaire in 1954, which stim-
ulated her interest in philosophical problems of good and evil, Takahashi immersed
herself in a study of the works of François Mauriac, which led her to complete a
master’s thesis on this author in 1958. Some of her first publications were in fact
not works of literature but literary criticism of authors like Mauriac and Endō
Shūsaku, who grappled with such questions from a Catholic perspective. She later
devoted herself to translation of Mauriac’s story Thérèse Desqueyroux (published in
1963), a tale of a woman who tries to poison her husband and comes face to face
with the evil impulses that lurk beneath the surface of her everyday life.
73.â•‡ Yonaha, 35.
74.â•‡ Mark Williams, “Double Vision: Divided Narrative Focus in Takahashi
Takako’s Yosōi Seyo, Waga Tamashii Yo,” in Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contempo-
rary Japan, edited by Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 111.
75.â•‡ Biographical information on Kurahashi is taken primarily from Chikuma

gendai bungaku taikei 82 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1977). See also Faye Yuan
Kleeman, “Kurahashi Yumiko,” in Japanese Fiction Writers since World War II,
edited by Van C. Gessel (Detroit: Gale Research, 1997), 93–101.
76.â•‡ NHK, the Japanese national television network, is functionally equivalent
to the BBC in the United Kingdom.
77.â•‡ Sakaki, “Kurahashi Yumiko’s Negotiations with the Fathers,” 311.
78.â•‡ See, for example, “Like a Witch” (Yōjo no yō ni, 1964), in which “femi-
ninity” is explicitly defined as thoroughly subsuming oneself in love for a man.
The protagonist’s writing career begins, she says, when she loses the ability to love
men and therefore “stops being a woman”; her ability to write originates from
the “third eye,” which develops at the site where her “female parts” shrivel away
(Kurahashi Yumiko zensakuhin, vol. 4, 247–248).
79.â•‡ A remarkable exception to this trend is “Virginia,” an unusually (for Kura-
hashi) realistic story loosely based on her stay in the United States, written just
after her return to Japan. In this story the author seems to be working through
some of her own anxieties regarding her conflicting identities of wife/mother and
published author. For more on this work, see Julia C. Bullock, “We’ll Always Have
Iowa: Gender and National Identity in Kurahashi Yumiko’s ‘Virginia,’â†œ” Proceed-
ings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS) 7 (2007).
80.â•‡ Kurahashi Yumiko, “Symbiosis” (Kyōsei), in Kurahashi Yumiko zensa-
kuhin, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976), 109.
81.â•‡ Ibid., 93.
82.â•‡ For a thorough account of the vituperative debates surrounding Blue
Journey and subsequent works, see Sakaki, “Kurahashi Yumiko’s Negotiations with
the Fathers.”
83.â•‡ Takeo Okuno, “Is Fiction Inherently the Realm of Women?” in Woman
Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing, edited by Rebecca L.
Copeland (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006). For a list of the women
writers honored by both the Akutagawa and Naoki prize committees, see Chieko
Ariga, “Onna ga teigi suru ‘onna’: Akutagawa shō, Naoki shō sakuhin ni miru,”
Nichibei josei jānaru 18 (1995). Ariga notes a marked increase in female winners
of both prizes beginning in the 1960s and then accelerating dramatically from
1980 to the time of writing.
84.â•‡ For more on Kurahashi’s popularity in the 1960s and her relationship
to the countercultural milieu, see Suzuki Naoko, “Ribu zen’ya no Kurahashi
Yumiko—Josei shintai o meguru seiji,” in Karuchuaru poritikusu 1960/70 (Tokyo:
Serika shobo, 2005). For an account in English of Kurahashi’s unfortunate experi-
ences with the bundan, see Atsuko Sakaki, “(Re)Canonizing Kurahashi Yumiko:
Toward Alternative Perspectives for ‘Modern’ ‘Japanese’ ‘Literature,’â†œ” in Snyder
and Gabriel, Ōe and Beyond.
85.â•‡ See Shimizu Yoshinori, “Arano no soko kara todoku koe,” in Doko ka aru
ie: Takahashi Takako jisen essei shū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006).
Chapter 2: The Masculine Gaze as Disciplinary Mechanism

Epigraph. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Femi-
nism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley (New York: Routledge,
1988), 64.
1.â•‡ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 200–201.
2.â•‡ Ibid., 228.
3.â•‡ Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
Inspired by ‘Duel in the Sun.’â†œ” In Penley, Feminism and Film Theory, 69–79.
4.â•‡ See, for example, Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender,
and the Self (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), and Caroline
Ramazanoğlu, ed., Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between
Foucault and Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
5.â•‡ Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, 221.
6.â•‡ For example, Garon notes the role of home inspections by grassroots New
Life Association activists in campaigns to inculcate frugality and resource conser-
vation as late as the 1980s (175). Likewise, in “Managing the Japanese House-
hold,” Gordon notes that such home visits were also integral in the movement’s
promotion of birth control (444–445), as well as intervention into family disputes
(435–436), demonstrating the degree to which outside surveillance penetrated to
the most intimate corners of women’s lives.
7.â•‡ Kōno Taeko, “Broken Oath” (Haisei), in Kōno Taeko zenshū, vol. 2
(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995), 289. Subsequent page citations will appear paren-
thetically in the discussion of the text. All translations are mine unless otherwise
indicated.
8.â•‡ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.
9.â•‡ Kasumigaseki is a neighborhood in Tokyo where the headquarters of Japa-
nese government bureaucracies are located, and the name of the area itself is used
metonymically to refer to this seat of administrative power, just as “Wall Street” is
used to refer to the center of financial power in the United States.
10.â•‡ Takahashi Takako, “Getting on the Wrong Train” (Jōsha sakugo), in
Hone no shiro (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 1972), 221–222. Subsequent page citations
will appear parenthetically.
11.â•‡ Kurahashi Yumiko, Blue Journey (Kurai tabi), in Kurahashi Yumiko
zensakuhin (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975), 98–99. Ellipsis in original. Subsequent
page citations will appear parenthetically.
12.â•‡ Chapter 1 in Atsuko Sakaki, “The Intertextual Novel and the Interre-
lational Self: Kurahashi Yumiko, a Japanese Postmodernist” (PhD dissertation,
University of British Columbia, 1992).
13.â•‡ This is not to suggest that only women are subordinated to disciplinary
mechanisms that produce them as gendered subjects. While a definitive conclu-
sion regarding the production of masculine gender identity is clearly unwarranted
given the parameters of this study, I hypothesize that men are likewise subjected to
a different type of societally inflicted gaze that polices their behavior and crafts them
into appropriately “masculine” subjects. Take, for example, the scene in Mishima
Yukio’s Confessions of a Mask, in which the young male protagonist dresses in his
mother’s clothes and performs in drag for an audience of friends and family, only
to be made to understand, via the horrified looks in the eyes of his loved ones, that
his behavior and desires are “abnormal.”
Chapter 3: Feminist Misogyny? or How I Learned to Hate My Body

Epigraph. Susan Gubar, “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the
Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One,’â†œ” Feminist Studies 20, no. 3 (1994):
462.
1.â•‡ See chapter 1, “Approaching Abjection,” of Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1–4.
2.â•‡ Kōno Taeko, “Bone Meat,” in North, Toddler-Hunting, 259. As “Bone
Meat” is one of two stories analyzed in this book that exist in English translation
and since the translated version of this story is widely used and cited in English-
language scholarship, I have opted to quote from this version rather than provide
my own translations of the original. Subsequent page citations will appear paren-
thetically and are from the translation by Lucy Lower so that English readers can
easily locate the quoted passages.
3.â•‡ Kurahashi Yumiko, “Like a Witch” (Yōjo no yō ni), in Kurahashi Yumiko
zensakuhin, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976), 217. All translations are mine. Sub-
sequent page citations will appear parenthetically.
4.â•‡ This notion of being impregnated by his gaze is eerily reminiscent of the
denouement of Takahashi’s “Getting on the Wrong Train,” where the eyes of the
young boy likewise “take up residence” inside the protagonist in the final lines of
the story.
5.â•‡ While the inclusion of “female Diet members” in this list of abhorrent types
may sound far from the Western idea of a feminine stereotype, in the Japanese
context, “housewife feminism” gave certain women license to participate in poli-
tics on the condition that they did so on the basis of their moral authority as wives
and mothers. Many female Diet members in the first few postwar decades ran on
such platforms. One example of this “feminine” approach to politics is Ichikawa
Fusae; though Ichikawa herself ironically did not marry or have children, she rose
to power on a platform that embraced “housewife-feminist” issues as central to
social reform. The symbol of her campaign for inclusion in this predominantly
male-dominated structure of authority was the rice ladle, evocative of home and
hearth, and a mother’s “natural” instinct to nurture. Another example would be
Oku Mumeo, who is said to have lobbied male Diet members with a baby on
her back even before women were legally granted the right to vote. For more on
“housewife feminism,” see Tokuza.
6.â•‡ Takahashi Takako, “Castle of Bones” (Hone no shiro), in Hone no shiro

(Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 1972), 19. Subsequent page citations will appear
parenthetically.
7.â•‡ For example, Watashi seems to sense the purpose of the man’s “training”
without being told (8), and the old man expresses the reason for Watashi’s wan-
dering city streets in exactly the same language she uses to narrate it, even though
there is no evidence that she has explained her motivation to him (12).
Chapter 4: Odd Bodies

Epigraph. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter
with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 78.
1.â•‡ Ibid., 72.
2.â•‡ Kōno Taeko, “Toddler-Hunting,” 45–46. Because this text is available in
English, I have chosen to cite from the translation by Lucy North so that English
readers can readily locate the passages in question. All page numbers are from the
translated version and will henceforth appear parenthetically.
3.â•‡ Gretchen Jones, “Deviant Strategies: The Masochistic Aesthetic of Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō and Kōno Taeko” (PhD dissertation, University of California, 1999),
115–116.
4.â•‡ This is not to say that boys are not in fact also coercively inscribed with
signifiers of masculinity as they develop into young men. I have no doubt that this
is true, but it is not recognized by the text, devoted as it is to detailing the restric-
tive practices of feminine discipline.
5.â•‡ Takahashi Takako, “Hi,” Shinchō, no. 822 (1973): 66. Subsequent page
citations will appear parenthetically.
6.â•‡ White and red are fairly conventional signifiers for masculine and feminine
respectively in Japanese society.
7.â•‡ The renewal of ANPO, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, in 1960, the year
this story was written, caused the largest mass demonstration in Japanese history
as citizens from all sectors of society, led by student activists and left-wing political
parties, rioted outside the Diet building while the conservative ruling party forced
passage of the ratification of the treaty. (See chapter 1.)
8.â•‡ “Anti-world” is Kurahashi’s own term for the narrative universe depicted
by her literature. Atsuko Sakaki describes it in the following terms: “The relation-
ship between the ‘Anti-world’ and the ‘real’ world is [such that]â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›the former is
not a representation of the latter, and yet it is a deformed version of the latter, and
thus subject to it.” Sakaki, “The Intertextual Novel and the Interrelational Self,”
9. See below for more on this term as it applies to Kurahashi’s critique of binary
models of gender.
9.â•‡ Kurahashi Yumiko, “Hebi,” in Kurahashi Yumiko zensakuhin (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1975), 86. Subsequent page citations will appear parenthetically.
10.â•‡ Irigaray, 72.
11.â•‡ Kurahashi quoted in Sakaki, “The Intertextual Novel and the Interrela-
tional Self,” 10; italics in original.
Chapter 5: The Body of the Other Woman

1.â•‡ Here, the term “Other Woman” is meant to signify that the character in
question is “not-self”—that is, a character different from the female protagonist in
some fundamental way that prevents complete understanding or intimacy between
the two characters, in spite of the fact that they are both women and assumed to
be fundamentally similar. The concept of the “Other Woman” thus serves as an
ironic critique of theories of gender difference that present Woman as a monolithic
category that is sexually Other (and implicitly inferior) to Man.
2.â•‡ Gregory M. Pflugfelder, “â†œ‘S’ Is for Sister: Schoolgirl Intimacy and ‘Same-
Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” in Molony and Uno, Gendering
Modern Japanese History. Pflugfelder notes that usage of the term “S,” used to
denote such passionate female friendships, persisted well into the 1960s in Japan
(174–175). This would suggest that the phenomenon it described continued
roughly up to the time that lesbian activists who emerged from the “women’s lib”
movement began to organize in more visible and explicitly politicized ways (see
below).
3.â•‡ Mark McLelland, Queer Japan: From the Pacific War to the Internet Age
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
4.â•‡ Ibid., 93. In making this statement, I do not mean to suggest that lesbians
did not exist in Japan before the 1970s. However, it is clear from the difficul-
ties recounted by Japanese lesbians seeking partners in the decades prior to the
“women’s lib” movement that outside of the perverse press described by McLel-
land, lesbians were virtually invisible to mainstream Japanese society. It appears
that it was only with the creation of Wakakusa no Kai, considered to be the first
lesbian organization in Japan, in 1971, and subsequent efforts by lesbian women’s
lib activists later in the decade to produce publications aimed explicitly at the
emerging lesbian community, that information about lesbianism as a distinct form
of sexuality and lifestyle choice became more readily available, even to women
seeking to build networks of like-minded women. See Sharon Chalmers, Emerg-
ing Lesbian Voices from Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002),
and Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, eds., Queer Voices
from Japan: First-Person Narratives from Japan’s Sexual Minorities (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
5.â•‡ I have written about such triangular relationships in Takahashi’s literature
at length elsewhere; see Julia C. Bullock, “Fantasizing What Happens ‘When the
Goods Get Together’: Female Homoeroticism as Literary Trope,” Positions 14,
no. 3 (2006).
6.â•‡ Kōno Taeko, “On the Road” (Rojō), in Kōno Taeko zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1995), 19. Subsequent page citations will appear parenthetically.
7.â•‡ “Christmas cake” is a rather callous expression for an unmarried woman

past the age of twenty-five. Like the sweet for which they are named, such women
tended not to “sell” (on the marriage market) after the twenty-fifth. This expres-
sion has rapidly fallen out of use in recent years as Japanese women have prolonged
the average age of first marriage well into the thirties.
8.â•‡ For other stories dealing with this theme, see also “Final Moments”
(Saigo no toki, 1966) and “Snow” (Yuki, 1962), translated by North in Toddler-
Hunting.
9.â•‡ Takahashi Takako, “Intercourse” (Majiwari), in Hone no shiro (Kyoto: Jin-
bun shoin, 1972), 150. Subsequent page citations will appear parenthetically.
10.â•‡ Ibid., 155. The character for “woman,” used along with kanojo (she) as
the only appellations given to the female other in this story, is written accompanied
by a phonetic equivalent instructing the reader to pronounce it as hito, which like-
wise seems to imply an erotic relationship between the women. (Phrases like ano
hito, or “that person,” are commonly used as euphemisms for a lover or significant
other. Kanojo, of course, can also be used to refer to one’s girlfriend.)
11.â•‡ This is in marked contrast to the penetrative gesture of Watashi’s carving
her initial into the woman’s body at the conclusion of the story. While the diffuse
eroticism of these homoerotic encounters acts as a positive expression of intimacy
between the women, the phallic act of inscribing her identity upon the other
woman—perhaps a parody of the way women’s identities are reassigned upon mar-
riage to a man?—brings the relationship to an untimely end. This is evocative of
Luce Irigaray’s argument in This Sex Which Is Not One that women, who possess
erogenous zones everywhere and may climax repeatedly, have a fundamentally
different sort of sexuality to that of men. It therefore seems possible to read this
scene as a conflict between two opposing models of sexuality that concludes with
the heteronormative imperative reasserting its authority.
12.â•‡ In fact, in a number of Takahashi stories, homoerotic relationships between
women obtain according to a triangular structure that is mediated by a male, who
serves as both an object of rivalry and a medium for intimacy between the women.
See Bullock, “Fantasizing What Happens.”
13.â•‡ The text hints that this may be cancer, but the nature of the illness is never
clearly stated.
14.â•‡ Kurahashi Yumiko, “Bad Summer” (Warui natsu), in Kurahashi Yumiko
zensakuhin (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975), 144. Subsequent page citations will appear
parenthetically.
15.â•‡ Interpreting fictional literature as a more or less transparently realistic por-
trayal of the life of the author, a genre known in Japan as the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu),
had become the dominant mode of reading by the 1960s, when experimental writ-
ing by Kurahashi and other writers influenced by the European anti-novel arose
to challenge this paradigm. Kurahashi’s anti-“I-novel” stance is evident within this
text, when L scorns the inclination of critics to offer biographical readings of her
literature (136). Kurahashi’s propensity for frustrating autobiographical readings
of her texts by simultaneously suggesting and denying their relationship to events

in her own life is part of the “postmodern” aesthetic that Atsuko Sakaki details in
her study of Kurahashi, “The Intertextual Novel and the Interrelational Self.” For
more on the “I-novel” genre, see Tomi Suzuki.
16.â•‡ This is unclear because nouns in Japanese are typically not designated as
to singular or plural, as is the case in this passage, so the “place” from which the
blood emanates may in fact be one or many.
Conclusion
1.â•‡ Foucault, Discipline and Punish. See especially the chapter entitled “Docile
Bodies.”
2.â•‡ Chizuko Ueno, “The Japanese Women’s Movement: The Counter-Values
to Industrialism,” in The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, edited by
Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 177–178.
3.â•‡ Ibid., 170.
4.â•‡ Shigematsu, 64.
5.â•‡ Ibid., 75.
6.â•‡ Ibid., 64, f116.
7.â•‡ Ibid., 225–242. See also Patricia Steinhoff, “Three Women Who Loved
the Left: Radical Woman Leaders in the Japanese Red Army Movement,” in Re-
Imaging Japanese Women, edited by Anne E. Imamura (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996).
9.â•‡ Steinhoff, 309.
11.â•‡ Ibid., 229–230.
12.â•‡ Steinhoff, 311.
13.â•‡ Japanese speech exhibits a relatively high degree of gender marking,
extending even to its morphology (sentence-final particles, use of polite language
and verb endings, etc.). For a brief study of “characteristically feminine speech”
as employed selectively by middle-class, middle-aged Tokyo women, see Yoshiko
Matsumoto, “Gender Identity and the Presentation of Self in Japanese,” in Gen-
dered Practices in Language, edited by Sarah Benor et al. (Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications, 2002), 339–354. For other articles on the gendered aspects of the
Japanese language, see also Okamoto (91–113), Yuasa (193–209), and Miyazaki
(355–374) in the same volume. For a comprehensive study of the historical devel-
opment and transformation of Japanese “women’s language,” see Miyako Inoue,
Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2006).
14.â•‡ Sandra Buckley, “A Short History of the Feminist Movement in Japan,”
in Gelb and Palley, Women of Japan and Korea, 173.
15.â•‡ Sandra Buckley, Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1997). See Buckley’s interview with Nakanishi
Toyoko, 185–198.
16.â•‡ Ibid., 193; see also Buckley’s translation of the preface to the Japanese
version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, 202–203.
17.â•‡ Joan Ericson, Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s
Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 27–29.
18.â•‡ Jones, 102.
19.â•‡ Sakaki, “(Re)Canonizing Kurahashi Yumiko,” 159.
20.â•‡ Ericson, Be a Woman, 31–32.
21.â•‡ Scholars are not in agreement on the degree of connection between the
radical ūman ribu (women’s lib) movement and the more “institutionalized” aca-
demic and bureaucratic trend that characterized Japanese feminism following the
formation of the International Women’s Year Group in 1975. It seems clear that
while there were many differences in emphasis and rhetoric (and some antago-
nism) between the two camps, there were also common goals, and in some cases
women affiliated themselves with both. For varying accounts of this transition, see
Shigematsu (epilogue), Mackie (chapters 7 and 8), and Kazuko Tanaka, “The New
Feminist Movement in Japan, 1970–1990,” in Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda,
Japanese Women, 343–352. At any rate, it seems difficult to see these two as entirely
unconnected either to one another or to the radical literary feminism of the previ-
ous decade given their common origin in the social and economic pressures of the
gendered division of labor that underwrote the era of high economic growth.
22.â•‡ Beginning in the late 1960s, Japan was hit with a succession of scandals
revealing the harmful effects of industrial pollution on the health and welfare of
ordinary Japanese citizens—for example, incidents of mercury poisoning that came
to be known as the infamous “Minamata disease.” See chapter 11 in Tipton.
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Index
abjection, 10–11, 76, 78, 83, 99 Bardsley, Jan, 29

abortion, 13, 18, 19–21, 22, 115, Baudelaire, Charles, 175n72
171n21 beauty (as disciplinary regimen), 88,
activism: feminist, 4, 6, 12, 156, 89–96 passim, 98, 105–114
158, 159, 162, 164, 165–166, passim, 125
169n3, 170n6, 180n4; student, Bhowmik, Davinder, 44, 174n56
15, 48, 115, 117, 159, 179n7 biopower, 6, 7, 14, 18, 41, 52. See
(see also student movement) also Michel Foucault
Akutagawa prize, 43, 49, 51, birth control, 18, 19–21, 177n6
176n83 Blue Journey (Kurai tabi). See Kura-
Amino Kiku, 173n46 hashi Yumiko
androgyny, 98, 108, 110–114, 143, Bluestocking (Seitō), 3, 9
145, 148–149, 165 “Bone Meat” (Hone no niku). See
ANPO (U.S.-Japan Security Treaty), Kōno Taeko
4, 15, 26, 48, 115, 171n6, Breton, André, 38
179n7 “Broken Oath” (Haisei). See Kōno
anti-novel, 181n15 Taeko
anti-world, 115, 118, 120, 122– Buckley, Sandra, 164, 174n57,
123, 125, 165, 179n8 183nn15–16
“Ants Swarm” (Ari takaru). See bundan (Japanese literary world),
Kōno Taeko 4, 8, 9, 30–33, 34, 36, 51, 52,
Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku. See ANPO 172n41, 176n84
Ariga, Chieko M., 32, 173nn45–46, Butler, Judith, 8. See also gender:
176n83 performativity of
Article 9 (of the Japanese Constitu-
tion), 170n2 Camus, Albert, 39, 49
autoeroticism, 140, 145 “Castle of Bones” (Hone no shiro).
avant-garde, 51, 141 See Takahashi Takako
Chalmers, Sharon, 180n4
“Bad Summer” (Warui natsu). See chauvinism, 1, 3, 4, 24, 29, 34, 45,
Kurahashi Yumiko 77, 94, 95, 158, 162, 164
193
194 Index
“Christmas cake,” 131, 181n7 Ericson, Joan, 31

“coeds ruining the nation” debate, Etō Jun, 51
25–26
“Coeducation” (Danjo kyōgaku). Fifteen Year War. See Pacific War
See Takahashi Takako “Final Moments” (Saigo no toki).
Cold War, 15 See Kōno Taeko
“Congruent Figures” (Sōjikei). See Foucault, Michel, 6–8, 14, 18,
Takahashi Takako 52, 53–56, 59, 64, 74, 153,
Copeland, Rebecca, 172n42 171n13
corporeality, 10, 11, 34, 36, 52, Fowler, Edward, 172n41
67, 71, 74, 76, 77, 86, 87, 89, Fujii, James, 172n41
91–94, 96, 97, 104, 105, 107, “Full Tide” (Michishio). See Kōno
113, 114, 125, 142, 144, 145, Taeko
157
“Crabs” (Kani). See Kōno Taeko Garon, Sheldon, 7, 55, 177n6
gender: binary models of, 2–3, 5, 6,
deformity, 98, 105–114 passim 10–11, 26–27, 28, 68–70, 74,
“Distant Summer” (Tōi natsu). See 76, 93–96, 97–99, 102, 114,
Kōno Taeko 118–125, 127, 149, 151, 153,
“Doll Love” (Ningyōai). See Taka- 162, 165, 179n8; disciplinary
hashi Takako mechanisms of, 6–8, 10, 18–19,
doppelganger, 11, 129, 133, 138, 23, 28, 30, 32–33, 52, 53–56,
140, 143, 149–150 60–65, 74–76, 77, 89, 96, 101,
“Dream Castle” (Yume no shiro). 104, 106, 113, 125, 153–156,
See Kōno Taeko 161–163, 166, 177n13, 179n4;
and division of labor, 2, 8, 14,
“economic miracle,” 16. See also 17, 18–21, 26, 27–30, 50, 102,
high economic growth 125, 151, 154, 156, 183n21;
education: coeducation, 9, 22, performativity of, 8, 75, 95. See
38–39, 44–46; higher educa- also androgyny; Butler, Judith;
tion, 16–17, 23–26; Ministry of, “good wife and wise mother”;
22, 24–25; sex education, 20, masculinity
22, 171n19; and women’s roles, gender-neutral, 56, 67, 74, 154. See
20, 21–27, 155; and women also androgyny
writers, 9, 31, 38, 44–46, 84, “Getting on the Wrong Train”
127, 140, 146, 155 (Jōsha sakugo). See Takahashi
employment, 16, 27–30, 155 Takako
Enchi Fumiko, 9, 32 “Glitter” (Kirameki). See Takahashi
“Endless Expanse” (Byōbō). See Takako
Takahashi Takako “good wife and wise mother,” 2, 18,
Endō Shūsaku, 175n72 28, 67, 169n3
“Engagement” (Kon’yaku). See Gordon, Andrew, 28–29, 55,
Kurahashi Yumiko 170n1, 171n6, 174n58, 177n6
Index 195
Green, Julien, 38 “Japan, Inc.,” 15, 125

gross national product (GNP), Jones, Gretchen, 103
15–16 joryū bungaku. See women’s (style)
Gubar, Susan, 77 literature
Haniya Yutaka, 51 Kafka, Franz, 39, 49

Hastings, Sally, 172n30 kaisetsu, 173n45
high economic growth, 2, 6, 8, 14, Kameda, Atsuko, 25, 172n29
16, 27, 67, 151, 155, 166, Kaneko Michiyo, 159–160
171n6, 183n21 Kasumigaseki, 59, 177n9
Higuchi Ichiyō, 172n42 Kishi Nobusuke, 170n3
Hirakawa, Hiroko, 25 Kleeman, Faye Yuan, 176n75
Hirano Ken, 39 Kōno Taeko
homoeroticism, 109–110, 128–129 —biography, 5, 13, 37–44, 46,
“Honorable Child” (Kodomosama). 51–52
See Takahashi Takako —works of: “Ants Swarm” (Ari
House of Rebirth, The (Yomigaeri no takaru), 42, 174n61; “Bone
ie). See Takahashi Takako Meat” (Hone no niku), 78–83,
“housewife debates,” 29–30 94, 157; “Broken Oath”
“housewife feminism,” 3, 169n3, (Haisei), 56, 57–65, 73–75,
178n5 155, 162; “Crabs” (Kani), 43,
174n61; “Distant Summer”
Ichikawa Fusae, 178n5 (Tōi natsu), 174n59; “Dream
ie (household) system, 21 Castle” (Yume no shiro), 42;
Ikeda Hayato, 16, 171n6 “Final Moments” (Saigo no
immanence, 76, 78, 82, 87, 94–95, toki), 43, 181n8; “Full Tide”
97, 145, 157 (Michishio), 174n59; “Inside
imperialism, 7, 34, 55 the Fence” (Hei no naka),
infanticide, 13, 47 174n59; “The Next Day”
infertility, 86, 99, 102, 104 (Akuru hi), 41, 174n61; “On
Inoue, Miyako, 182n13 the Examining Room Table”
“I-novel,” 31, 34, 51, 172n41, (Utena ni noru), 174n61;
181n15 “On the Road” (Rojō), 129,
“Inside the Fence” (Hei no naka). 130–134, 150, 158; “Snow”
See Kōno Taeko (Yuki), 181n8; The Strange
“Intercourse” (Majiwari). See Taka- Tale of a Mummy Hunter
hashi Takako (Miiratori ryōkitan), 175n65;
International Women’s Year Group, A Sudden Voice (Fui no koe),
183n21 43; “Toddler-Hunting”
Irigaray, Luce, 97–98, 114, 121– (Yōjigari), 13, 41, 43, 98,
122, 125, 181n11 99–105, 113, 154, 157, 158,
Ishigaki Ayako, 29–30 163, 170n7, 174n61; “Twin
Izumi Kyōka, 39 Arches” (Sōkyū), 42; A Year’s
196 Index
Pastoral (Ichinen no bokka), “Marriage” (Kekkon). See Kurahashi

175n65 Yumiko
Korean War, 15, 171n6 masculine gaze, 10, 52, 53–56, 57,
Kristeva, Julia, 78 63, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73–76, 77,
Kumaya Tomihiro, 49 92–93, 97, 106–107, 154, 157,
Kurahashi Yumiko 158
—biography, 5, 6, 13, 37–39, 47–52 masculinity, 2–3, 11, 28, 30, 34–36,
—works of: “Bad Summer” (Warui 50, 51, 70, 77–78, 85, 87,
natsu), 130, 141–149, 150, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97–99, 102,
154, 157, 158; Blue Journey 104, 113–114, 115, 118–119,
(Kurai tabi), 49, 56, 70–73, 121–125, 127, 146, 147, 149,
74, 75, 100, 157, 158, 162, 151, 154–165 passim, 179n4
163, 176n82; “Engagement” masturbation, 13, 22. See also auto-
(Kon’yaku), 50; “Like a Witch” eroticism
(Yōjo no yō ni), 78, 83–89, masukomi, 164
94–96, 154, 158, 176n78; Matsumoto, Yoshiko, 182n13
“Marriage” (Kekkon), 50; Mauriac, François, 38, 175n72
“Partei” (Parutai), 13, 49, McLelland, Mark, 129, 180n4
170n7; “Snake” (Hebi), 49, 98, McNay, Lois, 177n4
115–125, 155, 163; “Symbio- menstruation, 56, 71–73, 86–87,
sis” (Kyōsei), 50 100–101, 103–104, 114, 158
Miike coal mine strike, 15–16,
language, 11–12, 56, 59, 64, 73, 170n4
154, 157, 161, 162–165, Minamata disease, 183n22
182n13 minikomi (“mini-communication”
lesbianism. See under sexuality publications), 164
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 15, Ministry of Education. See under
170n3 education
“Like a Witch” (Yōjo no yō ni). See Mishima Yukio, 36–37, 177n13
Kurahashi Yumiko misogyny, 3, 34–37, 42, 69, 76,
“literature of the flesh.” See nikutai 77–78, 85, 88–89, 94–96, 143,
bungaku 151, 159–162
Miyamoto Yuriko, 173n46
Mackie, Vera, 3, 169n3, 183n21 Molasky, Michael, 35
marriage, 2, 17, 19, 20, 21–27, Mori, Maryellen, 175n71
29, 32, 51, 56, 155, 174n57, motherhood, 2, 5, 20, 23, 26–27,
181n7; and Kōno Taeko, 40, 40, 46–47, 49–50, 64, 99
42–43, 57, 64, 78, 130–134, Mulvey, Laura, 53–56, 59
174n60; and Kurahashi Yu- Muto, Ichiyo, 170n6
miko, 49–51, 70, 84–85, 117,
124; and Takahashi Takako, 5, Nagata Hiroko, 159–162
38, 46–47, 105, 113, 175n70, Nakamura Mitsuo, 51
181n11 Nakamura, Takafusa, 170n3
Index 197
Naoki Prize, 176n83 queer (theory): and “odd bodies,”

Napier, Susan, 36 11, 96, 124
New Left, 4, 51, 158–160, 169n5
New Life Movements, 28–29 radical feminism, 4, 169n3
“Next Day, The” (Akuru hi). See Ramazanoğlu, Caroline, 177n4
Kōno Taeko Red Army, 4, 159–162
Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), 49, Roden, Donald, 24
176n76 romantic love (ideology), 21, 23, 70
nikutai bungaku (literature of the Ryang, Sonia, 22, 171n19
flesh), 34–36 ryōsai kenbo. See “good wife and wise
Norgren, Tiana, 171n20 mother”
Occupation, Allied, 2, 9, 14–15, 24, sadomasochism, 13, 42–43, 83, 95,

34–35, 37–38, 44–45, 78, 146, 102–103, 132–133
170n2, 170n4, 171n6 Sakaki, Atsuko, 49, 51, 73, 122,
Ōe Kenzaburō, 36–37 176n82, 176n84, 177n12,
Oku Mumeo, 178n5 179n8, 180n11, 182n15
Onna erosu, 164 salaryman, 8, 14, 18, 27–28, 68, 98
“On the Examining Room Table” Sartre, Jean-Paul, 39, 48, 49
(Utena ni noru). See Kōno Sato, Barbara, 21
Taeko Schierbeck, Sachiko, 173n44
“On the Road” (Rojō). See Kōno scopic rape, 10, 66, 68, 70–71, 75,
Taeko 157, 162–163
Other Woman, 11, 126, 128–129, second-wave feminism, 3, 23, 124,
133, 138–140, 148–151, 153, 156, 166
180n1, 181n11 “Secret” (Hi). See Takahashi Takako
“Secret Rituals” (Higi). See Taka-
Pacific War, 39, 55, 174n56. See also hashi Takako
World War II Security Treaty (U.S.-Japan). See
“Partei” (Parutai). See Kurahashi ANPO
Yumiko Seitō (Bluestocking) group, 3, 9
pedophilia, 13 Self-Defense Forces (SDF), 170n2
Pflugfelder, Gregory M., 180n2 sexual indifference, 97–98, 105,
Popular Rights Movement, 9 114, 121–122, 124–125, 127.
Powell, Irena, 172n41 See also Irigaray, Luce
power: “hard” vs. “soft,” 10–11, sexuality, 4–5, 34, 37, 51, 129, 166,
32–33 180n4; feminine, 5, 19–23, 26,
pregnancy, 56, 67, 69, 87, 104, 114, 56, 63, 88, 166; heterosexual-
118, 142, 158 ity, 23, 35, 43, 47, 57, 128,
prostitution, 22 142–149; lesbianism, 128–129,
purity education, 22, 171n19. See 180n2, 180n4
also under education: sex Shigematsu, Setsu, 158–159, 169n1,
education 183n21
198 Index
Shimizu Yoshinori, 176n85 Expanse” (Byōbō), 47; “Getting

shishōsetsu. See “I-novel” on the Wrong Train” (Jōsha
Shōwa One-Digit Generation, 13, sakugo), 56, 65–70, 73–75,
17, 21, 45 157, 162; “Glitter” (Kirameki),
Slaymaker, Douglas, 35 170n7; “Honorable Child”
“Snake” (Hebi). See Kurahashi (Kodomosama), 47; The House
Yumiko of Rebirth (Yomigaeri no ie),
“Snow” (Yuki). See Kōno Taeko 175n71; “Intercourse” (Maji-
Socialist Party, 170n3 wari), 130, 134–140, 150, 158;
Sono Ayako, 32, 173n44 “Secret” (Hi), 98, 105–114,
Steinhoff, Patricia, 182n7 154, 157, 158; “Secret Ritu-
Strange Tale of a Mummy-hunter, A als” (Higi), 175n71; “Summer
(Miiratori ryōkitan). See Kōno Abyss” (Natsu no fuchi), 47,
Taeko 174n53; To the End of the Heav-
student movement, 4, 13, 15, 48, ens (Sora no hate made), 47;
120, 155, 158, 169n4 “Transformation” (Keshin), 47;
subjectivity, 33, 101, 145; feminine, “Woman-hating” (Onnagirai),
3, 4, 10, 11–12, 19, 41, 44, 56, 1–2, 169n1
63, 69, 71, 73, 78, 96, 99, 105, Tanaka, Kazuko, 183n21
111, 113–114, 134, 149–152, Tanaka Mitsu, 159–162
154; masculine, 11, 30, 34–37, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 39
77, 96, 102, 121, 125 Teruoka Yasutaka, 25–26, 29
Sudden Voice, A (Fui no koe). See Tipton, Elise K., 170n1
Kōno Taeko “Toddler-Hunting” (Yōjigari). See
Suganuma, Katsuhiko, 180n4 Kōno Taeko
“Summer Abyss” (Natsu no fuchi). Tokuza, Akiko, 169n3
See Takahashi Takako To the End of the Heavens (Sora
Suzuki Naoko, 176n84 no hate made). See Takahashi
Suzuki, Tomi, 172n41, 182n15 Takako
“Symbiosis” (Kyōsei). See Kurahashi transcendence (of the body), 34–36,
Yumiko 89, 92–96, 101, 110–114, 157
“Transformation” (Keshin). See
Takahashi Kazumi, 46, 175n70 Takahashi Takako
Takahashi Takako “Twin Arches” (Sōkyū). See Kōno
—biography, 2, 5, 13, 24, 37–39, Taeko
44–47, 51–52
—works of, “Castle of Bones” Uema Chizuko, 41, 174n60,
(Hone no shiro), 78, 89–94, 175n64
95, 154, 155, 157, 163; “Co- Ueno Chizuko, 155–156
education” (Danjo kyōgaku), ūman ribu (women’s lib), 3, 4, 5,
175n68; “Congruent Figures” 9, 11, 12, 183n21. See also
(Sōjikei), 46; “Doll Love” women’s liberation movement
(Ningyōai), 175n71; “Endless United Red Army. See Red Army
Index 199
Uno, Kathleen, 171n12 women’s liberation movement, 3, 4,

U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. See 5, 11, 23, 129, 152, 153–167
ANPO passim
women’s (style) literature, 11,
violence, 4, 11, 12, 15, 37, 40, 43, 31–32, 165
75, 114, 127, 148, 153, 154, World War II, 2, 7, 9, 15, 18, 19,
157–162, 163 34, 40, 128, 172n41
“Virginia.” See Kurahashi Yumiko
Year’s Pastoral, A (Ichinen no bokka).
Wakakusa no kai, 180n4 See Kōno Taeko
Welker, James, 180n4 Yonaha Keiko, 43, 47
Williams, Mark, 47
“Woman-hating” (Onnagirai). See zenshū (collected works), 32,
Takahashi Takako 173n47
About the Author
Julia C. Bullock is assistant professor of Japanese at Emory

University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research interests are
in the areas of modern Japanese literature, film, popular
culture, and gender theory. She has published articles
on feminine subjectivity, gender and national identity,
female homoeroticism, misogyny, and Japanese femi-
nism. She is currently working on projects that explore
the reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory
in postwar Japan, as well as the gendered discourses that
underwrote debates regarding the role of intellectual
women in Japanese society during the 1960s.
Production Notes for Bullock | The Other Women’s Lib
Text design by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff
â•…â•‡ with display type in Arctic and text type in Galliard
Composition by Terri Miyasato
Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc.
Japanese literature/gender studies
Bullock
“Julia Bullock’s lively study fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of femi-
nist theoretical development prior to the women’s lib movement of the 1970s.
Dealing with three of the most fascinating and challenging authors of the era,
Bullock’s sustained literary analyses are adroit, illuminating, and informative. Her
study is lucid enough to open itself to bright undergraduates, but provocative
enough to engage seasoned scholars of modern literature.”
The OTHER WOMEN’S LIB

â•…â•… —Rebecca Copeland, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan
(2000)
“In this stunning and original book, Julia Bullock analyzes the ‘philosophies of
gender in fictional form’ which were explored by three Japanese women writers
in the 1960s: Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko. Bullock The OTHER
WOMEN’S LIB
demonstrates that, in their exploration of the themes of ‘power, violence, and
language,’ these writers anticipated many of the themes of the women’s liberation
and feminist movements of the following decades. This book will be of interest to
scholars and students in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, literary studies,
and modern Japanese cultural history.”
â•…â•… —Vera Mackie, author of Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship,
Embodiment and Sexuality (2003)
“Julia Bullock’s cogent and focused study of three of the most imaginative Japa-
nese writers of the 1960s and 1970s analyzes issues driving the boom in writing by
women at that time. There is nothing else like it. She engages with the history of
feminism in Japan and pays special attention to ‘second-wave’ feminism. Her book
captures the complications these women faced as they grappled to express ideas
and experiences before representational schemes and categories were in place.
Among other successes, the book helps make sense of the violence of these works,
which has troubled so many.”
â•…â•… —Doug Slaymaker, author of The Body in Postwar Fiction: Japanese Fiction
after the War (2004)
Julia C. Bullock is assistant professor of Japanese at Emory University.
Cover Art: Lingering Dream by Kusama Yayoi (1949).

G E N D E R A N D B O D Y I N J A PA N E S E W O M E N ’ S F I C T I O N
Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888
Julia C. Bullock

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Japanese literature/gender studies

The OTHER WOMEN’S LIB

Julia C. Bullock is assistant professor of Japanese at Emory University.

Cover Art: Lingering Dream by Kusama Yayoi (1949).

University of Hawai‘i Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free

Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff

â•…â•… Acknowledgments vii

â•…â•… Notes 169

For works originally published in Japanese, both the Japanese-language

tics that were considered “masculine” and those considered “feminine.”

women’s sexuality in order to harness it toward the goals of a patriarchal

The [Japanese] imperial state did not rely on repression alone

Garon further demonstrates, in his book Molding Japanese Minds, that

the gendered division of labor that increasingly characterized Japanese

explicitly political discourses of liberation forwarded by the “women’s lib”

mutually imbricated spaces that operate according to analogous rules and

in contrast to men, who are envisioned as spiritually and intellectually

even as it enables the production and expression of subjectivity on other

Party Crashers and Poison Pens

Listening to you talk, all the penises of the world

T he 1960s witnessed the debuts of a succession of women writers of fic-

for them by the high-economic-growth society—producing, consuming,

Japan in the 1960s

increasingly conservative rule. The Occupation had begun with sweeping

images of a nation apparently on the brink of revolution.”5 In the wake

Rising aspirations fueled increasing demands for higher levels of education,

norms designed to produce “docile bodies” capable of channeling indi-

A bortion and B irth C ontrol

E ducation for M arriage

In 1940, in compliance with the state’s policy to increase the

On an individual level, marriages in the prewar period were typically

corruption,” in the form of rising rates of prostitution and abortion, and

While there is a conspicuous absence of mention of the “com-

with an increased emphasis on (heterosexual) romantic love, yielding a

to hang near the lavatory on New Year’s. In addition, the male

everything from the composition of local school boards to the contents of

According to Professor Teruoka, female university students were

to become housewives. In magazines and radio programs, his

The contemptuous attitude that Professor Teruoka demonstrated

models of gender in postwar Japanese society, before we go on to explore

G endered D ivision of L abor

of full-time housewife, even as it constrained their lifestyle options on

Her family criticized her as a young adult because she showed no

class Tokyo woman. Ishigaki describes how she despaired of find-

Viewed from the perspective of her personal history, Ishigaki’s frus-

Texts and Contexts

“F emininity ” and the J apanese L iterary E stablishment

of “popular” (stylistically inferior) writing by women. As a result, women’s

Modern Japanese women writers confronted a specific constella-

conferral of literary prizes), to inclusion in the ranks of those anointed to

G ender in P ostwar J apanese L iterature

The work of Michael Molasky and Douglas Slaymaker is particularly

Male characters in postwar fiction [by male authors] affirm their

It is striking that in male narratives of the Occupation, for male protago-

emergent generation of young (male) writers, Ōe went on to establish an

concerns that increasingly informed her writing as she developed as an

gain entry to a prestigious school that nurtured her interest in French

or other adornments was interpreted as flouting austerity regulations,