Tracing and Tearing: Fictional Gender

2023/06/22

Sometimes we trace over a model to learn how to write like it. While mastery is expected, there are times when the result looks nothing like the original, or after lines are drawn repeatedly, the bleeding ink or the sharpness of the pen tip eventually tears the paper itself.

As social beings, our "masculinity" and "femininity" are not only innate but are largely acquired by learning norms. While literature is often thought to be written based on a free desire for expression, one cannot become a writer without critics and readers to grant recognition. All of us choose our words and act while reconciling society's implicit rules with our non-conforming selves, and literary works preserve this process in a highly condensed form.

In this book, I examine works in which modern Japanese writers rewrote preceding texts or their own works in some way. I trace their respective gender-related choices within that process—strategies to gain social recognition, challenges to change norms, or the decision to remain anonymous through rejection.

The protagonists of this book are Toshiko Tamura, Fumiko Hayashi, Yaeko Nogami, and Yumiko Kurahashi. However, I have also cast the men involved with these female writers—such as Yasunari Kawabata, Osamu Dazai, Kiyoshi Miki, Hajime Tanabe, and Jun Eto—as central figures. All are individuals with great achievements in literature and thought, yet they were no allies to women.

That said, at the root of this concept is a sense of unease with the very act of separating their "great achievements" but then distinguishing their thought and literature from their behavior toward women, which is often attributed to the patriarchal climate of the era. The logic of excluding women is embedded within the thought and literature itself, and the oppression carried out under the guise of love or advice turns the text into a battlefield.

It is often said that new discoveries can be made no matter how many times one rereads past literary works or philosophical texts. If so, these are not events that have concluded. This book is an attempt to re-examine texts that went unappreciated alongside famous works, scrutinizing biases in evaluation and reading them as if confronting a new present. I hope that the perspective of this book will, in turn, be reread by the next reader.

Tracing and Tearing: Fictional Gender

Maiko Odaira

Ibunsha

304 pages, 3,080 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.