午夜剧场

Sometimes we trace over a model to learn how to write like it. While mastery is expected, the result may end up looking nothing like the original. After lines are drawn over and over, the bleeding ink or the sharpness of the pen tip may eventually tear 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 recognize them. All of us choose our words and act while reconciling the unspoken rules of society with the parts of ourselves that do not fit them; 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 choices regarding gender within that process—strategies to gain social recognition, challenges to change norms, or the refusal to conform by remaining anonymous.

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 protagonists in their own right. All of them are figures with great achievements in literature and thought, but they were not allies to women.

That said, the underlying inspiration for this work is a sense of unease with the very act of separating their great achievements in thought and literature from their behavior toward women—which is often attributed simply to the sexism of the era. The logic of excluding women is embedded within the thought and literature itself, and the oppression carried out in the name of love or advice turns the text into a battlefield.

It is often said that one can find something new no matter how many times they reread past literary works or philosophical texts. If so, then these are not events that have ended. This book is an attempt to reread texts that were undervalued alongside famous works, keeping a close eye on the bias of those evaluations as if facing a new present. I hope that the perspective of this book will, in turn, be reread by the next reader.

Maiko Odaira

Ibunsha

304 pages, 3,080 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.