Community and creativity in the 'revival of writing by women' in Modern Japan [electronic resource] : mapping an early shōwa literary network
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

ABSTRACT "Community and Creativity in the 'Revival of Writing by Women' in Modern Japan: Mapping an Early Shōwa Literary Network" Joanna Sturiano The women writers who formed a critical mass in Tokyo in the mid-1920s launched writing careers within and along the boundaries of the proletarian literature movement (puroretaria bungaku undō) of 1927-1931, capturing the attention of the literary establishment and popular readers alike. In this dissertation I examine how four of the most prominent of these modern Japanese women writers interacted with each other personally and professionally in what I call a literary "network." My project places Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-72) at the network's center, and proceeds by juxtaposing her with three contemporaries: Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), Sata Ineko (1904-1998), and Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951), discussing each pairing in the context of a specific literary experiment the authors shared. By viewing Hirabayashi in the context of a network of modern women writers, I respect and attempt to emulate her own self-contextualization as a writer whose creativity was intertwined with her community. I utilize the schema of the network as a map along which to follow (and trace, or re-trace) the connections between writers across the multiple terrains of time and space, and through shifting intellectual and literary movements and changing material circumstances. In Chapter One I consider how, despite the deprivation Hirabayashi and Hayashi suffered during their early careers at the moment when they lived with one another, their friendship can be seen as having both enabled their early literary pursuits and shaped their innovations as writers in modern Japan. I examine a variety of literature by Hayashi including Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki) and her postwar short stories alongside Hirabayashi's prewar short stories including "The Shopgirl's Lament" ("Joten'in no fuhei"). In Chapter Two I explore how Hirabayashi and Sata Ineko wrote autobiographical novels and memoirs about their younger lives during the war, in a shift from their prewar autobiographical short stories in the vein of proletarian literature. Conflict between personal and political identities fueled both women's literary activity. I look at the ways in which they each confronted the discourse on "women's literature" and narrativized the experiences of early Shōwa women writers through fictionalized versions of their personal struggles, specifically Sata's literary autobiography My Tokyo Map (Watashi no Tōkyō chizu, 1946-1948) and Hirabayashi's Desert Bloom (Sabaku no hana, 1957). Chapter Three addresses Hirabayashi Taiko's relationship with her longtime "rival, " Miyamoto Yuriko. This node of the literary network spotlights Hirabayashi's ideological conflicts with Miyamoto. Despite sharing an early interest in socialist revolutionary ideals, the upper-middle class Miyamoto and the working-class Hirabayashi famously disagreed about the proper role of socialist political activism in Japan. In the last years of Hirabayashi's life, she recorded her antagonistic views of Miyamoto in a critical biography (hyōden) entitled Miyamoto Yuriko (1971-72). I treat this work together with Miyamoto's essays on women and literature (Fujin to bungaku, 1947), examining how each writer positioned herself within the literary establishment through expository writings in response to the other, and how their intellectual postures came to represent a "rivalry." The epilogue examines the literary legacy of this innovative community of writers who "revived" women's writing in modern Japan via the figure of Hirabayashi's longtime friend, the writer Enchi Fumiko.