Phyllis I. Lyons

Women’s Narratives and Anti-narratives: Re-reading Japanese Traditions

The term joryu bungaku is used both popularly and critically as a single category, meaning “all writing by Japanese women of any historical period.” And yet it is critically empty; that is, it has no definitional characteristics: it does not describe a genre, a social program, a political stance. However, especially since the early 1960s some women writers have been producing fiction that seems to be so different from tilings that came before that it ought to be distinguished by its own separate designation. In my own work I have been using the term danrvu bungaku to refer to the “(largely male) canonical tradition of modern Japanese literature;” I have reserved jorvu bungaku for “(older) types of women’s writing that do not challenge received categories;” and have added a third term, shin-josei bungaku, to refer to the new kind of post-1960s Japanese women’s writing. Here I will bring several contemporary Japanese women writers into dialogue with some classic texts, to show how their work fits onto the classical templates. I compare Ariyoshi Sawako’s The Twilight Years and Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen as examples of jorvu bungaku in symmetry with the classical tradition, and Kurahashi Yumiko’s The Adventures of Sumivakist Q as a shin-josei bungaku example of asymmetry. I will suggest thereby some ways women writers have been maintaining and breaking apart the orders, patterns and symmetries that have governed both the practice of and critical discourse on contemporary Japanese fiction.