Landmarks From Contemporary Japanese Women Writers
One of the genres of work that has been gaining more and more popularity in recent years is fiction in translation, a way of discovering other cultures and movements that has become easier than ever in recent decades. Amongst the most popular of these is Japanese literature. In particular, we’ve been intrigued and enthralled by some of the work of women writers from Japan, who explore feminist themes, relationships and gender dynamics in a manner that is resonant while being unique. So we decided to compile a few recommendations that have stunned us over the years.
Masks - Fumiko Enchi, 1958
Traditional Noh masks from Japanese dramas form the centrepiece of this subtle, challenging novel. It is also about love, passion, betrayal, the spirit world and the idea hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It’s also about control– both from in the physical realm, and from the spirit world. The story follows Ibuki, a woman in the Meiji period. What plagues Ibuki is the curious bond that’s growing between Yasuko and her mother-in-law, Mieko, a sophisticated, jealous woman in her fifties, who is manipulating Yasuko’s relationship between two men. Fumiko Enchi is a Japanese cult writer, who recently gained popularity around the world after an English translation by Juliet Winters.
Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto, 1988
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is a gem from contemporary Japanese literature. It’s a tale that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women. Grieving, Mikaga is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) and the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses. Yumiko has lost the love of her life at the young age of 20. With language that’s deceptively simple, Yoshimoto dissects heartbreak and loss with fluidity and an emotive quality that’s as precise as it is profound. Yoshimoto eventually delivers an important message about kindness to strangers and the will to persevere through adversity.
Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami, 1994
Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womahood in a working class neighbourhood in Japan. It recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can call their own: thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko travels to Tokyo searching for an affordable breast enhancement surgery, accompanied by Midorika, who’s recently taken a vow of silence, finding herself unable to express the subtle yet overwhelming pressure of growing up. Her silence compels each woman to confront their own fears and frustrations. Ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indefinite identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old and childless. The novel remains one of the first books to talk about egg freezing in the East, way before it gained mainstream popularity.
The Housekeeper & The Professor - Yoko Ogawa, 2003
This novel by Yoko Ogawa, author of the bestselling novel Memory Police, follows the story of a struggling mother who takes up a job looking after an elderly mathematician with a learning disability. Seventeen years ago, the professor was in a devastating car accident that left him brain damaged, only able to remember 80 minutes at a time. He gets through the day solving maths problems, and attaching notes to his clothes to remember what he needs to do. The unnamed heroine, her ten-year-old son and the professor instantly bond, resembling an unexpected family, with an unspoken understanding of each other that transcends language and convention. Trouble beckons with his sister-in-law, who has her own complicated history with the professor, doubts the housekeeper’s intention. Ogawa deftly balances the exploration of an unconventional relationship with equal parts realism and whimsy.
Earthlings - Sayaka Murata, 2018
The second novel by Sayaka Murata to be translated into English after Convenience Store Woman (2016), is the story of 11-year-old Natsuki, who says she has magical powers and that her best friend – a plush hedgehog– is an emissary from the planet of Popinpobia. This is why when cousin Yu reveals he’s an alien, it does not catch her by surprise. The sense of whimsy Murata creates is soon crushed beneath the weight of the depravity Natsuki has to endure and the very disturbing places her escape into fantasy takes her. Similar to Convenience Store Woman, this novel is a critique of the cultural expectations and limitations placed on what women can do, and who they can be. Both as a child and an adult, Natsuki resists being a member of the “factory”-- the system that will consign her to a life as a wife, mother, a sex object, a good worker– and her desire to escape the Earth altogether persists. Murata uses surrealism and tropes of horror and fantasy and embeds real world commentary within them.
Terminal Boredom - Izumi Suzuki, 2021
This collection of short stories published by Japanese cult iconoclast, Izumi Suzuki, in 2021 by Verso books features seven punky and pitch-black stories that offer English readers a glimpse into her work, which was written in the 1970s. The cracks in a queer matriarchal utopia are exposed when a boy– a creature usually contained in ghettoised isolation– appears beneath a young girl’s window; a government initiative curbing overpopulation prompts a woman to re-evaluate her friendships; the last family in a desolate city learns to be human through awkward appropriation of popular culture; passive-aggressive furniture provides unwelcome romantic advice; Tokyo's teenagers, disaffected and numb from excessive screen time, find distraction in violence. Suzuki’s take on science fiction is fresh and urgent and filled with concerns about imperialism, society and gender.
Diary of a Void - Emi Yagi, 2022
A subversive novel about a Japanese woman who avoids harassment at work by perpetuating, for nine months, the lie that she’s pregnant, Yagi’s work is refreshingly different. Thirty-four-year old Ms.Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only women in her new workplace– a company that manufactures cardboard tubes– she’s expected to do all the menial tasks. She announces that she can’t clear away her colleagues’ dirty cups because she’s pregnant and the smell makes her nauseous. She isn’t forced to work overtime, and doesn't have to serve coffee to anybody. Pregnant Ms. Shibata can rest, watch TV, take long baths, and even join an aerobics class for expectant mothers. She uses a nine-month ruse, helped along with towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app on which can log every stage of “pregnancy.” Before long, the hoax becomes all absorbing and the line between fact and fiction blurs. This novel is both a cultural critique and a post-feminist landmark.