This chapter examines selected works by three women playwrights, Hasegawa Shigure, Ariyoshi Sawako and Dakemoto Ayumi. Notwithstanding very different times of production, a common thread runs through their works. This is the insistence of the male-constructed hegemon on diminishing the significance of women, or eliding their presence altogether, and a concomitant masculine disinterest in the torment created. Discussing two plays by each dramatist, the chapter notes how these women create spaces for audiences to hear the voices of those erased from history and thereby interrogate the highly gendered assumptions underpinning social institutions inside, and also outside, Japan.

Introduction

Recent decades have seen an exponential rise in English-language scholarly interest in writing by women in Japan. During this time, the focus has often been on fiction and non-fictional narrative, with some attention also given to selected verse and poetry. With the production of plays and theatrical material often overlooked, few women playwrights are well-known outside Japan. M. Cody Poulton notes how dramatic production generally, including that of men, has been given “remarkably short shrift in Japanese literary studies over the past century or so” (Poulton 2010, vii).

This chapter addresses that oversight by examining the contribution made to Japanese theater by three women: Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941), Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–1984), and Dakemoto Ayumi (1967–). Discussing two plays by each, including a translation by Ariyoshi that confirms her position—completely forgotten today—as a leading figure in the early 1970s Japanese theater world, the chapter notes how these dramatists create spaces for audiences to hear the voices of those erased from history and thereby interrogate the highly gendered assumptions that underpin social institutions inside, and also outside, Japan. While Hasegawa and Ariyoshi are relatively well-known to English language readers for their prose narratives, each also produced material for the Japanese theater world. Dakemoto is a contemporary playwright whose scripts speak to the erasure experienced by many women in modern Japan. In commentary that applies well to Dakemoto’s work, pioneering feminist and queer studies scholar, Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) notes how a growing number of contemporary writers attempt to capture: “Unspeakable memories, memories that cannot … or resist being historicized.