Individuals with physical particularities, gay and transgender people, even a woman with no interest in sexual intercourse or love affairs populate fiction by contemporary Japanese women writers. This chapter focuses on the depiction of these queer subjects in the works of Matsuura Rieko, Fujino Chiya, and Murata Sayaka. As the bubble economy collapsed in the 1990s, so did the myths surrounding the nuclear family and the ideals of “masculine” and “feminine,” yet, the ideology underpinning these ideals, as well as the strict gender-binary system, still permeates contemporary society, where minorities are either not represented or are alienated. In the stories by these contemporary writers, the protagonists’ perceived feelings of being an outsider vanish as they create new kinships (friendship, chosen family, or alliances), showing how being in a relationship can define an individual’s subjectivity, and how these writers envision a more inclusive society.

Introduction

The term “queer studies” comes from Teresa de Lauretis’s 1991 work, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction,” which gave name to a field of critical studies that investigates the sexualities, identities, and, more broadly, subjectivities of non-binary individuals who, albeit refusing heterosexuality as the benchmark for sexual orientation, do not feel represented by the labels of “lesbian” or “gay.” These studies challenge current notions of sexuality and criticize “identity categories that are presented as stable, unitary, and ‘authentic’” (McLelland 2005, 2). Annamarie Jagor points out, that “institutionally, queer has been associated most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity, and gendercorrective surgery. Demonstrating the impossibility of any ‘natural’ sexuality, it calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (Jagor 1997, 3).

In Japan, “queer studies” began to gain traction in the 1990s, with its meaning initially confused with “lesbian” and “gay.” At the same time, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the collapse of the bubble economy and the myths surrounding the nuclear family system, gave rise to a “gay boom” (Wallace 2020; Suganuma 2018). These years also witnessed the emergence of several women writers who depicted new models of femininity which deconstructed the myth of the sengyō shufu (full-time housewives) and the idea that women are fundamentally heterosexual (Chalmers 2002).