This chapter explores similarities in the underlying feminist messages of a novel by Enchi Fumiko, Onnamen (Masks, 1958), and a short story by Kurahashi Yumiko, “Kyōsei” (Symbiosis, 1966). The author finds that both criticize the early postwar context, whereby discourses of knowledge and power are coded as masculine, and advocate for women’s appropriation of these forms of authority through writing as a form of feminist praxis.

Introduction

The early postwar era must have been a heady time to be a Japanese woman. In the late 1940s, at the behest of the Occupation regime, profound changes to the Japanese constitution and legal framework granted women unprecedented rights to vote, run for office, receive the same level and type of education as men, and marry and divorce of their own volition. Once the Occupation ended, conservative politicians began consolidating their power, culminating in the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955. Thus emboldened, they embarked upon a “reverse course” of their own, and began attempting to roll back many of the reforms that had equalized women’s status with men. They questioned the value of higher education for women and attempted to reassert the prewar ideology of “good wife, wise mother” that had underwritten the educational system prior to 1945, which trained women for marriage and motherhood according to a strategically sex-specific set of norms and standards (Koyama 2013). By the early 1960s, the mass media was awash in tales of “coeds ruining the nation” (Bullock 2019). Pervasive discrimination in employment, coupled with more subtle means of indoctrinating women through gender-specific educational guidance and pension and tax systems that underwrote a single-earner male-headed nuclear family structure, made it increasingly difficult for women to leverage higher education in the service of financial independence.

Simultaneous to these cultural trends, the 1960s witnessed a boom in women’s literary production, with young writers raised under the postwar system of legal (if not de facto) equality between the sexes joining the ranks of more established female literati who began their careers in the earlier half of the 20th century. While not identifying explicitly as feminist, many of these women nevertheless used fiction as a powerful weapon of resistance against the societal forces that attempted to contain their ambitions and freedoms.