An increasing number of Japanese women writers in the late 20th and early 21st century are writing canine-centric novels. This chapter focuses on women’s writing that engages with what I dub “canine classics”: well-known tales of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and more. The contemporary works are rich subjects of examination, questioning gendered nature-culture dynamics and offering sociohistorical commentary. These effects are produced by women writers who do not “overturn” but rather expand upon and explore the canine presence in the classic stories.

Introduction

What does a Japanese woman writer in the 20th or 21st century see in a late 19th-century British imperialist narrative about India? Or an early 19th-century historical fantasy novel centered on male warriors in 15th-century Japan? The writers examined in this chapter are drawn to the dogs, wolves, and other canines that these classic works feature. In this chapter, I firstly take up Tsushima Yūko’s Warai ōkami (2000, Laughing Wolf), which is set in the early postwar years in Japan and structured around Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1893–1895) and Hector Malot’s Sans Famille (1878, Nobody’s Boy). Then, I turn to Tawada Yōko’s dynamic retelling of obscure Asian “dog bridegroom” folktales in Inumukoiri (1993, translated as The Bridegroom Was A Dog*). Finally, I look at retellings of the Japanese classic Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan of Southern Fusa, 1814–1842) in two works: Sakuraba Kazuki’s Fuse: Gansaku Satomi hakkenden (2010, Fuse: A Counterfeit Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi Clan) and Matsuura Rieko’s Kenshin (2007, The Dog’s Body).

Literary animals offer a lens with which to gaze upon a particular society and a particular point in time. The works examined here reflect some of the shifting relationships of human and nonhuman animals in Japan in the context of modern nation building, colonization, war and its aftermath, changing ideas of gender and other social norms, and global mobilities of cultural products, ideas, and people. However, I argue, this is not their main aim but rather their effect. It is the trail of the canine presence itself that these contemporary authors are most dedicated to sniffing out.