Reading Desire in a New Generation of Japanese Women Writers

A Special Collection of Essays

Nina Cornyetz, Rebecca Copeland, Nina Cornyetz, Rebecca Copeland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781000964660
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores desire through the work of a new generation of Japanese women writers, in response to the increased attention these writers have received following the release of their work in the English language.

The contributions explore a wide range of theoretical approaches and psychoanalytic interpretations to "reading" a new generation of Japanese women writers' relationships to identity, sex/gender, and desire. Through dealing with female spaces, maternal roles, gendered bodies, or resistant speech acts, the book uncovers the overarching theme of desire – desire for language, touch, and recognition. Focusing on authors who have previously been underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the book highlights the diverse nature and the important synergies of writing by women in the last few decades.

Addressing experimental and nonconforming authors whose works challenge gender and culture expectation as well as Orientalist myths, this will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese culture, and Asian studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Step to Trample the Unexplored: Family, School Girlishness, and Lesbian Panic in Matsuura Rieko’s Saiai no kodomo (The Most Beloved Child, 2017)
• 2 Body and/as Food: Rediscovering Female Subjectivity through the Mother–Daughter Dyad in Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru (2006)
• 3 Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko: An Analysis of “Unhomely” Sounds in the Mother Tongue
• 4 Writing and Being Written: Approaches to Reading the Narrative of Kanai Mieko’s “Mado” (“Window,” 1979)
• 5 Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces: Body, Precarity, and Language in Kawakami Mieko’s Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs, 2019)
• 6 Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital: Oyamada Hiroko’s Kōjō (The Factory, 2013)
• Index