The body politic in modern Japanese women's literature: Bodies of women and of the Japanese national empire in Yosano Akiko, Hayashi Fumiko, and Tamura Toshiko's writings

This dissertation investigates the female body as part of the body of the modern Japanese national empire as depicted in the literature of three prolific female writers, Yosano Akiko (1878--1942), Hayashi Fumiko (1904--1951), and Tamura Toshiko (1884--1945). More specifically, this research examines how the migrant bodies of female characters in modern Japanese women's literature delineate, confine, and/or expand the political boundaries of the national empire. As the cultural and geopolitical boundaries of the Japanese empire expand during this period, how is the female body inscribed in literature?; This study analyzes how literature depicts the female body as it migrates from inside Japan to Japan's colonies as well as to Western territories. With a premise that the body is both discourse and reality, this dissertation investigates how the gendered bodies of textual characters have acted within nationalist and imperialist texts and contexts of power and prohibition, in order to expose the different ways in which women could be seen to embody, dismember, and reconstruct what was considered "Japan" and "Japanese."; Although their literary characters aspire to attain women's independence from the nation state, their personal aspirations are still bound by the political ambition of the nation-state to expand Japan as an empire. Yosano, Hayashi and Tamura's characters attempt to erase their inadequacies, be they emotional, material, and/or physical, and to attain senses of freedom, security, and strength by incorporating the nation-state's imperialist discourse of liberation, salvation, and power into their stories. In the final analysis, although the three authors' inscriptions of the female body disturb the body of the nation-state, they in the end redraw, and do not transcend, the borders of the Japanese national empire.