Enchi Fumiko and re-writing postwar Japan: Translating classics, women, and nation

In postwar Japan an essentialist image of "Woman" was widely distributed in male-centered literary-critical circles. Enchi Fumiko was a 20th C. Japanese women writer who resisted this discourse imposed on women and women writers by masculinist/nationalist critics.; In Part One I introduce three postwar literary debates that revolved around issues of gender, nation and literature. I show how critics used a conceptualization of "Woman" to construct a nationalist ideology of a unitary "feminine" Japan victimized by the West; how essentialist criticism of Enchi's work marginalized the status of women writers in the postwar literary establishment; and what strategies Enchi used to counter this masculinist discourse.; In Part Two I demonstrate Enchi's critique of these essentialist and nationalist views of women and Japan by an examination of the theory and practice guiding her translation into modern Japanese of the best-known Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji. After discussing the relation of translation theory to ideology and resistance, I focus on the role of canonicity and ideology in the Genji translations of Enchi, Yosano Akiko and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro. I follow this with a close analysis of Enchi's Genji translation as an example of "transformance"---translation as a performative act. Part Two concludes with an Appendix comparing the Japanese texts of the translations by Enchi, Yosano and Tanizaki, Tamagami Takuya's scholarly edition of the classical text, and the English translation by Edward G. Seidensticker.; In Part Three I analyze several of Enchi's postwar novels and short stories, focussing on the themes of violence and gender to show that, and how, her own fictions represent a challenge to the prevailing postwar masculinist and nationalist ideologies. In her novels, Southern Skin, Women's Cocoon, and A House Without a Dining Table, and her short stories, "Skeletons of Men," "Boxcar of Chrysanthemums," and "Voices of Snakes," Enchi deals with the marriage system (wife, mistress, prostitute); paternal authority and motherhood; victimization; wartime violence and domestic violence; revolution and tradition---in each instance engaging in a "transformative" re-writing of women in/and postwar Japan.