Organizer: Michiko Niikuni Wilson, University of Virginia
Chair: Sumie Jones, Indiana University
Discussant: Sonja Arntzen, University of Alberta
Women's stories written by women from a feminine perspective are something to which modern Japanese literary historians and critics have paid little attention. This panel on Oba Minako (1930- ), one of the major figures of the resurgence of women's writing in Japan today, explores issues raised by both Japanese and American feminists: the notions of heterosexual love/gaze, motherhood, daughterhood, and wifehood, which have yet to be freed in the female imagination from patriarchal bondage and prejudice. Oba's writing directly deals with the possibility of power for women which has historically been skewed, trivialized, romanticized, and obfuscated.
Well-known for her tough, unsentimental, biting critique of the historical victimization of women by patriarchy and the magical power of women invested by men, Oba dissects and tears open the "relationship at the core of all power-relationships, a tangle of lust, violence, possession, fear, conscious longing, unconscious hostility, sentiment, rationalization: the sexual understructure of social and political forms" (Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution).
Oba's solution as a writer/cultural critic of humankind's refined destructiveness is to reintegrate the unconscious and the spirit of the prepatriarchal world that affirms the organic, dynamic interaction of the body and the mind, and to also bring men in to the healing process. Her writing may be read not simply as "re-writing" but as "re-visioning," a profound attempt to look afresh at old ways of seeing, doing, relating, in effect, an attempt to revise the world.
Once There Was a Woman: Re-visioning Gender in Poetic Writings of Oba Minako
Janice Brown, University of Alberta
In Japan, women have been writing about men for an extraordinarily long time, at least since the watershed Genji monogatari, while men, not to be outdone, have themselves written not only about women but also as women, in a literary tradition that continues to explore issues of gender and gender relations in greater depth and detail than many other writing cultures.
Oba Minako is no exception to this ancient tradition. Not only do Minako's writings focus almost exclusively on relations between women and men, her texts also frequently appropriate older and/or classical texts, re-working and re-writing them in ways that challenge traditionally readerly expectations. In Once There Was a Woman (Mukashi onna ga ita, 1994), a collection of prose and poetry, Minako scrutinizes relations of gender and power in modern Japanese society, taking as model the classical poem-tale Ise monogatari and its famous line "Once there was a man. . ." Conflating elements of autobiography, narrative fiction, fable, folktale, essay, and poetry, Minako constructs her own version of a modern, anonymous "woman."
This paper will examine Minako's poetic vision as found in the above text and in other poetic writings (including the poetry collection, Sabita kotoba, 1971) and will show her way-of-seeing constitutes a particularly intent "female gaze," one that, in its scathing regard, invokes further a critique of gender, of gendered constructs, and of gendered writing itself.
Rewriting Sexuality and Reproduction: Oba Minako's Funakuimushi and Urashimaso
Reiko Tachibana Nemoto, Pennsylvania State University
Focusing on the question of sexuality and its power for both destruction and reproduction (survival), Funakuimushi (1969) deals with two taboos which have socially castrated women: incest and abortion; Urashimaso (1977), on the other hand, takes up an issue central to female destiny: reproduction. The two works contrast two psychological reactions to the world we live in: the former sees the world as a place for "despair of humankind," the latter a world which expresses "hope out of despair."
Minako articulates the unspoken connection between women's will to survive and their sexual desires. Women, their bodies and sexuality controlled by men, have few choices to disengage themselves from the female destiny of pregnancy and reproduction. Minako's female characters in Funakuimushi make the most extreme choice: abortion. An alternative choice for other women in Urashimaso is what Elaine Showalter calls "sexual anarchy." Their desires lead to reproduction. One woman engages in sexual activities with two men who live under the same roof, producing a mentally abnormal son, and by whom the other woman, a generation younger, decides to have a child.
In the form of a parable for humankind, Minako lets her mind erupt: resisting the norms and ethics of the contemporary society which, she believes, have distorted the nature of both men and women. Through her keen feminist eyes, Minako dares to portray subjects that were and are still social taboos, challenging masculinist assumptions about women's roles as she re-visions female sexuality with its innate destructive and creative powers.
Mothers and Daughters in Oba Minako's Stories: An Unsentimental Journey Toward
Reintegration
Michiko Niikuni Wilson, University of Virginia
Women have been glorified and disparaged by men over the centuries: the female body is simultaneously the object of male gaze/desire and the threat/dread for men with its violent force. Oba Minako, despite the curiously apolitical stance she maintains in her writings, does not mince words to challenge this stereotypical power relationship at the center of sexual politics.
Often manifested in what feminists would call "Snow White's step-mother syndrome," women's ancient smoldering patches of deep-burning anger have been regarded as anything but legitimate. Women vent anger at their own daughters, daughters at their mothers, because womenfolk convince themselves that there is no other way but to compete for the hetereosexual gaze which determines their self-identity. Minako exposes time and again the terrible unspoken condition of power struggle between mothers and daughters whose sense of self clash and collide, sometimes suffocating the little girl within every woman, abandoning the little girl lost.
This paper examines Tsuga no yume (1971), Naku tori no (1985), and "Boshi" (1981), which detail the reality of motherhood and daughterhood in a nuclear family under the patriarchal system, an absolutely unsentimental, and, even, "unmotherly" picture of the maternal world. Minako's 'mothers and daughters' try to seek a way out of this sterile situation, outside the context of competition between women for men, first by demystifying the maternal instinct, maternal desire, and, exclusive female parenting that confines women's power to the domestic sphere, second by provoking us to reconsider the cultural construct of patriarchy.