Be a woman : Hayashi Fumiko and modern Japanese women's literature

Japanese women writers occupy a preeminent position in the classical literary canon, a phenomenon that many observers, both Japanese and western, have noted as an anomaly in world literatures. 1 Literary histories have also commonly noted that, after an earlier period of dominance, Japanese women writers were eclipsed and virtually silenced before their reemergence in the modern era. 2 Today, any sizable Japanese bookstore contains a section dedicated to women writers. Bookstores usually promote the latest winners of the Women's Literary Prize and current bestsellers. They also carry an impressive array of works, principally fiction, by women. Since the early 1980s, a wide selection of stories by modern Japanese women writers has been translated into English, 3 attesting to the recognition that these writers are now beginning to receive even beyond their own frontiers. But a western reader might easily miss the connotations borne by the terms "woman writer" (joryii sakka) or "women's literature" (joryu bungaku) until recently. 4 Ericson reviews the role of gender in classical and early modern Japanese literary traditions, examining the preeminent position of women writers in the classical canon and the virtual eclipse of women's voices prior to their reemergence in the modern era. Her assessment of recent feminist debates that shifted the terminology used to categorize writing by women leads her to an original interpretation of the origins and significance of the concept of women's literature