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An essay is presented which explores the queer feminist writings of Japanese author Ekuni Kaori particularly her significant contributions to Japanese literature.

Yoko Tawada, who writes in both German and Japanese, often uses images of reading to help her explore what she designates as exophony, that is, a condition of living, speaking, and writing outside one's mother tongue. The more closely Tawada's characters read German, however, the less they are able to feel at home in it. Her narratives often portray 'Japanese' narrators in German settings who struggle to make sense of a system of visual symbols that conjure up sound images, which in turn are interpreted for meaning. The narrators are accustomed to a system consisting of visual images already imbued with meaning. Tawada's attention to language underlies her exploration of foreignness. She recasts alienation as a stimulant to new ways of thinking about gender, otherness, and belonging. This article shows how two narratives, 'Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter' and 'Das Fremde aus der Dose', link illiteracy and marginality with the alphabet and gender. It addresses how Tawada's texts contribute to discussions about the mother tongue and systems of writing. It then analyses the texts noted above as key examples of Tawada's 'foreignising' manner of reading that pierces cultural conventions and animates language. This manner of reading also isolates its practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a young woman, the Japanese writer Miyamoto Yuriko travelled to the Soviet Union in late 1927 and was transformed by the experience. In the world's first and only socialist state, she perceived the possibility of equal relationships between men and women that were both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. In Soviet Russia, a woman could be 'fully bloomed': an equal citizen and worker as well as a wife and mother. Through an examination of her two self-narratives based on her time abroad - her diary and the retrospective, autobiographical novel Dōhyō (Signposts) - I will demonstrate how for Yuriko, the political and personal were inseparable. Her whole-hearted endorsement of the USSR and the equality it seemed to offer women was part of the individual journey begun with her love marriage, her divorce, and her relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko, whom she left for Miyamoto Kenji, a committed communist, after her return to Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of the representation of the tamashii (spirit or soul), in « contemporary tales » gathered in the 1980s by Matsutani Miyoko (1926-2015). These « contemporary tales » follow well-defined patterns. Six types of tamashii stories are identified. Some recount, amongst others, that just before death, the tamashii leaves the body to say goodbye to its loved ones and friends. Some tell that the tamashii of a dead person comes to pick up a departing tamashii. Or that the tamashii is reincarnated into the body of a baby so that it continues to exist. This concept of tamashii is extremely reassuring. People do not die alone. The tamashii of the dead person stays near its family and loved ones and protects them. This concept is very different from the rational vision of death according to which nothing remains after someone has died. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of Japanese women writers and focuses on their portrayal of femininity, radical feminism in Japan and domestic oppression and liberation, with references to Takahashi Takako's literary work "Botsuraku fūkei".

A literary criticism of the novel "Akirame" (Resignation) and the short story "Onna sakusha" (A Woman Writer) by Tamura Toshiko is presented. It focuses on female writers which includes its relationship with literature, media, and genders politics. It examines the Japanese women literary culture and the development of Japan's publishing industry. An overview of the novel and the short story is also given.

Like Nakagami's, over time Tsushima's stories would shift from domestically rooted stories of kinship tensions to more layered texts that drew on collectively authored songs, stories, and moved outside the boundaries of postwar Japan to both past and other countries. Shortly after Tsushima died on February 18, 2016, literary critic Karatani Kojin framed Tsushima's work in a formal legacy more visible to readers - the Nobel Prize. 5 See, for example, Livia Monnet, "The Politics of Miscegenation: The Discourse of Fantasy in "Fusehime" by Tsushima Yuko", I Japan Forum i 5:1 (1993): 53-73; and Barbara Hartley, "Writing the Body of the Mother: Narrative Moments in Tsushima Yuko, Ariyoshi Sawako and Enchi Fumiko", I Japanese Studies i 23:3 (2003): 293-305. Asia Pacific Journal, Japan, Asia Pacific, Pacific Rim, Asia, East Asia, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Contemporary Japan, Contemporary Asia Pacific, Contemporary East Asia, US-Japan relations, US-China-Japan-Korea relations, Japan-East Asian Relations, Japan-Northeast Asian Relations, Japan-Pacific Relations, Japan-Southeast Asian Relations, Japan-Middle East Relations, Japan-Central Asia Relations, Japan-South Asia Relations, Japan-European Relations, Okinawa. [Extracted from the article]