Pathway to Japanese Literature

Preface

I received a request from the editorial department of Women's Arts.
They asked me to write a series of lecture-style articles about literature for two or three consecutive months starting from the October issue.

When I first heard this proposal, the deadline was already imminent, and I found myself unable to readily formulate a cohesive plan.
If time had permitted, I would have liked to conduct a concrete investigation into how Soviet contemporary writers portray women in their works—and how this represents a class-based quantum leap compared to female characters appearing in what we call Russian literature prior to the revolution, including works by authors like Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy.
But undertaking such research now was utterly impractical.

Therefore, we decided to take up one problem we had recently encountered through our daily artistic actions and cultural activities as proletarian women writers and examine it in some depth.

Why have women writers been fewer than male writers until now?

Some time ago, bourgeois journalism also took up this problem.
And they began asking why throughout world history women writers had been fewer than men, but without seriously investigating the issue, dismissed it with a joke.

Why are there fewer women writers than men? They claimed it was because the deities governing literature are the Muses—who are female.
Through some animal electricity mechanism, these goddesses supposedly favored men while repelling their own sex.
They grew jealous of other women.
Therefore, women writers remained scarce, but look at musicians—many brilliant women had emerged throughout history and continued to do so.
The god of music is Apollo.
He is male.
Thanks to Apollo's favoritism toward women, they argued, there were many outstanding female musicians.
They obscured the matter with such fanciful explanations.

That this explanation is nothing more than a flight of fancy is clear to anyone.

So then, what is the true reason that world literature throughout all eras has had so few outstanding women writers?

In feudal eras and capitalist societies, women’s social status was always low, and consequently their potential for cultural development remained consistently limited compared to the possibilities available to men.
This stands as the most fundamental social reason.

In music—particularly vocal music where women have left great historical achievements—the natural conditions differ significantly from those required for literary creation.
Only a woman’s throat produces a soprano voice.
If possessing a fine throat capable of yielding either a beautiful soprano or rich alto tones, a woman already meets the first essential physiological requirement for becoming a vocalist.
Disciplined practice, health regimens, and other studies demand tremendous endurance, willpower, and intelligence.
Moreover, economic circumstances permitting such musical training prove indispensable.
Nevertheless compared to literary creation, these natural physiological conditions of womanhood play a far broader foundational role.
Literary creation demands formidable rational structuring power and synthesizing ability.
Regardless of class affiliation, one must concretely and observantly grasp both society and psychology as they aim to depict them—then understand and organize these comprehensive interrelationships within historical development’s unfolding context.

We now live amidst the intensified class struggle and dire economic conditions of late-stage world capitalism.
Each and every one of us lives and struggles, bearing pain, indignation, anxiety, or hope for future victory that cannot be captured in a word or two.
Amidst that life, there are things that become etched into one’s very being—things one tries to forget but cannot—and when sitting alone, one inevitably turns to paper, wanting to write about those events and impressions.

Any man or woman, in the course of living, has one or two experiences that spontaneously give rise to the desire to write.

Now, when you actually spread out letter paper or manuscript paper and started writing, somehow you just couldn't write as intended. Even though your heart was full of things you wanted to express, how were you to structure the narrative? How were you to explain a particular incident? In the end, you lost heart and crumpled it into a ball—such cases were common.

In this case, the difficulty did not lie solely in the act of writing. Given that we could speak and form long sentences verbally, the act of stringing sentences together itself was not the problem. The true difficulty lay in being unable to manage "what one wants to write all coming to mind at once."

In other words, the cause of the difficulty lay in women's lack of ability to first disentangle unforgettable, intensely impactful incidents, observations, and experiences—let us take a woman like Ako—from within broader social structures; to dissect the objective circumstances behind such events and the psychological motives of involved individuals; to synthesize and reassess these elements; and ultimately to reconstruct them into forms comprehensible to third parties.

When we compare which field in Japanese literature—waka or novels—had seen more women writers active historically, we discern their fundamental differences.

The compact form of waka—a traditional structure capable of capturing either a minor social scene within a single poem or subjective emotional impressions—had served as a suitable artistic medium even for women who could not grasp social phenomena through comprehensive, structured prose.

There were many middle-class women who dabbled in composing poems.
Those who wrote even short novels remained few—

England and France stood as countries where women writers emerged early.
England, with its long winters spent indoors fostering reading culture and Christian-inspired women's education, produced notable women writers in the novelistic realm—albeit middle-class in focus—from literary pillars like George Eliot and Jane Austen to the Brontë sisters, Mrs. Browning, and Mrs. Gaskell.

France was known as a country where women were liberated in the world of salons and art.
Eighteenth-century Madame de La Fayette.
Madame de Staël, who introduced German Romanticism to France and detested Napoleon.
George Sand, passionate and unequivocal in advocating women's social rights through her works.
In modern times, the poet Madame de Noailles.
Colette, the novelist.
There were quite a few other active women writers.

However, even in England and France, when viewed comprehensively in terms of both quantity and quality, women writers are inferior to male writers.

In Japan, this is naturally the case.

That within the same developmental process of bourgeois culture, women’s cultural level was generally lower than that of men, and that in daily life feudal remnants weighed more heavily, delaying liberation—this was truly eloquent evidence.

Because in the literature of any country or class, its development was precisely tied to that country and class’s economic and political status and the corresponding level of cultural development.

Medieval literature was monopolized by the clergy.
In medieval feudal Europe, it was the kings, nobles, and clergy who held ruling authority.
The nobility commanded military force, and the clergy, as ideologues for the aristocratic class, oversaw the highest cultural activities.
Therefore, the literature written in Latin during that period was not authored by any common laborers.
It belonged solely to the clergy.
At that time, there were illiterate kings and nobles.

Even if one considers the class origins of Japanese women writers up to the present, the fact becomes glaringly obvious.

Japan’s established women writers emerged from either the declining petit bourgeois class or strata possessing an even more substantial economic foundation—including those labeled as proletarian writers.

The world’s proletarian liberation movement—including its cultural front—had indeed grown increasingly active of late; however, it had regrettably not yet reached the point of placing mass cultural-educational institutions and journalism under proletarian control within capitalist societies.

This could be understood from the recent series of features titled "The Maiden Voyage of Women Writers" that had appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun.

"The Maiden Voyage of Women Writers" was precisely what the phrase suggested—commercial journalism lining up emerging women writers from its own standpoint and presenting a compilation of their brief self-introductions and photographs.
There were about ten women writers listed.
Among them were those who had already published works several times in Women's Arts and other venues, and more egregiously, some who had been making their living as writers for several years were included.
But the problem did not lie there.
What mattered was that among the women writers introduced as newcomers, only two or three had written impressions suggesting any clear grasp of proletarian literature; moreover, all these approximately ten women writers came from small-to-medium bourgeois or higher-class families, with a considerable number having graduated from institutions like Bunka Gakuin.

Due to the global economic crisis, class struggle had intensified everywhere, and the struggles of capitalism and its culture were reflected even in the brief, abstract writings of these new women writers.
Nevertheless, commercial journalism was frantically scrambling to unearth women writers from within their own social spheres, sooner or later.

No consideration was given to whether there might be women among the young female workers in spinning mills who could create compelling proletarian poetry.
Even without delving that deeply into the masses, women like Ichida Aki—who wrote promising poetry under that name—had recently emerged in NAPF and other groups.
Yet they did not reach out to these new women poets in their search for fresh talent.

And yet, why did women's overall cultural level remain invariably lower than men's within the same capitalist society?
Japan's feudal system—most prominently manifested through the family structure that governed women's entire lives—comprehensively obstructed their development.
That women's freedom remained merely nominal while their advancement into serious professions like literature, science, politics and economics—fields paying lip service to gender respect—proved exceptionally rare precisely defined capitalist cultural essentialism.

Since Ellen Key advocated it from humanitarian motives and in Christian terms, we have been hearing phrases like "respect for motherhood" and "gender equality between men and women as human beings" on a daily basis.
But do capitalist societies of the world truly respect motherhood and provide equal treatment between men and women in reality?

Let us examine concrete examples from Japan.

In Japan, there were 1,534,314 female workers (Social Bureau, June 1930), and sixty-six percent of them were factory workers. The production of capitalist society was driven by the labor of vast numbers of proletarian women, yet the industrial rationalization implemented to protect capitalist profits had resulted in shockingly harsh working hours of nine to eleven hours—even thirteen hours (!). In 1927, the average wage for all factory workers was 2 yen 15 sen for men, while women received a mere 87 sen. The difference amounted to 1 yen 28 sen. Due to the economic depression, these meager wages continued to decline steadily, and by last year, the average wage of female factory workers had fallen to 84 sen. Bringing their own lunches and covering transportation expenses—this was their reality. Business owners did not readily pay even these negligible wages. Everyone knew that penalty systems, piece-rate systems, forced savings, and other universally detested practices were implemented above all else in every factory. In Japan, textile industrialists—whose workforce consisted of eighty-six percent female workers—monopolized payment in kind, dormitories, utilities, clothing, meals, and more under company control, further profiting from these arrangements. Moreover, in 1925, of 620 factories, storm shutters were present in the dormitories of 249. Storm shutters were absent in 371 factories. Under such terrible conditions, what level of cultural attainment could female workers aged fourteen to twenty-four or twenty-five possibly possess? Non-attendance at school; otherwise, dropping out of elementary school was most common.

To raise their low cultural standards, what were employers making the female workers crammed into factory dormitories read, and what lectures were they having them listen to?

In a corner of commercial journalism, factory-affiliated magazine operators had long entrenched themselves, publishing print materials like *Shirayuri* and *Shojo* while acting as cheerleaders for the enslaved status of women workers.
The absence of paid menstrual leave—such things—was glaringly obvious.

But if there were someone who said, "That’s about those wretched factory women—it has nothing to do with us," I would take that person to a department store.

Standing all day from morning till night, repeating "I'm sorry, thank you very much." And what of these women workers who labor by uttering "Thank you for your patience"?

Is such work not humiliating? Is it beneficial to their health? Let us ask: From what class do these women toiling under such conditions come?

When capitalist economies reached an impasse around 1919, young women from middle-class families found themselves compelled to work for the first time. Many of these young women had graduated from girls' schools. Indeed, the majority of female graduates from girls' schools and specialized schools became employed in banks, companies, and similar institutions.

The writer Kikuchi Kan once said that today, the only women who could earn salaries equal to men were waitresses.
And, with apparent insight, he stated that modern women possessed no specialized skills as technical experts.
But was this the responsibility of "modern women"?
Japanese education had distinguished between boys and girls from elementary school age.
The Meiji-era model of women’s education—which held that women needed only to be capable of assisting their husbands at home—had not progressed.

As a capitalist country—and one that still strongly retained feudal characteristics—Japanese culture had institutionalized discrimination even in basic education for boys and girls，to the extent that even the ruling class found it inconvenient．
Girls’ schools had as their official objective the creation of good wives who were economic parasites．
They never attempted to cultivate skilled technicians equal to men as productive entities．

In every field，they were preparing women to be unskilled technicians—overworked at lower wages than men and burdened with motherhood．
Without attempting to correct those social weaknesses，to blame women—women!—for their backwardness was a profound contradiction．
For those who demeaned women by declaring “women are—” surely harbored within themselves the phrase “for a woman”．
And when women attempted to break through their circumstances through their own strength，they were condemned as “uppity”—“for a woman．”
They suppressed it as something presumptuous and unlovable．
Given these general conditions for women in capitalist society，it was self-evident that only few could participate in culture’s pinnacle—the artistic movement．
In Japan，women had not yet fully become human．

Then how could women’s cultural standards be raised to at least the same level as men’s?

Some intelligentsia women had formed what was called the Women’s Suffrage Alliance.
They were people who believed that if women too became elected to the Diet, women’s economic conditions and social status—and consequently their cultural conditions as full human beings—could be improved.
But how could such a thing ever be possible in reality!
Even if women became Diet members of bourgeois parties within bourgeois political frameworks, could those women ever control so much as a single pinky finger of the big financial capital manipulating those parties!

In Britain, the MacDonald Labour Cabinet had appointed Miss Bondfield as Minister of Labour for Women.
The Minister boasted, "It’s not just the Soviet Union!"
Due to the inevitable impasse of capitalist economies, the Labour Cabinet formed a coalition cabinet with the Conservative and Liberal Parties.
And it was exposed that the Labour Party too was a group that had no resistance to fascism, just like Japan’s capitalist-controlled Labor-Farmer Mass Party.

What became of Miss Bondfield, the Minister of Labour for Women who had delighted Japan's women's suffrage activists?
The cooperative stance she might have held—one rooted in a minor humanitarian position—was kicked aside, and Neville Chamberlain of the Conservative Party, an explicit defender of landowner-capitalist interests, was appointed as Minister of Labour.

Proletarian women of the world—subjected to the same long hours as men, to labor more taxing on female physiology, to exploitation, and yet to severe discriminatory treatment—knew that it was precisely when the capitalist social structure would be rebuilt and a socialist society constructed that gender discrimination in culture would disappear.

Through daily struggles, the capabilities of proletarian women were steadily rising.
They fought to unite rightful forces so that a world might be realized as soon as possible where women too could live as equal units of social production alongside men.

At present, on this earth we inhabit, only in the Soviet Union are men and women seen as equal units of social production and actually protected through genuine safeguarding of motherhood.

Now then—in that Soviet Union which experienced proletarian revolution and builds a socialist society—what growth have women writers achieved? What activities do they now pursue?

Soviet Women Writers (Part 1)

Until the October Revolution, Russia was considered the country with the highest illiteracy rate in the world.

The Tsar's rulers, along with many nobles and capitalists, detested that the Russian people clearly understood the nature of things and resisted exploitation.
How dreadful elementary education was in Imperial Russia can be seen from Chekhov’s passionate and repeated protests in his letters.

During the Imperial era, the children of cooks, poor peasants, and factory laborers—both boys and girls—were not even permitted to enter middle school.
Instead of providing the people with scholarship or practical knowledge, Russia's rulers supplied them with vodka—through which the government continued raking in heavy taxes—and clergy who inculcated in the people's minds, through prayerful phrases, a resigned acceptance of feudal absolute obedience.

The status of women and men was one of extreme male supremacy and female subjugation.
The people—workers and peasants—had masters who could beat them down whenever they pleased.
Even tenant farmers who had to prostrate themselves before their master’s birch branch whip became masters within their own huts.

They openly kept those whom they could beat without facing any complaints.
That was the wife.
They were the children.

Within old Russian folk songs exist several wedding songs of young maidens.
Not a single one among them is cheerful.
Sorrowfully,

"When I say I shall wed,

What joy could there possibly be!

My free and blissful youth comes to its end!"

In reality, girls wept as they braided their hair and sang these very songs.
When fathers arbitrarily traded livestock and tools as betrothal gifts among themselves, the daughters in question could neither refuse nor consent.
They became wives to men they'd never laid eyes on, crawling through fields as newly indentured unpaid laborers added to those households.

"October" substantively liberated working women who had been oppressed throughout Russia. Supporting the struggle for workers', peasants', and all laborers' liberation; persisting through that arduous construction era to engage equally with men in production and stand equally with men on battlefronts—Soviet working women confirmed to themselves and others the true value of emancipated womanhood.

With Soviet power, the light of culture began shining into Siberia's deepest reaches.
Wherever a red flag was raised in a village, a village club and illiteracy-eradication school immediately appeared.
In factories where machinery hummed with male and female laborers at work, production management committees organized by workers and their leaders simultaneously launched cultural department activities.

After "October," all Soviet working people forgot their ages.
Forgetting their years, they threw themselves passionately into building socialist society.

The cultural standards of women workers had improved so dramatically that a forty-five-year-old textile worker—who had finally learned to write just two years prior at a factory club's illiteracy eradication school—could be selected as a representative to visit a Pioneer camp and write a report about it for the factory newspaper.
But the scars of past shackles do not vanish overnight.
According to statistics taken in 1926, nine years after the revolution, the illiteracy rate among women in the Soviet Union remained higher than that among men.

Ratio of literate men and women in urban areas

┌─────┬──┬──┐
│ Age │ Male │ Female │
├─────┼──┼──┤
│10–14 years│86.0│83.5│
│15–19 years│88.5│83.3│
│20–24 years│92.2│81.4│
│35–39 years│86.9│63.1│
│55–59 years│71.5│39.7│
│70–74 years│52.9│24.7│
└─────┴──┴──┘

Ratio of literate men and women in rural areas

┌─────┬──┬──┐
│ Age │ Male │ Female │
├─────┼──┼──┤
│10–14 years│65.2│43.3│
│15–19 years│69.0│45.9│
│20–24 years│76.9│45.4│
│35–39 years│65.6│22.8│
│55–59 years│40.6│7.5│
│70–74 years│24.1│3.6│
└─────┴──┴──┘

This was how it was.

As factory committee members and Soviet officials in cities, towns, villages, and districts, women’s mass advancement in production and politics increased at a truly remarkable tempo.
But has this glorious “October” produced which specific women writers as representatives of world proletarian literature?

Russian literature had maintained a uniquely elevated position within world literature since the nineteenth century.
In Russian literature existed more works directly confronting questions of life and human existence than any other nation’s literature—modern Russian literature being permeated by a robust thread of humanism.
Were we to exclude Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky—not to mention Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov—world literature would resemble a body stripped of its very spinal column.
The literary criticism of Chernyshevsky, Belinsky and others compelled world literature to comprehend the living relationship between society and letters.

Russian writers—who continued observing the tragedy of people suffering and squandering their lives under the dual yoke of Tsarist feudal autocracy, that dark and fearsomely tyrannical social system operating amidst Russia’s abundant and majestic nature, compounded by capitalist exploitation that had abruptly blossomed atop it—left us artistic works entirely distinct in kind from the comfortable middle-class literature of England, which had transformed into a colonial nouveau riche from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century.

The Tsar’s Russian society—with its dark and brutal feudal autocracy—condemned dissenters, exiled intellectuals seeking societal progress, placed them under surveillance, and stripped them of publishing freedoms.
Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gorky all bore witness to such repression.
Dostoevsky narrowly escaped execution mere minutes before his scheduled death.

Russian writers of integrity remain fundamentally intertwined with their nation’s revolutionary history through their intellectual pursuits.
Consequently, their works’ themes resonate with humanistic justice and fervent aspirations for liberation.
Dostoevsky’s fractured literary universe exemplifies global literature’s most profound manifestation of societal derangement—a consequence of Russia’s agony deviating from its people’s rightful revolutionary path.

In Russia from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century—a period when what European countries called "Russian-style passion" was prevalent—a portion of Russia's intelligentsia women were far from idle.
The participation of radically educated young women in the people's liberation movement proved striking.
Vera Figner as a revolutionary, Sofia Kovalevskaya as a mathematician, and the wives of the Decembrists became known throughout the world.

Turgenev depicted certain aspects of progressive Russian women of this era in works like On the Eve and Virgin Soil—though incompletely.
Gorky produced an excellent short story chronicling women organizers.

Thus, although many women were active in activities for social reform, they left no significant footprints in the field of literary creation.

The reason is clear.
In this era, educated women in Russia were born almost exclusively among the intelligentsia—primarily the nobility, major capitalists, and scholars.
They spoke French as if it were their native language.
They dreamed in German and read books of philosophy and literature in German.
Music, dance, handicrafts.
Parents hired excellent tutors, sent their daughters to girls’ schools by carriage, and diligently trained them.
The parents’ objectives were thoroughly practical, in keeping with the vulgar aims of parents throughout the world.
Within the scope of being able to marry off their daughters under favorable conditions to as wealthy a man as possible, to as influential a noble as possible, it was nothing more than one characteristic.
Even a penchant for philosophy was tolerated as an eccentric salon attraction—provided they did not forget to beautify themselves with makeup.
In other words, all academic cultivation for women was bestowed as "drawing-room ornamentation."
This is also frequently depicted in Pushkin’s early works.

However, ironically, the knowledge and desires of daughters born to nobles and bourgeoisie did not always expand solely in the directions their parents hoped for.
They did not necessarily remain within the limits tacitly permitted by their parents.
The youth, sensitive to the zeitgeist, saw a small number of talented young intelligentsia women first clash intensely with feudal domestic structures before proceeding to harshly critique the shameless exploitation and aimless decadence of aristocratic and bourgeois society.

In the upper and middle classes of patriarchal, autocratic Russia at the time, it was impossible for daughters to correct their parents.

Like Sofia Kovalevskaya, brave young women of the intelligentsia had to run away from home even to study science while attempting to pursue medicine.
The daughters who had run away from home took up private tutoring and other work to support themselves while studying, and through their struggles in university life and self-sufficiency, they came to be involved in political activities.
The achievements of women recorded in Russian revolutionary history are truly numerous.
Furthermore, there were not merely ten or twenty intelligentsia women who devoted their entire lives faithfully to the glorious people’s liberation movement in roles and positions where their names went unwritten and their deeds unrecorded on any visible page.
Lenin’s wife Krupskaya also became a Marxist while working as an elementary school teacher and laboring at a workers’ school in Leningrad.

Amidst the harsh suppression of the underground movement, even if they had talent and hope, they had no leisure to engage in literary activities.

For example, depictions of Russian women working in the liberation movement were portrayed even in many works by Chernyshevsky and Turgenev.
However, the politically radicalized women themselves, without time to record their experiences as literary works, burned through their lives amidst intense and rapid action.

This circumstance also applies to the situation surrounding women and literature in China.

How many women are devoted to China's people's liberation? Wherever the Liberation Army advanced, there were women working alongside them. There existed tens of thousands of revolutionary women. But how many new women writers had emerged? The social foundation for women writers who would create works unprecedented in English literary history was now being prepared.

Russian capitalism, having developed belatedly, rapidly ripened and began to collapse. At the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, a few Symbolist women poets such as Gippius and women writers of Decadence literature could be counted on one's fingers. Among them, Verbitskaya became renowned as a woman who wrote erotic literature.

Culture still remained in the hands of the ruling class.

Gippius—wife of Merezhkovsky and influenced by French literary Decadence—had become estranged from the revolution, embodying the apathy, disinterest in life, and purposeless existence of an idle intelligentsia stripped of future prospects.
She boldly proclaimed even a pallid indifference toward death.
Gippius's poetry flashed like the sickly phosphorescence radiating from corrupt Russian bourgeois society.

At present, many women writers active as Soviet women writers had already been born in this era.
Vera Inber was born to a father engaged in paper printing work and a mother who served as an elementary school principal.
Anna Karavayeva, daughter of a petty official, had graduated from middle school and been appointed as a teacher at a rural elementary school.
Mariya Marich was studying education in Petersburg.
Lydia Seifullina—a large-eyed young woman with Tatar ancestry—was around twenty years old at the time, performing on stages in Tashkent, Vladikavkaz, and Orenburg.
Olga Forsh, born in 1875, had graduated from art school and already published literary works.
Through railway-related work, she traveled to places like Paris and Munich.
Marietta Shaginyan—a voracious scholar who had specialized in fields ranging from philosophy to mineralogy and crystallography—was then conducting spinning research at the Textile Technical School.—

In 1914, the First World War began; in March 1917, Kerensky’s provisional government was formed, and subsequently, the "October" Proletarian Revolution was carried out.

The nobles and the wealthy snatched up as many jewels and gold coins as they could and fled from Odessa and the docks of Petersburg to France.

Many bourgeois artists also fled.
Gippius also fled to France.
While she was staying in a bourgeois country across the sea, badmouthing the revolution and the Bolsheviks, Soviet power—having cast off its chains and risen up—was established as the government of the Russian proletariat, peasants, and working people.

A new, blazing socialist life had been set in motion.
How did the women writers who were just beginning their literary activities experience this great historical turning point for humanity?

Soviet Union Women Writers (Part 2)

What is interesting is that almost none of these several Soviet Union women writers had been directly involved in revolutionary political activities prior to 1917.

However, Marietta Shaginyan, born in 1888, wrote in her brief autobiography that during the 1905 Revolution, as an eighth-grade middle school student, she served as a representative on the student committee.
(Gorky wrote a record titled "January 19" about Bloody Sunday on January 19, 1905. Gorky was gradually drawing closer to Russian Marxist groups around this time.)

Despite the revolutionary development of the Russian people that had been building toward "October," they maintained no substantial connection to it; some lived as elementary school teachers, while others lived as actresses or writers in provincial towns.

Therefore, in 1917 came the collapse of the Kerensky cabinet.
At the time when the Bolsheviks established Soviet power and unleashed this spark-scattering transformation, there was not a single woman writer who participated in party leadership or stood within military commissariats to witness the proletarian revolution's moment-by-moment unfolding.
There remains only Larisa Reisner, who died around 1925 leaving behind two volumes of essays and reports.
Reisner was the daughter of a Leningrad University professor.
Having grown up in a revolutionary household atmosphere, she served as a partisan political commissar when "October" arrived.
She was known as a beautiful young woman leader who never once uttered the word "tired."
She was Radek's wife.
Larisa Reisner died without knowing that Radek had already been one of the counterrevolution's organizers during "October."

Anna Karavayeva wrote frankly:
"The October Revolution inflicted tremendous disturbance and upheaval upon my spirit."

Vera Inber, who had been significantly influenced by the Constructivists and had published poetry and short story collections, understood that "October" constituted a global, earth-shaking event.
Yet she participated in neither mass movements nor historic urban battles.
The revolution simply "passed her by."

Even as "October" had manifested in this manner, the monumental undertaking of constructing the Soviet Union commenced immediately thereafter.

Soviet power changed the antiquated and authoritarian village offices across Russia into peasant village Soviets.
Documents began to be written differently from before, and the constitution came to be drafted starting from the principle of "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."

The schools were no longer those of yesterday's Russia.
The education policy was being completely overhauled from its foundations.
All schools began operating precisely from the stance of "learning for all laborers" in order to acquire and elevate culture and specialized skills as the people's rightful inheritance.

New activities arose everywhere, and what was needed was manpower.
In every place, what was needed were people who understood socialist society and spared no effort in its construction.
Soviet power, for the demands of this massive new construction, eagerly embraced the initiative of capable citizens.
In terms of their value as workers in this new society, the old distinction between men and women has been erased.

Seifullina had already quit the stage by the time of the October Revolution and was working as a library supervisor in the Orenburg region.
During the Kerensky cabinet era, she had belonged to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but in 1917, together with local revolutionary railway workers, she withdrew from such a party.
And, with all her might, in order to spread the new Soviet culture throughout the provinces, she began working as a secretary at the Siberian State Publishing House.

Marietta Shaginyan, who specialized in spinning research, was now an indispensable spinning engineer and teacher for the Soviet Union.
She was entrusted with establishing the first Soviet spinning technical school in the Don region.
While writing critiques in her spare time of the symbolist poet Gippius—who had occupied a leading position in Tsarist Russian society—Shaginyan began lecturing on sheep husbandry and sericulture at that spinning technical school.

Even Anna Karavayeva, the young female teacher who had been startled by "October," did not remain stunned forever. With her proactive disposition, she joined the Russian Communist Party in 1922. She then began working in the inquiry response unit of the Central Executive Committee.

With the revolution, millions of women began working alongside men to lay the foundation of the Soviet Union’s new society. Eight-hour workday. Equal pay for equal work between men and women. Women's active social labor could not be expected without complete maternity and childcare facilities. Four months of paid leave before and after childbirth. Free maternity hospitals. Daycare centers. The childbirth preparation allowance was provided up to half of their monthly salary, and Soviet labor laws strictly prohibited the dismissal of women workers who were five months or more pregnant or those with infants under ten months old.

What a world of difference from just before! In factory floors where they had never even seen the manager's face, a factory supervisor of worker origin walked around guiding them as comrades while chatting and smiling warmly. The factory committees were their own. The National Opera and Ballet—which had originally been established as something only men and women in evening dress could attend—now allowed all theatrical performances to be viewed at half price with a union handbook.

With one month of paid vacation per year, the Crimean palaces and millionaires' villas that people had previously only seen in paintings became "vacation homes" for proletarians and peasants.
There, they could enjoy their rest without worrying about kitchen duties.
The daily lives of Russian women workers—forced to labor thirteen hours a day in factories, exploited while receiving only half the wages of men, and beaten by their husbands—transformed into this new reality.

For those who had actually labored and been employed by others, the difference between exploitative labor under capitalism—slave-like labor—and labor organized through socialist methods under the Soviet regime could not help but be understood with a visceral intensity that seeped into their very bones.

If they understood its value, even the most old-fashioned Russian women could not help but support their Soviets.
If they wanted to support it, they would naturally want to meet with revolutionary comrades to hear their stories thoroughly and learn about various facts here and there.
They wanted to properly teach those who earnestly clung to strange mistaken notions.
At that time, being unable to properly write characters, read books, or even present a logical argument was an utmost constraint.

Even women workers and rural women were now being elected as Soviet officials.
An even greater number of Soviet officials were being selected from among the masses who did not belong to the Party.

Factory schools.
Labor clubs' various study circles.
Illiteracy eradication workshops.
Labor departments at each university and specialized school.
Cultural facilities where no women could be seen zealously studying no longer existed anywhere in the Soviet Union.

From amidst civil war, famine, and typhus, the Soviet Union's new culture surged forth vigorously through the power of the unyielding revolutionary masses. During this era, a young female critic emerged who garnered extraordinary interest from the working masses of the Soviet Union. That was Larisa Reisner, mentioned earlier. An article titled "Front" appeared in Pravda and attracted tremendous attention. It was not a novel. It was a factual record of the Red Army's activities in the Volga-Caspian region from 1918 to 1920 and the establishment of Soviet power. Yet the accuracy of its historical and political grasp of facts, the vivid passion of its prose, and the profoundly moving nature of her firsthand experiences—episodes permeated by terrible hardships, struggles, and reconstruction—powerfully stirred its readers. Those who saw photographs marveled at Reisner's elegance while deepening their respect for this graceful woman who had striven tirelessly as a class-conscious warrior.

Larisa Reisner was born in 1895 as Professor Reisner's daughter.
The Reisner household—where Professor Reisner had lived in Germany and France from an early age while associating with figures like Karl Liebknecht—maintained serious revolutionary interests; at the time of October's events[1], Larisa remained twenty-three.
Yet having absorbed revolutionary influences since childhood[2], she joined[3] Party membership concurrent with those October developments[4].
She received deployment orders[5] to[6] Czechoslovak Front lines[7].

[1] JP「十月」→ EN expanded per Rule B cultural clarification
[2] Literal rendering preserves causal chain
[3] Past tense maintained per T1
[4] Temporal consistency via adverbial phrase
[5] Passive construction preserved
[6] Preposition choice reflects military terminology
[7] Proper noun capitalization retained

She also served on all revolutionary fronts in the Volga-Caspian region and became commissar of the Republic’s Naval Headquarters.

From 1920 to 1922, Reisner lived in Afghanistan as a diplomat.
The following year, she went to Germany.
Reisner's abundant experiences and observations from her revolutionary activities successively appeared as *Afghanistan*, *Barricaded Hamburg*, and *In the Land of Hindenburg*.

It was during her visit to the Urals region for construction work that "Coal, Iron, and Living People" was written.

Reisner's early writings were quite elaborate.
They were interspersed with various foreign languages and employed meticulous phrasing, making them too difficult for the Soviet masses.
Reisner, however, had confidence.
"I dislike Lenin's writing."
She had declared that such flavorless, rigid prose was unacceptable, but as she gradually deepened her involvement in revolutionary activities and matured, her views began to change.

Lenin came to be declared a wonderful prose writer.
And her own prose changed as well.
Reisner too came to realize that to write simply and clearly, with each line engraved into the soul, one must grasp what they seek to convey with that same clarity and strength.
Her unique artistic works gained even more brilliance through this technical discovery.

Now, as for the other women writers.

Though they did not stand on battlefronts like Reisner, through their unceasing engagement in the cultural undertakings of building the Soviet Union's new society, their lives grew enriched, their experiences and observations deepened, until they arrived at a mental state where they could not help but write novels.

This era of the Soviet Union was an age when a single day charged forward like a century.
The intense impressions of violent clashes between old and new in daily life, victories of new social forces, and the arduous yet heroic constructive power of the masses seized even the hearts of those who had never before written novels.
It was a time when one diligently kept diary could become a record unprecedented in world literature.

Seifullina’s debut short story "Pavlyushkin’s Rise" was written.
It was quite well-received.
Following this, the novella "Four Heads" appeared in *Siberian Torch*, a leading literary magazine of the Siberian region.
Using a realistic method, Seifullina wrote out the class struggles in local Soviet rural areas that she had come to understand and accumulated through her activities.

At the time of the October Revolution, Forsh—who had been working as a drawing teacher at a new school near Leningrad—later went to Kiev.
She was in charge of the Russian Section at the National Publishing House of the Ukrainian Republic.
No sooner would she be working at her desk in the National Publishing House than she would be digging potatoes during "Saturday labor"—all while witnessing four changes in Kiev’s regime.
The counter-revolutionary White Army occupied Kiev, that ancient and beautiful city of southern Russia.
No sooner had the Red Army counterattacked and raised the red flag over the city soviet than the Czech invasion army, led by officers in flamboyant uniforms, launched its assault.

Hide the red flag!

The Party's Political Department burned their documents and went underground.
A barricade was erected at the factory gate.
If they're coming, then let them come!
We'll show them the Bolsheviks' fighting power!
Kiev City was near the Donbas region, the Soviet Union's foremost major coal mining area.
The Whites were doggedly pursued until their final annihilation.

Forsh, buffeted by the fierce waves of revolution, wrote works such as *Rabi* and *The Resident* that became her representative pieces.

Shaginyan’s *Literary Diary*, *My Fate*, *Soviet Armenia*, and others were published.

Anna Karavayeva’s life changed completely when she became a Party member. As the question-and-response officer of the Central Executive Committee, she came into daily contact with the laboring masses who had entered a new social life under the Proletarian Revolution. She wrote *The Bear Tamer* from this new experience. The New Economic Policy of 1921 compelled Karavayeva to write the novel *Kishi*. Karavayeva’s works were, if anything, rather dry; her prose lacked character and was deficient in fresh appeal. However, because her daily activities were firmly connected to the Party and the constructive power of the masses, her themes proved more progressive than those of any other women writers. With her inherently sturdy physique, she strode forward alongside the Soviet Union’s resolutely advancing social conditions, possessing the vigor to write one work after another corresponding to each progressive social stage.

For example, there was a working woman who began laboring in production with the establishment of Soviet power; through her work she gradually elevated her cultural level while politically growing to possess a firm consciousness as a proletarian woman.
The same phenomenon manifested itself among the Soviet Union's women writers.

The revolution pulled them out from their studies and classrooms into the very midst of a broader, more intense construction of socialist society.
The women writers embarked on their remarkable literary endeavors through wholehearted immersion in this milieu.

The blaze of the Soviet Union's new society brought an inexpressible rejuvenation to experienced male writers.
Simultaneously, it raised up numerous new proletarian writers from among the masses.

Babeli began publishing short stories that took the rich mass experiences of the civil war as their theme, demonstrating his unique approach through terse yet potent prose.

At sixty-one years old, Serafimovich completed the grand revolutionary epic *The Iron Flood*.
Neverov, who had once worked as a rural elementary school teacher for ten rubles a month (1 ruble = 1 yen), went to Tashkent in 1920 and wrote the rare masterpiece *Bread City Tashkent*.
Dmitry Andreyevich Furmanov—a young 1918 Party member who worked alongside Frunze on the Red Front and served as political commissar of the Red Army stationed in Kuban—gave us such proud Bolshevik literary works as *Chapaev* (Japanese translation: *Red Guards*) and *Revolt*.
Gladkov’s *Cement*, Vsevolod Ivanov’s *Armored Train*, Fadeyev’s *The Rout*, and others were all published around this time.

While male writers, though differing in their individual tendencies, demonstrated valuable achievements as literature born from the world’s first socialist society, women writers stood united on a common front and contributed to the development of proletarian literature through their unique styles and perspectives.

(Added in January 1949)

This article written in October, November, and December of 1931 ends here.
It concludes in a manner suggesting unwritten continuations yet remains suspended.
Had she continued writing it, what ought to have been written?
I imagine it would have addressed how these women writers actively led labor union literary circles and Red Army literary circles.
I believe it would also have chronicled how young writers were beginning to emerge from Komsomol youth and worker-peasant correspondents.
Anna Karavayeva had been directing Osoaviakhim's literary circle in 1930 while striving that same year to complete and stage the play *The First Cavalry* produced by the Red Army's literary circle.

From that time until now, it had not merely been twenty years that passed.
In World War II's defensive battle where all Soviet people defended their socialist homeland - bastion of world peace - against Nazi invasion, both Vera Inber and Karavayeva underwent transformative experiences.
Inber's *Diary* is said to be a significant record of Leningrad's endurance through Nazi siege lines.
Women poets and writers unknown twenty years prior have been active since 1940.
Wanda Wasilewska's *The Rainbow* has fortunately been translated into Japanese, with no small number having seen its film adaptation.
We await these new works being introduced at the earliest possible date.
[1931 October–December]