Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Miyamoto Yuriko

When we look at various beautiful relief sculptures, in what form do those reliefs appear to us?
We always view them from their raised surfaces.
Yet within their shadows lies a hollow as deep as the thickness of the protruding relief.
Life too resembles a relief sculpture; beneath the illuminated surface that reflects light lies an equally sunken plane, and wherever brightness exists, there too accompanies its shadow.

Literature depicts the various aspects of life and society in a manner that makes them vividly visible and palpable before our eyes.
So in what relationship are society's brightness and darkness perceived?
Here lies what I believe to be a new perspective on literature.
When examining the issue of women and literature through the lens of human and literary history, the first question that arises is this: Why have women across the world historically engaged less in literary activities than men?
The position of women in literature—as is well known—has been that of women depicted by men from literature's very first pages, women taken up as subjects of creation.
This fact holds profound significance.
In Homer's *Iliad*—that Greek epic poet's work perennially counted among world literature's most classical—there emerges the first female figure depicted as object.
Within the *Iliad*, Helen appears extraordinarily beautiful, rendered as feminine beauty's archetype.
Though Helen may have rivaled Venus in beauty, examining how Homer portrays her social existence reveals radiant Helen positioned as little more than a "pawn" within her era's ruling-class struggles.
The first woman appearing in world literature occupied this status as contested object—a position demonstrating Greece had already established its patriarchal system when the *Iliad* was written.
Though Greece was deemed a free nation whose culture became European civilization's fountainhead, that freedom and culture stood upon slavery's foundation.
Slaves tilled fields, wove cloth, raised livestock—shouldering life-sustaining labor to make possible Greek free people's cultural existence.
Upon such basement-supported freedom, even speaking of Greek women's liberty remains hollow—for with female slaves present in that society, true freedom as understood through modern sensibilities simply did not exist.
Greek mythology itself starkly reveals women's position: Venus—sculpted and painted as feminine beauty's epitome—invariably appears as aesthetic object meant for gazing in every artwork.
Has anyone witnessed Venus engaged in weaving?
Has anyone beheld Venus portrayed as an ordinary woman raising children?
Though her son Cupid perpetually attends her as love's messenger bearing golden bow and arrows, one never glimpses Venus' life as mother or wife.
She appears often nude—displaying feminine beauty yet invariably rendered passive.
That Greek life depicted only non-laboring women's beauty has not escaped notice.
In women's artistic appearances like Venus and Helen lies the origin of feminine tragedy—the forms of power manifest throughout human societal history.

Thus, what changes did women—who had been led into literature as passive objects, naturally mirroring their passive social position—undergo during the Renaissance, that era of cultural revival?

The Renaissance began to emerge in fourteenth-century Italy, where commerce had developed earliest and the economic and political power of the citizen class had grown. And spreading to France, England, Germany, and all of Europe, it became a movement seeking to liberate humanity freely and unrestrainedly from the oppressive medieval royal authority and religion, ushering in an era when social life and culture began swinging open the door to Europe’s modernity.

As the Renaissance progressed, women’s social roles began to expand, with several female scholars emerging at institutions like Spain’s University of Córdoba.
Shakespeare’s plays—as one of the artists embodying the Renaissance’s richness and overflowing humanity—have always been a subject of discussion.
The characters in Shakespeare’s dramas are remarkably diverse, characterized by a richness mirroring social reality itself.
Human vulnerability, cunning, guile, innocence, and every manner of intense desire are depicted there—and the women who appear are never uniform.
From terrifying figures like Lady Macbeth to King Lear’s daughters with their varied personalities; from tragic princesses like Juliet who sacrificed her life for doomed love with Romeo; to spirited tomboys like those in *The Merry Wives of Windsor* and *All’s Well That Ends Well*; and Ophelia as Hamlet’s ill-fated lover—Shakespeare’s works present women of infinite variety.

Now, when we today consider Shakespeare’s famous masterpiece *Othello*, we cannot help but feel profoundly and acutely about the fate of its heroine, Desdemona.

Othello was a black general born in Africa.
As a brave victor, he took as his wife a beautiful European noblewoman named Desdemona.
However, among Othello’s subordinates was a villain named Iago.
Iago was born with a wicked nature—one that took pleasure in using his malicious cunning to disrupt the lives of simple, honest people and revel in the resulting chaos.
Desdemona’s obedience and unparalleled beauty, combined with the black Othello’s affectionate nature, stimulated his malicious cunning.
Iago, who had been waiting for an opportunity, seized upon a single opening.
While keeping her misfortune unconfided to Othello, Iago succeeded in provoking his suspicion and jealousy.
Othello, the black man, not only felt jealous as a husband but also, as a human being, found it unbearable that his dignity had been wounded by Desdemona’s fickleness, ultimately leading him to kill Desdemona and commit suicide.
Othello remains a work that delivers vivid emotional impact even today, distinguished among Shakespeare’s tragedies by Iago’s malicious cunning, Othello’s impassioned nature, and Desdemona’s pure love.
Desdemona possessed a single exquisite handkerchief.
It was something Othello had given her; having been told that if she were to lose it, he would take it to mean her love had been lost, it had been bestowed upon her as a token of love.
Iago’s eyes were drawn to that handkerchief.
With his characteristic cunning, he stole the handkerchief from Desdemona.
And he made those around them believe that Desdemona had quietly given it away.

Though Desdemona’s bewilderment and anxiety over losing the handkerchief were heartrending enough to evoke sympathy, she did not speak a single word to Othello about the disappearance of that precious handkerchief, nor did she ask for his help in searching for it.

However, as we women witnessed this tragedy, our hearts trembled with sympathy for Desdemona while boiling with frustration toward her.
Why, Desdemona!
If she loved her husband Othello so deeply," one wondered, "why did she not honestly confess the theft of the handkerchief sooner and attempt to share her anxieties and perplexities with him?
Desdemona ardently loved Othello while simultaneously fearing him.
Fearing the intensity of Othello’s love, she became crushed and paralyzed by the weight of those words—"Do not lose this"—spoken to her.
Because of Desdemona’s undiscerning excessive obedience, purity, innocence, and refinement, Othello’s tragedy could not be prevented.

We could not help but profoundly perceive the significance of such works being created during the Renaissance.
The Renaissance had liberated women’s humanity—yet in Desdemona, how passive, uncertain in judgment, and precarious that humanity remained!
According to our modern common sense, if one were to lose a very important handkerchief, I believe they would say, "I’ve lost the handkerchief you gave me—please help me look for it."
Even if it wasn’t found and they were severely scolded, they would have the other person acknowledge that their love remained unchanged by this incident and that the loss was merely a misfortune.
For a handkerchief is merely an object.
At this juncture, the fundamental issue lay in marital love.
Even if the handkerchief—a token of love—was lost, love had to be protected and could indeed be protected.
Therein lay autonomous human love that transcended circumstances.
However, when we looked at Desdemona, it became evident that upper-class women of the Renaissance era lacked the capacity to protect their love and prevent their own tragedies in such a manner.
This came to mean that from men’s perspective, a character like Desdemona was seen as exemplifying women’s endearing vulnerability.
Desdemona’s tragedy lay in how her boundless obedience and devotion to Othello—lacking clear judgment and will—allowed circumstances to deteriorate from bad to worse, creating the decisive moment that enabled Iago’s malicious cunning to succeed.
When we considered this Desdemona, our minds naturally turned to the position of women that followed from the earlier issue of Helen.

The Renaissance acknowledged the broadening of emotion that allowed Desdemona to love Othello despite their differing skin colors but failed to cultivate the intellectual maturity needed to fully realize that love.
The Renaissance era was a period when not only literary works but also grand paintings and sculptures bloomed in abundance like flowers.
Yet when gazed upon intently, one finds a certain melancholy within Michelangelo’s paintings.
When viewing famous murals like those in the Vatican, there exists an inescapable melancholy alongside Michelangelo’s cosmic grandeur.
When reading Michelangelo’s biography, one clearly understands how he—despite possessing such immense talent—was oppressed by the Pope’s selfishness and caprices.
On one side of the Renaissance there still existed oppressive feudal elements; one recognizes that even in the relationship between Pope and artists these remnants lingered.

While recognizing Michelangelo’s talent, the Pope of that time, feudal in his habitual belief in his own absolute authority, failed to fully acknowledge Michelangelo’s humanity as an artist.
Within Michelangelo’s immense talent and profound humanity, there always lay an anxiety of being unable to fully express himself.
Just as Desdemona had always feared Othello alongside her love.
Michelangelo had to fear the Pope alongside his own talent.

The facade of the Renaissance was a history of resplendent high-relief sculptures, but in its shadowy depths, feudal elements lingered thickly.

For example, what kind of smile has Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa left to this day?
Mona Lisa's smile has been called an enigmatic smile since the era in which it was painted.
Mona Lisa’s smile has been called a smile that deeply and mysteriously captivates the hearts of those who gaze upon it, as if to drive them mad.
This smile of Mona Lisa’s is not that of a liberated woman; rather, I believe it connects to Desdemona’s anxiety and Michelangelo’s melancholy.

This lady portrait by da Vinci—smiling her world-renowned enigmatic smile—merely smiled with lips, cheeks, and eyes; she did not reveal her teeth in joyful laughter.
Mona Lisa stared intently at something.
Her gaze was profoundly deep, imbued with soul, yet those eyes were by no means sparkling with joy.
A melancholic gaze lay beneath heavy, plump and beautiful eyelids.
But she kept staring so intently, holding that smile so still.
What was the essence of Mona Lisa—of La Gioconda’s—smile?
From our own hearts as women, we attempted to penetrate into the emotional states of Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci spent several years working on this beautiful portrait of Mona Lisa, but ultimately it remained unfinished.
What does it mean that a painter of Leonardo’s caliber, having embarked on a single portrait and spent years on it, left it unfinished?
Could it not be said that no sooner had Leonardo da Vinci thought he had finished painting Mona Lisa than something flashed forth across her face—in her eyes and upon her lips—a single new human emotion, a feminine beauty he had never before discovered?

When painting the opulent and beautiful Mona Lisa, the scene of how Leonardo went to great lengths to decorate his studio, had music played, and tried to keep her cheerful was depicted in exhaustive detail in *The Forerunner*—a historical novel by Merezhkovsky featuring Leonardo da Vinci as its protagonist.
While Mona Lisa’s mysterious expression was grasped through Leonardo da Vinci’s boundless breadth and depth of intellect, I do not believe that intense sensual intensity—so richly present within that mystery—ever originated from Leonardo’s intellect.
In Mona Lisa’s entire being as a mature, fragrant woman—I maintain—there existed a passionate emotion that could not help but gaze somewhere with that deeply sorrowful look, and a powerful pulsation that compelled her to place those elegant hands against her ample chest. How acutely Leonardo must have sensed this, transferring it to his brush while imprinting it upon his own heart.
It would have been unnatural to claim there had never been a mutual flow of emotion between the beautiful woman being depicted and the brilliant Leonardo depicting her.
Mona Lisa perceived Leonardo’s intellect through her senses, and Leonardo—with that formidable capacity for human insight evident in all his sketches—had grasped even the subtle inner sensations of this woman called Mona Lisa.
When such mutual understanding arose between members of opposite sexes, it was exceedingly rare for this not to be romantic feeling.
For it is precisely in such harmony that the deepest manifestation of human accord resides.

Did Mona Lisa feel toward her husband that complex and subtle harmony which had arisen between her and Leonardo da Vinci? Most likely she did not.
And at the same time, it seems Mona Lisa had not clarified to herself what kind of thing this new sensation of life welling up within her truly was.
Otherwise, how could that ambiguous smile—infinitely pressing upon her face—have lingered so persistently?
When she had clearly grasped the substance of her emotions as a woman, that smile would inevitably either leap into an expression of anguish or burst forth into radiant joy.

When viewed in this way, here too we can discern the contours of Renaissance emotion.
Mona Lisa gazes and gazes at that pleasurable emotion from which she cannot tear her eyes, unwittingly forming a smile that reflects the inexpressible shadow of her heart—yet in the Renaissance era, she did not act upon that longing.
Gazing and smiling, through that fierce inner turbulence, she only managed to make Leonardo sense a single portrait as eternally unfinished.
It can be surmised that Leonardo left this painting unfinished with deliberate intent.
The unfinished portrait was spared from being sent to the residence of Mona Lisa’s husband, its commissioner.
And did Mona Lisa truly feel dissatisfied that Leonardo kept it by his side as an unfinished work?
Mona Lisa married the man chosen by her father and brothers’ command, and did not attempt to shatter through her own passion the fate of Italian women who had to spend their entire lives under their husbands’ authority.
The Renaissance granted Mona Lisa that smile-filled human freedom, but it restricted the social agency of women as independent individuals beyond that.

When viewed in this way, it becomes evident that even the resplendent art of the Renaissance did not fully liberate the people of that era.

In the 18th century, people with modern materialist philosophies like Rousseau emerged in France.
The Industrial Revolution, which brought about a state of having to work, has from this era onward produced—and continues to this day—a laboring populace that must truly work and survive solely through their labor.

Proletarian women began to emerge in history.
During this period, in Britain and France, several women writers rose to prominence.
In 19th-century English literature, there was George Eliot—a name that could not be forgotten.
Jane Austen.
The Brontë sisters.
Mrs. Gaskell.

In France, there were figures such as Madame de Staël and George Sand—the latter being particularly familiar to Japanese readers.
And what should be noted is that these women writers were all middle-class women except for Madame de Staël.
George Sand, after her first marriage ended in failure, wrote *Indiana* advocating for women’s rights while struggling to make ends meet, and George Eliot too began writing novels as a woman who had to support herself through her pen.
All these women writers, while addressing various themes, ultimately saw Rousseau emerge as a forceful advocate for human naturalness against the formalism and religious ideologies forged by French absolutism—the societal framework that shaped women’s lives at the time.

As a philosopher and educator, Rousseau’s ideas advocated for human equality, freedom, and independence—a liberty founded upon equal humanity between women and men—in opposition to the intense absolutism spanning the reigns of Louis XIV to Louis XVI in France.
Alongside Rousseau, a pioneer of modern democracy, there emerged Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot who championed modern ideas.

The French Revolution of 1793 breathed new life into France and all of Europe.
Marie Antoinette, who was a central figure in this French Revolution, was one of the women whose youthful and frivolous life was exploited most egregiously within the utterly corrupt French court life.
However, her fate was entirely passive; despite living a life that was discussed from so many historical angles, Marie Antoinette herself wrote nothing.
As the daughter of Austria’s Maria Theresa, she had received the highest education and should have possessed the greatest freedom—and yet.
What she wrote consisted solely of secret letters to the Austrian court; she did not compose even a single short poem.
In an era when small poems were so popular and noblewomen’s literary fervor ran high—and yet.
Even when considering such examples, it becomes clear that a woman’s status or education alone does not give birth to art.

By the nineteenth century, when capitalist societies across Europe had approached their developmental zenith, the issue of human liberation—whose trajectory had been charted since the Renaissance through the eighteenth century—materialized concretely. Particularly in Britain, where steam-powered industrialization commenced earlier than elsewhere through what became known as the Industrial Revolution, textile manufacturing advanced remarkably.
Great numbers of British women and children began laboring in factories.
The mechanical force that displaced men from muscle-dependent jobs across numerous factories presented a scene eminently worthy of attention—wives, daughters, and children resisting their shackles.
George Eliot adopted even her male pseudonym upon recognizing that identifying as female would invite tiresome discriminatory practices.
Jane Austen too satirically depicted in *Pride and Prejudice* how British middle-class households orchestrated mercenary calculations and ludicrous commotions over matrimonial arrangements.
Even around us today, mothers with marriageable daughters still alter their countenances at every opportunity.
They deprive themselves of sustenance to purchase dressers and prepare kimonos—waiting perpetually as if their daughters were merchandise awaiting purchase.
Not only men but women themselves voice phrases like "for a woman."
The conditions Austen so bitingly satirized during the nineteenth century endure potently within Japan's lingering feudal customs.
When women bereft of family pillars by contemporary wars read *Marta the Widow*—authored by Poland's Orzeszko during that same nineteenth century—none could help marveling at how precisely Marta's tribulations mirror their own wretchedness.

Now then—what kind of literature did Japanese women create throughout history?
We have the Manyoshu.
The Manyoshu collected excellent works by women from all social strata of its time.
From empresses and princesses to other court ladies—along with frontier guards (sakimori) who journeyed from Tohoku’s mountains to the capital, and their mothers and wives—it gathered their songs.
Simultaneously, it collected without prejudice even poems composed by courtesans and beggars, so long as they held poetic merit.
Among Japan’s classical works, there existed no poetry anthology as populist as the Manyoshu.
In the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki—texts predating the Manyoshu—Izanami no Mikoto, the first woman recorded in these chronicles, was depicted through a male-supremacist lens shaped by the Confucian-style ideologies of the scholars who compiled them, despite an empress having commissioned the Kojiki’s creation.

The Manyoshu directly reflects how primitive Japanese society as a whole was at the time of its compilation, along with its mode of production. People were impetuous and straightforward—they found beauty in beautiful things, cried when they wished to cry, and when they loved, poured both heart and body into that love; these emotions of the Japanese people were laid bare. When we look at the Manyoshu, we can also infer that ruling power at the time was by no means as firmly established as in later eras.

After the era of the Manyoshu passed, the Fujiwara period arrived—a time when women flourished in literature.
It is said that the literature of the court era was created primarily by women.
Eiga Monogatari, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, Sarashina Nikki, and various other women’s literary works were written by women.
Among them, the name Murasaki Shikibu stands out—there is no one who does not know *The Tale of Genji*—but what was the real name of this woman called Murasaki Shikibu?
The appellation "Murasaki Shikibu" was a courtly courtesy name.
In feudal merchant households around Osaka, there were instances where female servants were given names like O-Také-don or O-Umé-don.
In such households, a girl named Sayo would be called O-Také-don while working there; names like Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, and Akazome Emon—appellations derived from court life for those employed in the imperial court—were likewise service designations.
The personal name of Murasaki Shikibu—such as Fujiwara no...—does not appear in history.
The same applies to Sei Shōnagon.
Up until now, the women whose names clearly appear in the genealogies of Japanese history are solely those from the Fujiwara family—specifically Michinaga’s clan—who became empresses, consorts, or mothers of princes.
Only women who, like the beautiful Helen, were valuable gifts or stakes in the Fujiwara clan’s power struggles had their names recorded.

It became clear that despite possessing the immense literary talent and life experience required to write *The Tale of Genji*, her real-life circumstances as a woman did not match those of men.
The name of the woman who wrote *The Sarashina Diary* also remained unknown.
And in *The Sarashina Diary*, which chronicled the life of this middle-class woman, the figure of a middle-class woman with unfortunate parents—tossed about by an unstable life—stood vividly depicted with elegance.
*The Pillow Book* possessed a remarkably fresh sense of color.
The vivid sight of a servant in an ocher-colored kimono carrying irises with blue leaves and purple flowers; how interesting it was that on a moonlit night, when riding in an ox-drawn carriage, the moon reflected in shallow water beneath the wheel tracks shattered and sparkled—Sei Shōnagon’s aesthetic sense had been remarkably dynamic for a courtly figure of her time.
The freshness of her aesthetic sensibility would have astonished even Matisse.
We could scarcely believe this was an eleventh-century Japanese work.
Who had this person called Sei Shōnagon been? And how had she ended her life? That too remained unknown.
Even in the history of literature, the lives of ordinary individual women had not been preserved.
What then had motivated Sei Shōnagon, Murasaki Shikibu, and other women to write such literary works within that society?
The Fujiwara family’s power struggles had solidified into a fierce tradition, and when sending their daughters to become empresses or consorts, the parents placed court ladies with literary talent around these daughters to secure political power in socially prominent settings.
This served as both decoration and defense.
Whether Murasaki Shikibu or Sei Shōnagon, they had been employed to adorn their mistresses and—through these outstanding court ladies’ reputations—maintain their mistresses’ high status.
And as could be seen even in *The Sarashina Diary*, for middle-class women who were not born into influential houses and had to rely on their own talents to secure good marriages, court service had also been a path in life.
The chapter “A Rainy Night’s Discussion” in *The Tale of Genji* proved Murasaki Shikibu had been a realist in her perspective on women’s lives.
Murasaki Shikibu had attempted to write Hikaru Kimi as a typical man of that era’s aristocratic society.
From today’s perspective, she asserted that even amidst aimless, indulgent emotional lives, there must remain an enduring humanity.

Though that era spoke of refined elegance and tender poetic sentiment—with romance and marriage seemingly flowing like a graceful stream where women were not subjugated—the reality remained that they were loved and discarded according to men's arbitrary whims. Even a woman like Izumi Shikibu, who actively pursued romantic relationships, ultimately found her passions confined to passive acceptance.

The greatness of Murasaki Shikibu, I believe, lies in how—as a literary scholar—she consistently emphasized the authenticity and sincerity of human connections while depicting several romances centered on Hikaru Kimi through her vivid, powerful descriptions.

When viewed against contemporary literary conventions like those seen in *Sue-tsumu Hana*, the exceptional appeal of *The Tale of Genji* stems precisely from how its portrayal demonstrates resistance to the ephemeral fate imposed upon women.

Murasaki Shikibu never succumbed to complacency within the prevailing style of delicate refinement.

The manor system that formed the foundation of the Fujiwara period's prosperity—when the economic equilibrium of absentee landlords collapsed—saw jitō (local land stewards) and manor lords who had directly ruled these territories begin fighting over land.
In these conflicts, samurai—hired in ways resembling modern organized crime groups—allied with powerful local clans to rise up, ousting absentee court nobles from their dominant positions and ushering in the age of samurai rule.
Soon came the Sengoku period.
We must not forget that Japan entered this samurai era precisely as the Renaissance began flowering in Europe.
This historical parallel influenced the Meiji Restoration and remains critically relevant to Japan's ongoing democratization challenges today.

The lives of women after the samurai era began were truly even more deplorable than Helen’s.
The more beautiful a woman was, the more tragic her fate became as a hostage.
They were taken as hostages and married off as peace offerings.
The extent to which the love and humanity of women during the Sengoku period were trampled can be understood by examining the tragic end of Hosokawa Tadaoki’s wife Gracia.
O-Tama no Kata, who was Akechi Mitsuhide’s third daughter, embraced Christianity and took the baptismal name Gracia.
When Ishida Mitsunari, based at Osaka Castle, attempted to resist Tokugawa Ieyasu, Gracia—who was the wife of Hosokawa Tadaoki, an ally of Tokugawa, and the daughter of Mitsuhide, whose clan had been annihilated by Hideyoshi—refused the order to enter Osaka Castle, set fire to her residence, and ordered an elderly retainer to stab her to death.
In her short life of thirty-six years, O-Tama no Kata had fully experienced the hardships of a woman of the warrior class, and thus she ended her life.

In this era, women could no longer exist as creators of literature.
In the Noh plays that emerged as characteristic literature of this era, women were depicted; their portrayals expressed through anguished hearts—those who became living spirits while alive as madwomen and lunatics, or manifested as ghosts after death bound by love’s chains.
One could understand how women of that time had strangled their own hopes to survive, and how an implicit fear—the terror of enforcing such suppression—flowed beneath men’s consciousness.
Whether termed madness, living spirits, or dead spirits, there lay a fear toward those who deviated from ordinary human bounds.
Noh plays were considered literature of the clergy.
The spectacle of people who had attained leisured lives through modern underworld dealings moaning over these pitiful tales of women struck one as both infuriating and absurdly comical.

Tokugawa Ieyasu put an end to the Sengoku period, ushering in Edo's long and dreary three hundred years.
The position of women in this era can be fully grasped through just one text: *Onna Daigaku* ("Greater Learning for Women").
Though we speak casually of three centuries of Tokugawa rule, from it trail unresolved feudalistic issues persisting to this day.
Imitating Chinese Confucian principles, the feudal era made family its absolute central concern.
Those incompatible with household customs must depart.
Those failing to bear children must depart.
Those consumed by jealousy must depart.
Kaibara Ekiken's *Onna Daigaku* solemnly codifies these "Seven Grounds for Dismissal."
A wife must rise early and retire late.
Women must never indulge in food.
When we contrast how this same Kaibara Ekiken wrote *Yōjōkun*—tediously expounding longevity secrets for men—we cannot help but feel profound astonishment.
What cruelty demands that sleep-deprived, malnourished women with chilled bodies be cast out for childlessness?
How could this man who blamed women alone for barrenness have penned *Yōjōkun*?

As for literary figures of the Tokugawa period—whether we speak of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Saikaku, or Bashō—those like Bakin who appeared were far inferior in literary terms, though famous. However, not a single woman writer emerged during these three hundred years. Only a few women’s names were barely recorded in the realm of haiku. Women had no path to survival unless they submitted to their parents, older brothers, husbands, or sons. They could not live according to their own will. Just as men had to absolutely obey their lord’s commands, in an era when women had to obey men, those women could not possibly write literature. Even among the warrior class, literature ceased to be created. During times of war, one must not think deeply about things. This military education had persisted in Japan until very recently like an aberrant presence. In a human existence where heads are severed and replaced with iron helmets, how could literature—that most human of endeavors—give rise to truly human creations? In an era when even being the master of one’s own heart is not recognized—no matter when that era may be—literature cannot be born.

What circumstances shaped Bashō? He was a lower-ranking samurai who eventually abandoned the warrior's path to pursue haikai poetry. The fact that Bashō's aesthetic standards were grounded in an exceptionally modest economic foundation holds profound significance. By hanging a single gourd from his hut's pillar—requiring only the rice stored within and a few meager provisions—he sought an artistic realm liberated from power struggles and financial anxieties. This reveals that by Bashō's era, the samurai class's economic base had already destabilized under merchant control, eroding their warrior pride. For Bashō, a man of acute sensitivity, the samurai's posturing had grown intolerable.

Saikaku, who was a retired major merchant, differed yet again.
The short story *Eitaigura* and other works by Saikaku, which depicted Osaka’s social conditions through an economic lens, possessed an entirely different realism compared to Bashō.
Bashō—born into the samurai class—approached art with ascetic dedication; having broken free from Chinese-derived cultural influences, he relentlessly pursued a new world of sensibility rooted directly in Japanese life. During one period, he even composed haiku saturated with Zen phrases.
After traversing that era, Bashō’s intuitive expression of reality achieved artistic perfection.
Among Bashō’s disciples were female haiku poets.
Yet even when a woman attempted to compose haiku, her life—like all women’s lives in the Tokugawa period—could only barely be allotted to artistic refinement after fulfilling every demanded obligation.
The path of art—refined, compressed, and sensorially intense like Bashō’s—proved excruciatingly difficult for women living such lives.
If women could dedicate only their exhausted post-housework hours to art furtively under an andon lamp’s glow, the possibility of their talents flourishing remained profoundly tenuous.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon expressed the overflowing humanity of samurai, townspeople, and others who had broken free from feudal constraints through his tragic jōruri puppet plays.
He wrenched tears from contemporary audiences by portraying various female types through their sacrifices, devotions, and cruelties.
Yet the women depicted by Chikamatsu and Saikaku lacked the capacity to silence their own voices as women.
The circumstances of men and women, parents and children, and close friends—whose mutual human expression was blocked by the immovable dam of that era's rigid class and status system—were conveyed through jōruri playwrights' tenderly persistent lyricism.
The collision between social obligation and human feeling formed one of the central tensions in Chikamatsu's literature.
Lovers rendered tragic in Chikamatsu Monzaemon's works committed joint suicide as if by prearrangement.
Despite the shogunate's prohibition on double suicides, these men and women who could not actualize their love in this world pursued death while binding their hopes to the next.

Such methods of asserting pitiful humanity never disappeared from Japanese society even after the Meiji era.
And today, though people no longer commit double suicides over love, we are seeing that parent-child suicides driven by financial hardship have been decreasing in number.

Now, Japan's history transitioned into the Meiji era.
The Meiji Restoration was not a revolution where the bourgeoisie—the citizen class that had risen in modern European society—overthrew monarchical power dominating feudal society to propel history forward.
It was characterized by Japanese capitalism advancing through the bourgeoisie compromising with government power created by the Satchō clique and submitting to transformed remnants of old forces.
How much antiquity the new Meiji era contained within itself manifested even in Higuchi Ichiyō's novels.
I indeed consider Ichiyō's masterpiece Takekurabe beautiful.
That lyrical quality of Ichiyō's writing—blending refined elegance with common sensibilities—constitutes one classic exemplar of classical literature.

Higuchi Ichiyō passed away at the young age of twenty-five.
When she first began attempting to write novels, she entered into discussions with a literary figure named Semi Tōsui for consultation.
The question of why a woman of Higuchi Ichiyō’s considerable talent became close to a mediocre writer like Semi Tōsui has been frequently discussed among researchers.
There exists a diary of a snowy day that became the basis for the novel Snow Day; examining it makes abundantly clear that Semi Tōsui was just as impoverished as Higuchi Ichiyō.
Ichiyō had become a live-in disciple at Nakajima Utako’s school, which attracted upper-class students at the time, but detailed anecdotes reveal how her talent was envied and how she suffered amidst those spoiled young noblewomen.
Ichiyō writes in her diary that poverty is something deeply frustrating.
Semi Tōsui, tormented by debt, concealed his whereabouts and lived hidden in a small room.
There Ichiyō took her manuscript to have him read it.
Given that poverty defined Ichiyō’s reality, it follows naturally that she came to view Semi Tōsui—who laid bare that very reality—as her comrade and closest male companion.
The similarity in their lived realities.
A sense of being fellow sufferers in poverty.
This must have been the powerful motive driving Ichiyō’s affinity for Tōsui.
However, Nakajima Utako scolded her for associating with Tōsui.
Declaring she had never even contemplated romance with Tōsui, Ichiyō severed all ties with him.
Throughout her association with Tōsui, not a single love poem appeared among Higuchi Ichiyō’s works.
Only after actually ending her association with Tōsui and reaching a state where no one would criticize her circumstances did Higuchi Ichiyō finally break free from feudal pressures and compose love poems.
She created them in overwhelming abundance.
I see this as a single Desdemona’s handkerchief manifesting in the Meiji era.

There, the strongly feudal character of the Meiji 19 era in which Ichiyō lived tells us many things.

When viewed through the lens of world history, the year Meiji 19 was an era when the first May Day was held in America.
And it was the time when workers of the world first stood demanding eight hours of labor, eight hours of education, and eight hours of rest.

In Meiji 23 (1890), Japan suppressed the Freedom and People's Rights Movement that had existed until then and upheld the absolutism of autocratic power.
In this same year, International May Day began worldwide.
We have inherited today’s history upon an essence of history so profoundly divergent from that of Europe and America.
Ichiyō’s *Takekurabe* was a distinctive masterpiece in which feudal elements and the influence of Romanticism—emerging in modern European literature that had begun to be introduced by figures like Tōson—achieved a rare harmony, appearing like a single dewdrop of singular character.

Around the time when the Meiji era entered its forties, there emerged the Seitō-sha (Bluestocking Society) movement led by figures such as Hiratsuka Raichō.
Opposing feudal customs, they asserted that since women too were human beings, they should develop their talents and exercise emotional autonomy.
Tamura Toshiko’s literature demonstrated the stages through which Japanese women sought independence from the mid-Meiji era into the Taisho period.
Within Tamura Toshiko’s advocacy for women’s emotional freedom as human beings lay what appears from today’s perspective as a severely distorted yet naive conception of gender equality.
It maintained the limited view that since women were equally human, they should be permitted to act as capriciously as men did; that if men smoked, women naturally should smoke too—centering male norms while failing to critique feudal social customs, merely asserting that what men did women should emulate.
No essential development was observed.
Nevertheless, the women’s liberation movement from late Meiji through Taisho held significance in that women began asserting themselves as human beings while gradually advancing understanding of economic independence’s necessity.

At the beginning of the Showa era, in tandem with the rise of socialist movements across various countries following the First World War, Japan too saw the emergence of its proletarian literary movement.
It was only during this period that it became clear how issues of improving women's social status and achieving women's liberation were problems to be resolved in tandem with elevating and liberating the living conditions of the masses as a whole.
People came to understand this not as a conflict between men and women as genders, but rather as a class issue within modern society—one arising between the social position of working men and women among the masses and that of the exploiting class.

In the realm of literature, proletarian literature was the first to begin pursuing and clarifying how culture had been distorted within the social structure of capitalist Japan—a society rife with feudal remnants—and why women’s capacity for literary creation had been diminished.
They had discovered that the conditions women of the masses held within societal reality—the origins of those unfortunate social conditions—were causing suffering not only to women but making men unhappy as well.
The voices of the people, their appeals, their joys and sorrows, and their hopes for the future—none of which had been written in novels until then—had to be written down and expressed.
It is only by nurturing the ability to express the appeals buried in women’s hearts—the stories that must be told, their demands and hopes—and by creating opportunities for this that proletarian literature can truly affirm women’s literature.

At the beginning of the Showa era, the existence of the proletarian literary movement within Japanese history marked an attempt to systematically address—for the first time under modern social science’s illumination—the numerous social and cultural contradictions left unresolved by the Meiji Restoration.
The movement framed issues of women, society, and literature as matters concerning the happiness of women—who constituted half the populace—and the development of their creative capacities.
During this period, women writers of new caliber began to emerge,
including those who continue to write works today: Sata Ineko, Hirabayashi Taiko, Matsuda Kaiko, and Tsuboi Sakae.
Unlike previous women writers, these were individuals who had experienced poverty firsthand, understood the realities of labor, and endured trials specific to womanhood.
Through such figures, voices of women who truly recognized social contradictions and sought to flourish as human beings began making themselves heard within literature.

Had the proletarian literary movement developed smoothly, Japan's new democratic literature today would have been illuminated by a far brighter light. However, Japan’s ruling class suppressed the progressive nature of the masses with such ferocity; particularly during the past ten-odd years, they persisted in crushing the people’s will entirely for military ends. Proletarian literature—which ultimately sought new social development and thus inherently opposed the contradictions and shackles of semi-feudal bourgeois society—was something Japan’s military autocracy could never have accepted. Alongside all movements for popular liberation, proletarian literature too was annihilated. Women began speaking candidly. If left unhindered, their thoughts, speech, and actions would have matured naturally. They sought to block now—these hearts, words, and movements of women that wielded strong influence over men. By restraining every limb and stifling the liberation movement itself, women were denied progression toward true independence. Thus these long years of suppression persisted until August 15, 1945.

What kind of lives did those who were boys and youths during the war lead? Among them must have been those taken to the Special Attack Units. Many were made to work in various workplaces through conscription, while many others had their lifelong ambitions thwarted by student mobilization. There must have been countless people who lost their homes along with family members and life's stability. With deep wounds carved into each life, the war thus came to an end.

Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration demanding its transformation into a democratic nation. The current government bears responsibility—imposed by the world—to liberate Japan's people and create a democratic society. Indeed, its very existence is permitted solely through this responsibility. Yet how many young new writers are being sent forth into what we now call democratic literature? Exceedingly few declare themselves new writers born alongside this new Japan while bringing forth such vivid works. Herein lies today's grave problem.

People in their mid-twenties to thirties today, both men and women, possess life experiences incomparable to those of Japan’s youth from the era without war.
They have fought while once denying their own lives.
They must have seen people starving to death, and they themselves may have crawled back home malnourished.
Why is it that no new literature is born from that?
How could one claim there was not a single heart caught up in historical barbarism—suffering, secretly weeping, longing for humanity?
And yet, why have no novels been written about that?
With so many women having had their love destroyed, why do their voices not gush forth?
This very thing, I think, is the truly significant problem we face today.

For literature to be written, there must not only be memories of phenomena but also a complex human assimilation of experience—how one perceives it, thinks about it, and what one draws from it—that must undergo this process.
From this assimilation novels are born.
If literature could be created through physical experience alone, one might argue that any woman who endured childbirth three times should write masterful novels about it.
Yet no novel can emerge from bodily experience alone.
As members of a peaceful populace, what had that war truly been?
Had it been a conflict where every Japanese citizen debated its merits, cast votes, and chose to participate, reflecting on its historical meaning and personal impacts might have yielded humane insights.
But reality differed.
They extracted brains from skulls and crushed hearts, desiccating both men and women into rigid forms called endurance.
With stone-hearted resolve and pulverized minds beneath steel helmets and gas masks, all staked their fates and lives.
Japanese women could not assert their affections—not even to levels credible to global observers.
How could we have resisted?
One faced conscription by authorities or imprisonment for opposing war.
They received this unspeakable brutality not as chosen experience but as forced ordeal.
We were herded into a war devoid of human dignity.
In this livestock-like conflict where we sacrificed ourselves, we barely endured physically—our minds too broken for literary creation.
Both genders lived frantically then.
Passivity dominated utterly.
Despite intense longing for democratic literature, why does no war-critical writing emerge? Why don't women write of being household pillars in an oppressive society?
The causes lie not just in passive experience-taking but postwar instability's grave effects.
Healing war trauma's mental wounds vanished alongside prospects for literary productivity and labor-secured livelihoods.

The inflation that causes prices to skyrocket every two to three months ruins individual economies while amplifying women's social existence and the anguish of household duties to unprecedented levels.
First, one must survive.
Only through survival does literature exist.
Conversely stated, literature constitutes the most searing manifestation of human vitality.

We had here reached a realistic understanding.
It was the fact that literature's development required a suitable social foundation, and that the working class's demand for stable livelihoods aligned perfectly with our demand for a humane culture.
The revised constitution treated men and women as equal.
However, in real life, men and women's labor wages were not the same.
Though men and women equally possessed both voting rights and eligibility for election, the equality in economic and social life forming its foundation had yet to be realized.
Issues such as wage improvements and better working conditions demanded by labor unions and all democratic forces, along with realizing the socialization of household tasks, were absolutely necessary preconditions for making women's twenty-four hours equal to men's twenty-four hours in terms of social quality, while allowing for inherent differences.

Let us consider education, which forms the basis of all culture.
The Constitution states that all people can receive an education.
But today, the fact that students who attend school properly every day are mostly children of the propertied class—what a significant detriment this must be to the building of a democratic Japan.
Students are even resorting to black marketeering just to eat.
It is not enough for it to be stated in the Constitution.
Unless actual possibilities are created, the issue of democratizing education will become an egregious deception.

All people can work.
If that is so, then a minimum standard of living stability must be maintained through their labor, and social protection as working people must be secured.
Through such demands for all people's social way of life and efforts toward their realization, democratic literature's potential likewise expands.
The issue of working hours and wages constitutes both a matter of human survival for the people and a cultural problem.
For any human being, life becomes defined through time.
Whether one uses that time for personal and societal happiness or becomes an object of exploitation—this difference gives rise to fundamental divergences in destiny.
Could anyone possibly deny this?

When addressing issues of culture and literature, it becomes necessary to re-examine the 6-3 system problem. It was reported by an American education inspection team that graduates from Japan's national schools after six years of education possessed academic abilities equivalent to only four years of study. To build a democratic Japan and improve the people's general intellectual standards, extending compulsory education was deemed necessary, leading the Ministry of Education to establish this 6-3 system. Rather than calling it nine years of compulsory education, they conceived it by dividing the period into six years and three years. Why didn't they simply designate it a nine-year system? Unless the national treasury guaranteed every child's ability to study throughout those nine years, the reality of paying tuition fees, feeding children, and purchasing school supplies amid inflation would remain an increasingly burdensome task for the majority of parents sinking deeper into poverty.

Even though the Ministry of Education cannot be unaware of this reality, by splitting it into 6-3, they are attempting to codify into law that the latter three years can be fulfilled through correspondence courses alone.
The latter three years would then be considered completed as compulsory education even if one does not actually attend school and merely receives correspondence courses.
First, there are not enough schools for the newly added students of the three-year junior high school system, and there are no teachers.
There aren’t even enough textbooks.
Moreover, children around the age of having completed six years of schooling—now old enough to be useful to their parents—go to help with shopping errands and get caught up in managing difficult daily lives, leaving them no time.
For war victims, demobilized soldiers, and repatriates—all people in dire straits—there are many cases where they must make their children who have completed six years of schooling into assistants for their livelihood.
There is an extremely urgent demand to work in factories, service jobs, or shops and somehow get employers to provide at least enough to eat.
In reality, the number of apprentices employed by artisans has been increasing noticeably.
Tinsmiths and carpenters.
The Labor Standards Act establishes protective provisions regarding juvenile labor, and labor unions are demanding improved treatment for youths and women.
After demanding wage increases in response to rising prices of daily necessities, wages rose from 700 to 1,500 yen, but today, with prices having surged significantly and official rates also risen under an 1,800-yen base, it has become impossible to manage on an 1,800-yen base.
It has become a reality that even living modestly requires about 5,600 yen for a family of four.
A university student cannot manage without 2,500 yen per person.
If it is decided that the latter three years can be fulfilled through correspondence courses alone, does that mean compulsory education can be completed anywhere as long as mail can be delivered there?
For children who are unable to attend school and are sent to factories for their livelihood, becoming artisans' apprentices—what opportunity to study could possibly be afforded them?

When examining the textile industry as a women's issue, the abysmal state of contemporary women's labor becomes starkly apparent. Every spinning mill generally operates under a dormitory system, where tens of thousands of girls—aged fourteen or fifteen to just under twenty, having completed only six years of national schooling—are compelled to work there. While companies provide meals, not a single spinning mill hands over nearly the full amount of earned wages to these girls. They remit only a certain percentage. The corporations withhold the remainder through forced savings schemes. At a factory called Gunze in Shikoku, incomes around 230 yen were most common last autumn. Consider the financial leverage gained when companies withhold half the salaries of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of girls and divert those funds for monthly operational use—what immense capital power this generates. For childlike female workers who've merely graduated from six-year national schools, even detailed explanations remain incomprehensible. To sustain youthful illusions, companies whitewash factory buildings, cultivate decorative flower beds, host entertainment events, install mock girls' schools within compounds, and force training in tea ceremony and flower arrangement. These young women's cultural level directly constitutes the foundation of Japanese women's cultural standards. The lowest cultural baseline possessed by girls laboring in Japan's most regressive textile industry—in terms of working conditions—forms the very foundation of Japan's democratic cultural level.

The task of the people's literature and democratic literature was forced to take its first step from this reality.
Since six years of compulsory education had provided only four years' worth of academic capacity, it remained an unequivocal fact that youths completing merely six years under the 6-3 system equated to four-year graduates.
Should the majority of people—with diminished intellectual capacity and deprived of critical judgment—grow into adults who never question capitalist exploitation, descending into chaotic individualism rather than organized action against poverty, wielding voting rights without discernment for political alignment, then Japan's democratization would not only remain unrealized; through either governmental impotence or more calculated feigning thereof, the masses might well be reduced to a state of utter enslavement.
Who could countenance a people being driven into subjugation by their own government?

The will to see such reality as reality and guide it toward improvement.
That is precisely the living cultural quality for the Japanese people today, the substance of literature, and its very material.
Today’s literature stands as more profound in its social elements and grounded in objective necessity than Bashō’s poetic elegance.

Even in matters of love, Desdemona's handkerchief must be discarded.
Women’s lives must not be a performance of femininity for their male rulers, but a passion to create conditions where they can live authentically as women—conditions forged through mutual reliance between men and women on the path toward establishing true happiness for the people.
For the advent of a desirable society, we must continue advancing step by step along this journey of construction.
There, I believe, lie the new generation’s poetry, songs, literature, and marches.

There had been a tendency to regard literature as something detached from real life, but this was absolutely not the case.
Literature could be said to be a historical and class-based act.
Action inherently possessed a direction of development for survival's significance.
In the midst of this tumultuous social life, it became crucial that we knew which way our toes were pointing.
The individuality essential to literature was forged precisely through understanding one's relationship with society and its class structures, and through actively engaging with that reality.
Our every step became an irreplaceable one in our lives.
We possessed the right to live.
We held the right to affirm certain things and reject others according to conscience, to labor for society and ourselves, and to sing songs celebrating life.
We bore the obligation to know that right and realize it.

When it comes to literature, talent is often discussed.
I shall here transcribe an unforgettable phrase that has been uttered concerning talent.

“All talent is an obligation.”

[April 1947]