Women’s Voices, Bodies, and the Nation in 1930s–40s Wartime Literature

Abstract

In both Japan and North America, “Japanese women’s literature” has by now become a recognized part of the field of modern and contemporary Japanese literature. By this I mean that there are numerous scholarly articles and books about Japanese women writers and their writing, and these studies reflect the great diversity of the literature itself, presenting different approaches to authorship, narrative, social context, genre, period, and so on. However, in both Japan and North America there is still a lot more to be learned about Japanese women and their works during the so-called Fifteen Year War (1931–45). Thanks to an increase in scholarship on 1930s women’s literature, we do have a better understanding of this decade in general, but we still need more exploration of works written from the late 1930s through the years of the Pacific War (1941–45). Indeed, there are fewer studies of “wartime” literature overall, not just of women’s literature, when compared with the number of studies of “prewar” literature and “postwar” literature. Having said that, research into wartime literature has been increasing, along with new ideas of what “wartime” means, more historical and film studies on the period, and a