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Japan
Organized Panel Session
Tamura Toshiko (1894-1945), a famous writer of the late Meiji and early Taisho periods, tended to write stories centered on women seeking freedom from stifling and tense heterosexual relationships, often the result of an imbalance of economic and gendered power. From 1911 to 1918, she published on nearly a monthly basis in Japan’s leading literary journals. Always ahead of her time, she is best known for her bold depictions of female sexuality when such details rarely appeared in literature, certainly not literature written by women, about women, and for women. Divorce is a theme that appears often in her works. A child of divorce herself, her first published work of fiction produced at the age of nineteen, “Tsuyuwake goromo” (Dewy-weathered garments, 1903), centers on the idea of “rien,” literally “separation of family ties.” She would continue to write about this topic in later works with more real-life experience after her own marriage failed. Even in death, she has a connection to divorce. She is buried at Tôkeiji, the “divorce temple” that was built in 1285 and served until 1873 as a place of refuge for women seeking separations from their husbands. This paper will focus on how divorce gets depicted in Tamura’s first published work “Tsuyuwake goromo” and how her literary depictions of divorce compare with the legal and social realities of her time.
Anne Sokolsky
Ohio Wesleyan University