Enchi Fumiko's Stormy Days: Arashi and the Drama of Childbirth

Before she became known as a novelist and as a translator of Genji monogatari into modern Japanese, Enchi Fumiko (1905- 1986) was a productive playwright, publishing about twenty plays between 1926 and 1935.¹ Arashi (The Storm), a work from this early play-writing period in Enchi's career, emphasizes aspects of political conflict and social commitment that become more subdued in Enchi's later oeuvre. The piece, however, is of significance not only for what it reveals of a major writer's literary development, but also from a broader feminist perspective.

It is a critical commonplace that drama was a genre in which Enchi attempted to deal with social questions in an intellectual and cerebral mode, and that she moved away from the genre when her own life and literary imagination became too complex to be expressed through its conventions. Researchers have also commonly regarded Enchi's transition from drama to fiction as marking a shift from a commitment to sociopolitical concerns to a concentration on exclusively private and emotional themes.² This schema is problematic, in my opinion, because of the way it designates Enchi's sociopolitical writing as immature and her mature writing as apolitical. The schema ought to be carefully examined and deconstructed, which can be accomplished from two different directions.

First, one must consider the politics of Enchi's mature writings, that is, the sexual subversiveness of the female characters in her novels. The social and political dimensions of Enchi's postwar writing are invisible only to those who consider sexual power structures to be nonsocial and nonpolitical. Various scholars have recently drawn attention to the political dimensions of Enchi's mature works, as well as of her various acts of "translation" of Japanese classics.³

These efforts to recover the politics of gender and sexuality in Enchi's mature works ought to be complemented, however, with an attempt from a second direction, that of recovering the gender and sexuality of her politics in her earlier works. That is the concern of this essay: I believe that Enchi's "less mature" dramatic works deserve more careful examination. Many of her plays written in the 1920s and 1930s deal with leftist themes, but they also grapple with questions of psychology, sexuality, and women's paradoxical status in class struggle.

Arashi, the work translated here, is one of the least discussed yet most interesting of Enchi's early dramas. The central female character is a variation of a type Enchi depicted in a number of plays: a woman who recklessly commits herself to the leftist movement by affiliating herself with a male activist and who pays a social and emotional price for it. Yet by making this female character an absent presence, an empty center, as it were, Enchi delineates more sharply than in most of her other plays the sexual conflict suppressed by the left's facade of a united front. By surrounding this female character with male characters, who, in contrast to her silence, fill the stage with a great deal of talk, Enchi further dramatizes the gendered nature of discourse. And this discourse focuses specifically on a topic thought to be of primary significance for women: reproduction. In other words, while her other plays often show female characters engaged in debates about politics, Arashi shows male characters engaged in debates about women. Finally, the play also poses some radical questions about the meaning of reproduction for women, and in doing so it raises fundamental questions about the very basis of certain kinds of feminist arguments. Understood in the context of Enchi's own life as well as that of the other dramas she wrote on similar themes, the play allows us not only a fuller understanding of the career of a remarkable writer, but also insight into a certain dimension of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and politics in early Shōwa Japan.

Enchi Fumiko (née Ueda) was born in 1905 to a middle-class family in Tokyo. Her father, Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937) was a well-known professor of linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University, and...