The Father-Daughter Plot

Chapter 5 De-siring the Center Hayashi Fumiko’s Hungry Heroines and the Male Literary Canon

143 Chapter 5 De-siring the Center Hayashi Fumiko’s Hungry Heroines and the Male Literary Canon Janice Brown I have no teachers. I read, and those writers I like I allow into my heart. Inadvertently they become my teachers. Hayashi Fumiko, “Itaru tokoro Aoyama ari” (Destination Aoyama) For a writer who openly denied the traditional teacher-disciple relationship and relied almost completely upon her own experiences as well as those of other lower working-class women to provide the themes and subject matter of her writings, it comes as somewhat of a surprise to find throughout the texts of Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951) a steady stream of references to and critiques of male writers. In fact, Fumiko’s sensitivity to male writers and male texts far outweighs any corresponding regard for female writers and texts. Certainly such bias is observable in the careers of many literary women writing within hegemonic patriarchal social systems. In Japan, however, with its great classical tradition of female writers, such preference might seem less understandable . One might expect most modern women writers, especially those like Fumiko1 who were instrumental in bringing women’s writing to the forefront of modern Japanese letters, to have followed in the footsteps of their illustrious literary foremothers. For Fumiko, however , as for many modern Japanese writing women of the lower social classes, such was not the case. The works of classical Japanese female writers, obfuscated by generations of male-authored criticism and interpretation, did not speak to women of Fumiko’s class or background. Representing an elitist literary order, such texts tended to offer little inspiration to poor and/or working-class women who sought to express the realities of 144 Janice Brown their own experience. Hence, would-be women writers, like Fumiko, often looked not to the classical past but to the contemporary literary scene for their models. In Fumiko’s day, this milieu was all but closed to women. Still in the process of assimilating and adapting Western literary modes, methods, and texts, the 1920s Japanese literary establishment was exclusively male-oriented. Male-authored texts dominated contemporary life and thought, whether from Japan or the West, and it is not too surprising that many of Fumiko’s early writings were inspired by her reading of these male writers rather than other female models. At the same time, however, the extent of Fumiko’s devotion to male writers is surprising, given her unabashed determination to write from the female position. Her reading, moreover, was not limited to Japanese texts but ranged over a great deal of European literature, including works by both major and minor male literary figures. In many instances, Fumiko openly declared her desire to “write like” a number of these male writers. Such admiration apparently continued throughout her life, even after she had become a major Japanese literary figure known for her writing of and about women. Fumiko’s desire for the male-authored text can be read as something more than an exercise in apprenticeship to those writers who constituted the male literary canon. She had, in my view, an exceptionally powerful urge not simply to “write like” the male writers but, more important, to write from their position, which Fumiko intended to make her own. Impatient with tradition and with entrenched attitudes toward literature and female writers, Fumiko actively and repeatedly worked to place herself, as a woman, and her writings of and about women in a central, commanding position that had hitherto been occupied only by men. With a view to evaluating Fumiko’s keen regard for male writers and their texts as well as the significance of these texts as “models” for Fumiko in her own writings, this chapter will examine those writers who seemed to have had more than ordinary import for Fumiko and who may be said to have “influenced” her work. I will focus first on the anarcho-dadaist male poets; second on Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, which Fumiko herself cites as inspirational; and finally on the relationship between Fumiko and one of her mentors, the naturalist writer Tokuda Shûsei. In an attempt to determine how dutiful or undutiful a literary daughter Fumiko may have been, I will include discussion of Fumiko’s own writings as they pertain to the male model(s). Hayashi Fumiko’s Heroines and the Male Literary Canon 145 I will argue also that much of Fumiko’s literary desire connected...