Politics of Doodling: Tamura Toshiko's "A Woman Writer"

In "A Woman Writer" ("Onna sakusha," 1913), probably Tamura Toshiko's best-known short story, it is odd that, despite the title, this woman writer never writes. Instead, she doodles. Her act of "doodling" can be read not only as a symptom or a metaphor, but also as a performance. But what kind of performance is it? This essay argues that the woman writer's doodling allows the reader to imagine her hand as it "labors," a hand that is often invisible to the reader's perception, and that the visibility of her hand has a political effect. Vague as it may be, the image of her hand provides the reader with the distinct presence of this anonymous woman writer, and despite the discouraging context, such a presence enables an oblique sense of hope. This effect begins with the first paragraph of "A Woman Writer":

This woman writer's head was filled with residues, the very last remnants of her squeezed brain, and no matter how much she compressed her head-bag, neither a word with flesh nor a fragment with the smell of blood would come out. She had been tossing around her idea for a commission by a publisher since the very end of last year. Every day she sat behind her desk and did nothing but doodle flax leaves and vertical lines in the grids of the ruled paper.¹

As the story continues, the woman writer gives up writing for the day and instead plays with her face, putting on makeup and displaying various facial expressions to suggest a different persona, as if she were an actress. Then she abruptly begins to hop around the room like a mad person and physically assaults her husband. "A Woman Writer" does not have a "story" in an ordinary sense; the protagonist's idle and agitated moments are casually put together. Probably because of such an ostensibly disorganized appearance, the story's political aspects have been overlooked. To return to the opening scene, what the woman writer confronts is the neatly and apparently innocently partitioned space of the ruled paper (genkōyōshi). These grids, which are always already laid out in advance, paralyze her with their decisive dictating power, implying the tacit rules of conventional literary production. However, paralysis might not be the only thing that she experiences. In fact, the woman writer commits herself to a mischievous act, doodling, as if to counter the imposed oppression of her creativity and to play with it. Her "play" is never mere play, because it is motivated by the structure that would restrict her literary production. Doodling, instead of obediently filling the ruled spaces with kanji or hiragana, one per box as would be expected, risks her identity as an author and undermines her authority, for an author or sakusha (the person who produces works) has to be productive, while doodling is just waste. In order to read the woman writer's idle and mischievous act in a political context, this essay situates the story within both literary and social history.

Reading Tamura's Work as an "Autobiographical" Story

Tamura Toshiko (1884–1945) has often been associated with the tradition of the "I-novel" (shishōsetsu), a confessional or autobiographical narrative.² Unfortunately, such a categorization rarely goes beyond the acknowledgment of Tamura's and/or her protagonist's suffering. While it is crucial not to overlook her suffering, it is more important to examine how her autobiographical writing forms or disperses her subjectivity and what such a formation or dispersion might imply. The exhibition of her suffering in "A Woman Writer," for example, is more than a simple record. The story obliquely demonstrates the deprived foundation of female authorship, but it does not or cannot say what exactly the problem is, for the very concept of a "woman writer," which is supposed to guarantee her identity, is what this woman writer rebels against. In order to demonstrate Tamura's political implications, this short story needs to be historically contextualized, and, first, considered within the framework of theoretical models of autobiographical or...