“I need to ask you to select a cover color,” Mark Gresham, Managing Director of MHM Limited, reminded me in an email message. I had just submitted the completed manuscript of the Handbook on Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers. I opened the attachment he sent and looked over the various colors. To my disappointment, an earlier editor had already claimed the pretty purple. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a purple person. I brightened when I discovered there was another in a lighter shade. Then the red caught my eye.

Japanese women have long been tied to the color red. When a woman steps into a space typically dominated by men, she is referred to as “kōitten,” a single splash of red in a field of grey (or sometimes green). The vibrancy of her red color distinguishes her as singular and, despite her attractiveness, out of place. In the late-19th century, when male writers began to take up more and more of the pages in the journal Jogaku zasshi (Women’s education magazine), editor and educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu inaugurated two issues. The White Covers (or otsu no maki) catered to these young men, providing room for their literary experiments, translations, and critical essays, while The Red Covers (or kō no maki) was assigned to women writers and featured articles on domestic science, marriage advice, and stories for children.

I chose “red” for the cover of this Handbook in recognition of the way the color has often been used to categorize women in Japan. I do so in response to Iwamoto Yoshiharu’s sequestering of women into journal issues that limited their field of vision largely to the domestic sphere. The women writers discussed in this Handbook are as likely to write beyond and against domesticity as they are to write within it. The chapters herein demonstrate their creativity and the wealth of writing among them, thus opposing the notion of “kōitten,” the one lone talent. These women have long occupied spaces earlier thought to be off limits. Through their presence, they have stretched the boundaries of their chosen genres and styles.