While there are many well-known Japanese women writers who write historical fiction, such as Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), Miura Ayako (1922–1999), Nagai Michiko (1925–), Sugimoto Sonoko (1925–2017), Miyao Tomiko (1926–2014), Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–1984), and Sugimoto Akiko (1953–2015) there has also been fairly consistent resistance to the idea that women should or can write it well. By looking at how Nogami Yaeko, Nagai Michiko, and Ariyoshi Sawako challenge this assessment of historical fiction writing by women and defy the limitations placed upon them, this chapter demonstrates how historical fiction written by women expands the boundaries of the genre.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the modern era, women writers have been encouraged, and sometimes even forced, to limit the style and content of their writing to those that are “becoming of a lady.” They have been not only expected to keep their works set in the domestic realm but also “to confine themselves to a sentimental tone, a lyrical style, and especially a focus on the soft and subtle moments in a woman’s life” (Copeland 2006a, 21–22). Further, male critics and readers alike have attributed value to women’s writing only insofar as it differed from men’s. As Oguri Fūyō, Yanagawa Shun’yō, Tokuda Shūkō, Ikuta Chōkō, and Mayama Seika (all men) note in their essay “On Women Writers”: “Our wish for women writers is that they take henceforth as their guiding principle the preservation of that within themselves that is most womanly and that they adapt themselves to this womanliness and write accordingly. If women were to do so, their works would satisfy just those very elements that men’s works cannot” (Copeland 2006b, 34). This bias regarding how and about what women should write has existed in some form for decades, even as women have continued to write in ways that reject such expectations.

Women who write historical fiction find themselves doubly bound by these expectations. There has been fairly consistent resistance to the idea that women can write historical fiction that is entertaining or successful. Not only are women not supposed to write in nonwomanly ways about non-womanly things, they also are not supposed to write history.