Reading Desire in a New Generation of Japanese Women Writers

Nina Cornyetz is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Instruction, USA, and is the author of The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (Routledge, 2007). Rebecca Copeland is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and is the author of the novel The Kimono Tattoo (2021).

• Introduction 1. The Step to Trample the Unexplored: Family, School Girlishness (Joshi kōkōsei rashisa), and Lesbian Panic in Matsuura Rieko’s Saiai no kodomo (The Most Beloved Child, 2017) 2. Body and/as Food: Rediscovering Female Subjectivity through the Mother-Daughter Dyad in Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru (2006) 3. Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko: An Analysis of “Unhomely” Sounds in the Mother Tongue 4. Writing and Being Written: Approaches to Reading the Narrative of Kanai Mieko’s "Mado" (Window, 1979) 5. Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces: Body, Precarity, and Language in Kawakami Mieko’s Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs, 2019) 6. Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital: Oyamada Hiroko’s Kōjō (The Factory, 2013)