On Teaching Japanese Women Writers

For the past few years, I have taught a course entitled “Women Writers in Japanese Literature” to undergraduates at Waseda University. At the outset, students were non-Japanese doing their junior year abroad at Waseda; most were from North America, but with a sprinkling of Europeans, Chinese, and other students from non-English-speaking countries. More recently, the class has also included undergraduates in the new School of International Liberal Studies, many of whom are Japanese-educated Japanese pursuing their university education in a faculty where almost all teaching is in English. The heterogeneous nature of the student body means that their common language is English. I teach in English, all readings are in English, and our discussions take place in English.

I had the idea for “Women Writers in Japanese Literature” when students who had taken a semester-long course in which we read and discussed The Tale of Genji in English asked for a follow-on course. My colleague Adrian Pinnington was already teaching waka and haiku, so the heart of the new course had to be prose. I make no apology for the seeming arbitrariness of excluding writing by men: such exclusiveness is a form of strategic essentialism; it also enables us to focus on that half of human experience that has been women’s.

It is not difficult to put together a series of readings in English translation covering writing by women from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries—from Kagerō nikki through Towazugatari. The recent flourishing of women’s history enables our reading of Heian- and Kamakura-period diaries and fiction to be supplemented by English-language historical scholarship; students have learned much from work by Carolina Negri and Hitomi Tonomura, for example. But what does one read between Towazugatari and Higuchi Ichiyō? There is plenty to read about women and their lives in late medieval and early modern Japan, but where are the English-language translations of works by women?

Kate Nakai, since she assumed editorship of Monumenta Nipponica, has published several important translations of work by Edo-period women, Hiroaki Sato’s translation of Arii Shokyū’s Akikaze no ki (Record of an Autumn Wind, 1771) and Janet R. Goodwin, Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Elizabeth A. Leicester, Yuki Terazawa, and Anne Walthall’s translation of Tadano Makuzu’s Hitori Kangae (Solitary Thoughts, 1817-18) among them. (For details, see the bibliographical listing.) Translations of Ema Saikō’s kanshi by Hiroaki Sato, published by Columbia University Press, have proved immensely popular with students. But that is about all one has to offer them. Haruo Shirane’s recent Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 (2002), also published by Columbia, has completely changed the map of the possible as far as teaching Edo-period literature is concerned. When I observe that among its one thousand plus pages, only three are devoted to the translation of a work told, if not written down, by a woman—Thomas Harper’s translation of Oan monogatari (O-An’s Stories, first published 1737)—I do not mean that as a complaint or a criticism of this magnificent volume. I would rather see the absence of women from the anthology as a symptom of several larger problems.

Very briefly, one is the intractable problem of the low status of translation in the Anglo-American academy. In Britain, translations do not count as research for the purposes of the regular “Research Assessment Exercise” (RAE) in which the majority of university departments are rated on a scale from “unclassified” (“below the standard of nationally recognised work”) to 4 (“quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour”; see http://www.rae.ac.uk/aboutus/quality.asp). A senior academic who participated in one of the first of these grading exercises told me that translations would only count as research if they involved establishing the text first, that is, the preparation of a text from a manuscript or manuscripts. I have no personal experience of the situation in North American universities, but friends who do tell me that translation is not looked upon favourably by tenure and promotion committees. How did we get here? Where did the notion that translation is an unoriginal activity, requiring so little intellectual effort that it cannot be compared with the preparation of a scholarly article or monograph, come from? And how can we change such moronic views?