ABSTRACT
General Nogi's wife has decided that Death was the meaning, that she and death were to be dismissed at the same time, and that therefore, were it to be in her countenance itself, there was to be no mention of it. The gender politics of modernism, based on homophobia and the exclusion of women, have rarely been addressed in studies of the modern in Japan. Many narratives about the course, nature, and political implications of Japanese modernization have been written by historians and cultural critics. Women have constantly been represented in the metanarratives of intentionality/subjectivity/selfhood that historians, as well as cultural and literary critics, have constructed about Japan's modernization. The erasure of women, through silence, madness, and death, is one of the enabling factors of modernity itself, the continuing silence of critics about the role of women in modernism may be one of the enabling conditions of this type of criticism.
