ABSTRACT
Women writing in the years after the war share few of the anxieties concerning gender and societal roles found in the flesh writers. The liberating desire reflected in men’s writing is largely absent in writers such as Sono Ayako (1931– ), Hiroike Akiko (1919– ), Nakamoto Takako (1903–91), Shibaki Yoshiko (1914–91), and Saegusa Kazuko (1929–2003). I have chosen to focus on postwar fiction written by these writers because they portray women in a close relationship to sex work. Their works offer a counterreading to the masculine fiction of the flesh writers examined in the previous chapters, who rarely interrogated the gender and identity structures they describe or propose, even in fiction registering the anxiety of unstable social roles during the postwar years. While these writers ostensibly proposed a means of liberation for all Japanese subjects, their solutions, extremely convincing at the time, failed to open possibilities of agency for women. Women writers are not uniformly critical of these power structures, of course; nonetheless, they are much more in evidence in women’s writings.
