Christina Yi

This thesis offers an analysis of the intertwined dynamics of labor, gender, and food in volume one of the Japanese light novel series Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits (Kakuriyo no yadomeshi) by Yūma Midori, which began publication in 2015. Grounded in close reading analysis, the thesis details types of labor and their relationships to family structures in post-war and contemporary Japan. It also briefly explores previous scholarship on the isekai or “other world” genre of light novels as well as food literature. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Kakuriyo does not simply reflect but actively mediates and attempts to “solve” the modern problems of economic precarity through its representations of food – only to ironically reiterate the very same ideologies of gendered labor and care that precipitated that economic precarity in the first place. The close reading analysis consists of excerpts from volume one of Kakuriyo. Through these excerpts, the thesis examines the female protagonist’s relationship to food and cooking and how this relationship influences the work that she performs. The first body chapter argues that Kakuriyo juxtaposes different modes of work in its narrative to produce a fantasy of economic security and emotional well-being for its readers. The second body chapter builds on this analysis to analyze gendered labor representations in Kakuriyo. It compares the protagonist and another female character in the novel to understand how gender operates in the construction of dependency work and identity work. Both characters present complex, layered versions of these ideas in the work that they perform and the choices that they make. Furthermore, it argues that the restaurant the protagonist operates is a liminal space, which can only be realized in the fantasy world she finds herself in. This liminal space is a place where ideologies of gender and labor can be overcome in a tempting solution to the problems of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the conclusion summarizes how the light novel produces an alternative (albeit limited) model of care and gendered labor through its story and characters and explores directions for future research.

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Half a century has passed since Okinawa’s 1972 reversion to Japan after 27 years of American military rule, but the region continues to struggle with unfinished histories of colonization, war(s), and occupation. Despite this troubled past and present, mainland Japan has often depicted Okinawa Prefecture as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima), exoticizing it while reinforcing its colonial status. Medoruma Shun (b. 1960), a significant literary voice from Okinawa, has proactively written about war memories of the Battle of Okinawa and its aftermath through his innovative fiction. This thesis examines how Medoruma’s short stories “Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) and “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998) challenge hegemonic narratives about Okinawa’s war experiences and its portrayal as “healing islands” through their representations of human bodies within and against various natural, linguistic, and social landscapes. In the main chapters, I analyze “Droplets” and its use of bodily sensation to explore war experiences excluded from official historical accounts. This approach reveals the complex position of Okinawans as both victims and victimizers. My close readings demonstrate how the protagonist’s mysteriously swollen foot and the water it exudes function to disrupt the alignment between body and nation, thereby subverting the absorption of individual Okinawan experiences into simplified accounts of sacrifice and victimhood. I also read “Spirit Stuffing” as a challenge to the “healing islands” narrative through its portrayal of community tensions and the dynamic interplay between human bodies and environmental imagery. The story’s narrative perspective and treatment of gendered bodies unmask how supposedly “healing” landscapes operate as repositories of unresolved trauma. By examining these literary interventions, I argue that Medoruma’s writing constitutes a form of decolonial resistance specific to the Okinawan context. Rather than offering paths to reconcile war memories, both texts expose fundamental contradictions between mainland Japan’s portrayal of Okinawa and war survivors’ trauma. Through his focus on embodied experience and environmental connection, Medoruma creates a literary space where voices excluded from colonial frameworks become audible while also inviting readers to engage as active listeners in a process that transcends the binary of colonizer and colonized.

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This thesis seeks to address the question of how Okinawan newspaper articles published between 1956 to 1972 constructed journalistic discourses that posited prostitutes as the source of moral pollution. Additionally, the thesis is interested in the sociopolitical mechanisms that managed and suppressed the destabilizing effects posed by the prostitutes and their commercial-sexual relations with both American and local men. In exploring these issues, the thesis seeks to shed light on the ideological functions that such discourses served in managing the contradictions between economic dependency on the sex industry and other competing political and moral aspirations operating within Okinawan society after the end of the Asia-Pacific War under U.S. military occupation.The articles were transcribed and thematically coded manually by the author and then analyzed using methodological tools drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The application of these analytical methods was primarily grounded in a critical realist perspective on Foucault’s discourse theory, as outlined in his 1970 Collège de France lecture The Order of Discourse (L’Ordre du Discours). The framework to understanding morality and morality-related sociopolitical mechanisms was drawn from Mary Douglas’s work Purity and Danger (1966).During the period specified above, the journalistic texts published in Okinawan newspapers initially identified the prostitutes working in Okinawa’s base towns as outsiders of society and cast them as the source of moral pollution that endangered the rest of the society by way of their sexual relations with the American soldiers. However, concurrently and over time, additional information and alternative moral-discursive representations emerged which destabilized this simplistic moral-discursive framework, which partially led to a refocusing on the brothel owners as the face of evil in Okinawa’s sex industry between the late 1950s up to the ratification of the Prostitution Prevention Law in Okinawa in 1972. The same discursive shift also cast the prostitutes as victims in need of rescue, thus indemnifying the governing authority and the segments of Okinawan society that had benefitted from the women’s sexual labors postwar.

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Dazai Osamu (pen name of Tsushima Shūji, 1909–1948) is one of the most celebrated writers of modern Japan. His enduring literary impact extends to the present day, as his works delve into contentious yet accessible topics like social alienation, fragmented subjectivities, and nihilism. Academic scholarship has historically situated some of his most iconic works within the shishōsetsu (“I-novel”) paradigm and examined them under an autobiographical lens. This thesis redirects the focus from Dazai’s canonized, (quasi-)autobiographical works to “Osan” (1947), one of his lesser-known works from the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). “Osan” features a first-person female narrator-protagonist who never benefits from the “revolutionary” opportunities introduced by the Occupation. In focusing on this text, my thesis offers important new insights into Dazai’s position vis-à-vis the changing conditions of Japan under the Allied Occupation. Specifically, this thesis argues that Dazai rejected the dominant idea of a Japanese postwar state that had completely and successfully severed itself from its problematic past and that the nation could only recover under the reformist agenda of the occupying forces. By employing a cross-gendered voice in “Osan,” Dazai offers a critique of the political continuities of the past into the present through the highlighting of persistent gender norms. Chapter One comprises the introduction to this thesis, including a historical overview of the Occupation period, a brief biography of Dazai, and a literature review of his cross-gendered writings and related scholarship. Chapter Two focuses on Occupation-period discourse surrounding “female liberation” and its effect on Japanese women, followed by a close reading analysis of “Osan” with a focus on the temporalities within the text and their relations to prevailing ideals of female domesticity. Chapter Three considers the language and narrative structure of “Osan” together with larger sociolinguistic discourse on “women’s language” in order to explicate how the female narrator-protagonist’s speech and interiorized thoughts are tied to her subordinated role within the household. In all, my thesis seeks to reveal the limits of “female liberation” as a masculinist-gendered discourse in Occupation-period Japan and illuminate the danger of forgetting those who have been overshadowed by the complex historical processes of patriarchal nation-building.

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Dazai Osamu (1909–1948) is a celebrated Japanese author who is most known for his postwar novels of despair and decadence, such as The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). He is recognized as one of the literary greats by the academy and his work has been praised by scholars and critics. However, his star image also has a familiar presence in mass culture and his texts have been labelled as popular literature for anomic youth who are struggling to define themselves. While Dazai’s place in canonical literature is well established, I argue that it is Dazai’s multi-faceted, mutable image as a decadent anomic figure that has been mobilized by popular culture networks to expand his star text, adapt it to new mediums, and generate interest among youths in the historical “original.”I first contextualize Dazai’s literary celebrity in his historical moment of early twentieth-century Japan to highlight how the author self-fashioned himself as a social outcast vis-à-vis the literary establishment, and how the details of his life and death have been “re-authored” by publishers and readers to intensify his image as an anomic figure. Specifically, I engage in paratextual analysis to see how reprints of No Longer Human emphasize narratives of autobiography, suicide, and youth literature; and how this, in turn, has led to Dazai’s star text becoming synonymous with the novel and its protagonist, Ōba Yōzō.Then, through a close reading of the multimedia series Bungō Stray Dogs (2013–) and Bungō and Alchemist (2016–), I explore how Dazai’s “character-ification” has embodied the author’s abstract image in the collective imagination and brought it into in the world of manga, anime, and video games. Because the author-characters are constructed from biographical details with new elements added on top, there is still room for audiences to translate the semiotic signs assigned to each character. This has made Dazai visually “knowable” to audiences and encouraged many fans to seek out the original author. In this fashion, popular culture adaptations of literary star texts have played a significant role in revitalizing youth interest in modern Japanese literature and its authors.

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The birthrate decline (shōshika) of Japan is seen as a social crisis that may, without intervention, lead to drastic population decline and eventually the extinction of humans in Japan. While policies that support working parents have been implemented since the 1990s, many still believe that shōshika is caused and exacerbated by women not carrying out their reproductive and caretaking duties. In response, contemporary women writers Kawakami Hiromi (b. 1958) and Murata Sayaka (b. 1979) have created reproductive dystopias where reproductive continuity is held up as a social priority and people are seen as literal spawning machines. This thesis concentrates on the utopian urges and dystopian realities in the fiction of Kawakami and Murata, and in particular women’s roles in these pronatalist systems.In the introduction, I define dystopia as an apocalyptic imagination that is systematically planned and controlled by means of violence and dehumanization, and then examine its utopian impulses. In Chapter One, I focus on Kawakami’s Do Not be Snatched by the Great Bird (Ōkina tori ni sarawarenaiyō, 2016), tracing the evolution of its dystopia through the eyes of female characters and their nonnormative sexual experiences in order to unpack society’s utopian desire for stability and the dystopian reality of dehumanization. In Chapter Two, I read Murata’s Dwindling World (Shōmetsu sekai, 2015) as a dismantlement of existing heteronormativity, the sexual order, and reproductivity. The utopian impulse for total reproductive efficiency leads to the totalitarian city of Eden, which demands that everyone be a child-bearer. In both texts, women who are doubly oppressed by patriarchy and dystopia have non-reproductive sex with taboo partners, thereby disturbing pronatalist ideologies. These narratives underscore and critique existing patriarchal structures, gender inequities, and heteronormativity in contemporary Japan and question the desirability for total reproductive efficiency.

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In the history of crime-and-mystery fiction in Japan, few are as influential as Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965). Despite this, Ranpo is often left out of discussions on crime-and-mystery fiction as a global genre; further, when he is discussed, his more orthodox detective fiction tends to be the focus of study. By examining four of Ranpo’s non/pseudo-detective early narratives, this thesis seeks to expand and nuance academic understanding of his significance in both the broader context of crime-and-mystery fiction and that of late Taishō (1912-1926) and early Shōwa (1926-1989) Japan. In critiquing tendencies to sum up Ranpo as an Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) facsimile, I propose innovation as a mediating factor between the analytic categories of “imitation” and “inspiration.” Exploring Ranpo’s sociohistorical background and positioning him within the nascence of ero-guro nansensu (“erotic-grotesque nonsense”), I elucidate how Ranpo at once influenced and was influenced by ero-guro sensibilities.Most crucially, I consolidate the concept of the literary fetish. Drawing on previous academic theorizations of the fetish, which position its critical aspect as an implicit, paradoxical, and inherently epistemological duality—the simultaneous recognition and disavowal of knowledge—I reformulate the fetish as a narrative device, arguing that, in these four stories, Ranpo elevates the plot twist to a literary fetish. Sensational and often sensual, the plot twists of these narratives occupy the climactic position in their narratives, and the climax they express cannot be satisfactorily resolved. Instead, the plot twist foregrounds questions of subjectivity, reality, and Truth, speaking to ero-guro sensibilities and to Ranpo’s contemporary sociopolitical flux. It is through intertextual analysis of Ranpo and Poe’s respective plot twists that I address their complicated history of identification, ultimately locating in those twists the strongest case for Ranpo’s distinction from Poe. And it is through intertextual analysis of Ranpo’s own works, and close examination of his plot twists, that I suggest narratives like these—which I term “mystery-plays” for the way that they play with mystery—most seductively encourage his readers to think critically of what they have read, of their world, and of themselves.

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