Envisioning the Invisible: Sex, Species, and Anomaly in Contemporary Japanese Women's Fiction

Abstract

[...]Pollock provides an inventory of potential techniques for accomplishing this rethinking of literature as people have done things with (18), including in this list such strategies as listening to the questions the texts themselves raise, refusing to segregate literature from the rest of the culture, learning to think in a historical-anthropological spirit, exploring what relationships have existed between literature and the often simultaneous orders of oral, manuscript, and print cultures, and uncovering how canons were established and what norms, aesthetics, and readerly expectations these embody (13-15). [...]tales of the anomalous and the miraculous, in their very strangeness, draw attention to core components of major cultural systems, such as religious worldviews, social structures, and state formations.3 These continental forms found an audience on the Japanese archipelago, where they were in circulation by at least the eighth century, and we see their influence on and adaptation in local literary forms such as the gazetteer (fudoki) and the explanatory tale (setsuwa).\n In all three cases the marshes are described in terms suggestive of female genitalia.