The Poetics of Space in Enchi Fumiko’s The Waiting Years / 円地文子『女坂』における空間の詩学

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines how Enchi Fumiko, in her novel The Waiting Years ( Onnazaka 1957), uses verbs of motion, such as kuru (to come) and iku (to go), to carefully shift the novel’s focalization, allowing readers to grasp the subtle nuances of relationships within the Shirakawa household as characters move through the Shirakawa residence. This construction of the physical and social space of the home allows Enchi to explore the constraints women faced within the patriarchal ie seido (family system) that largely governed gender roles in prewar Japanese society. It argues that while Japanese third-person fiction (with its flexible use of tense, deixis, and person) tends to be told from the here and now of a story, English third-person fiction (told in the past tense) has greater difficulty entering a story’s here and now. As a result of these linguistic constraints, this layer of social critique is not always replicated in John Bester’s English translation (1971).