Chapter 12 - Food as Feminist Critique: Osaki Midori, Kanai Mieko, and Ogawa Yōko

Summary

This chapter examines the literary depictions of food as feminist critique in the works of three Japanese women writers: Osaki Midori, Kanai Mieko, and Ogawa Yōko. Their works challenge the archetype of woman as the nurturing maternal body that provides comfort, nourishment, and protection to others, and offer social critique by depicting women who refuse to comply with the domestic, feminine roles that have been prescribed for them by society. As close analysis of their works show, literary depictions of food can be a lens through which we reveal the critique inherent in the works concerning gender roles, family, marriage, and reproductive body.

Introduction

Food has been a significant concern for feminist literary criticism, intertwined with representations of women’s experiences and identities relating to issues of body, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. Just as food can be a means to nourish or deprive the body, femininity can be embraced, rejected, or revealed of its social construction. Natalie Jovanovski’s notion of “food femininities,” as “the multiple versions of gender offered to women throughout cultural discourses about food and eating” (Jovanovski 2017, 5), is useful to understand how literary depictions of food can be a lens through which we can tackle larger feminist concerns such as gender roles, family, misogyny, and reproductive control. In all the literary works examined in this chapter, food becomes the central trope through which the reader is invited to look deeper into the psyche of various female characters and explore some of these concerns. Often the characters’ inner dilemmas are unarticulated, and it is through analyzing the depictions of food that we can shed light on their anxieties, struggles, and resistance.

This chapter examines three female authors from three different historical periods: Osaki Midori (1896–1971), Kanai Mieko (1947–), and Ogawa Yōko (1962–). Osaki’s work can be read in the context of the rapid expansion of women’s writing and literary modernism in the 1920s, where a vibrant translation culture allowed for transnational connections of shared feminist and modernist concerns. Kanai’s work fits within the context of the 1960s feminist movement and the influential philosophical works of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, which challenged women’s prescribed roles within domesticity and revealed the social construction of femininity.