Chapter 16 - Writing the Aged Woman: Enchi Fumiko and Tanabe Seiko

Summary

Most first-world countries treat the elderly with disdain, regarding them as a drain on society. Pundits and scholars focus on the troubling nature of this trend and largely overlook the fact that the elderly are also a source of great creativity, in spite of the aging process. Writers Enchi Fumiko and Tanabe Seiko challenge the doom-and-gloom portrayals of aging by offering a counter narrative of vibrant and feisty senior citizens. They illuminate the resilient and selfaware identities of elderly women who, though physically compromised by their aging bodies, unfurl powerfully varied inner worlds that refuse to yield to their everyday socio-cultural trauma.

Introduction

Aging is a complex term. It deals with more than biology and personally-lived experiences; one must also consider aging alongside sociocultural contexts that relate individuals to their society as a whole. Thinking about aging in this way illustrates how social-psychological perceptions frame individual bodies and reveals what is created within the dynamic relationship between diverse individuals and their socio-cultural context. Margaret M. Gullette affirms this in her study, Aged by Culture, in which she emphasizes the relation between “age” (“aging”) and dominant cultural narratives that have consistently shaped our conception of “age.” Aging issues tend to compound the systemic biases that inordinately affect women, thus complicating the intersection between gender and age. This unfairness leads to problems for society’s oldest citizens who happen to be women. There are many means to measure and assess the biased social treatment of women and the construction of stereotypes of the aged and their uncomfortable relationships with society.

This situation is especially true in Japan, where there are more women over the age of sixty-five than men. Japanese women are often noted for their record longevity, but the main socio-cultural narratives neglect to give voice to their individuality, simply packaging them as an elderly group and a burdensome object of the social care system. It is ironic that there are so many old Japanese women, and yet it is so hard to find diverse stories of their individual experiences. Jason Danely’s study Aging and Loss points out that cultural and social narratives about old people resemble traditional literary narratives of aging in presenting depictions of decline and deterioration, such as the yamamba and obasute stories (Danely 2014, 111).