Sexism In Japanese Literature

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If you Can't Stand the Sexism, Get Out of Literature According to Edith Sarra “gender is a fictional construct, a matter of textuality rather than of the physiology of a writer” (Sarra 16). This idea of gender performance in writing is put to test in Tsurayuki's “Tosa Journal”, a first person recollection as told through the eyes of a woman. Despite being a man, Tsurayuki is able to convince the reader that he is actually a female writer. However, with the knowledge that the journal is not written by a man, one can start to look critically at the work and see how Tsurayuki views women. In doing so, it becomes clear that Tsurayuki views women as inherently inferior to men in literature and thus in society. In Heian period Japan, language was very delineated; men spoke and wrote in a certain script, and women spoke and wrote in another. Specifically, men studied Chinese and “official documents were always written in Chinese” (Chizuko 298). Due to the fact the women were not taught Chinese nor were they allowed to learn it, amongst the court a writing style called kana developed. Kana was separately feminine and yet inferior to Chinese. This makes the “Tosa Journal” that much more unusual because it was written in kana. It is argued that Tsurayuki wrote in kana because it allowed “him to write about a range of emotional experiences not otherwise easily expressible for male writers, who normally only wrote nonfictional prose in Chinese, not Japanese” (Sarra 14). By donning the female writing style and publishing a popular Journal , he is showing that anyone can appear feminine. If any man can appear feminine through his writing, and yet any woman cannot appear masculine in her writing because she is unable to write in Chinese, it serves to follow that being a woman is simple; capturing the essence of a
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