University of Heidelberg

Researcher: Corinna Menzer M.A.

During the Westernization in early Meiji-era Japan, a huge amount of western European and North American literature was translated. Among those translations were the representative works of autobiographies written by representative western men. Even though the Japanese literature had a tradition of self-referential writing, the autobiography was adopted as a western import. Elder Japanese states- and businessmen, who quoted from the life stories of Rousseau, Franklin or Goethe, soon used this new literary form of public representation and vindication. A male genre from the West had found its counterpart in Japan. But it didn’t stay a male genre for long as Japanese Women started to publicize their life narratives as well.
The history of autobiography in the West often assumed that women stay speechless, as they usually don’t occupy important positions and therefore have nothing insightful to tell about their private lives. The Feminists, who entered the autobiography studies in the 1970s, claimed that women had to adapt to a male language if their life narratives shouldn’t go unnoticed. They assumed an asymmetry between female and male language variants. Even though Japanese as a language undeniable has those male and female language variants, the question is, if those variants had significant effect on the  self-rhetoric of Japanese Women.
The Cluster Asia and Europe tries to find new ways to deal with Eurocentric views and it is within this framework that this study tries to systematically analyze modern life narratives by Japanese Women. Leading questions will be how these women perceived themselves and which language variants or literary style they used to express their self-reference. The influence of translated autobiography or traditional sources on those life narratives should be traced, if possible, to make flows of language patterns visible. This project argues that the realm of the modern self-writing might not have been as male centered, as it was perceived in the Eurocentric view.