Japanese Women Writers

For decades, writing by women was treated as its own separate genre in Japan, joryu bungaku. In today's episode, we’ll start with an explanation of why joryu bungaku became its own separate genre. We’ll move on to the story of women’s writing between the Meiji Era and the Pacific War and then immediately after the Pacific War. We’ll zoom in on three writers who really changed the narrative for women’s writing in Japan—Taeko Kono, Takako Takahashi, and Yumiko Kurahashi—and then talk very...