This chapter discusses examples of contemporary literary humor by Ogino Anna, Itō Hiromi, and Kanai Mieko. Despite their differences, their texts share certain characteristics such as complex intertextuality, blurring and merging of genres and forms, extensive use of word play and parody, and acute social criticism from women’s viewpoints in Japan’s aging society. Parody, with its ambivalent relationship with the texts or genres that it parodies, offers a range of possibilities for these writers to subvert gender discrimination and stereotypes, and revitalize both life and literature.

Introduction

Japanese culture, like many others, has long neglected or underestimated women’s contributions to humor, parody, and satire, even though the mythological origin of comic performance is attributed to the woman deity, Ame no Uzume. From about the 1970s onwards, women writers such as Kurahashi Yumiko and Tanabe Seiko have gained recognition and popularity through their comic-parodic texts, though women’s humor is still grossly underrepresented in literary criticism and humor studies. This chapter discusses recent works written by three acclaimed writers: Ogino Anna (1956–), Itō Hiromi (1955–), and Kanai Mieko (1947–). Despite differences in their styles, forms, subjects, and methods, the texts selected here share certain characteristics, such as complex intertextuality, extensive use of word play and parody, acute social criticism, and humor that questions or subverts gender and other kinds of discrimination, as well as stereotypes.

Among these comic-subversive devices parody deserves special attention. The definitions and uses of parody have changed from ancient to postmodern times (Rose 1993). There are also cultural differences and variations. We can safely say, however, that parody requires a text (hypotext) to mimic or repeat and at the same time transform, often, though not necessarily or always, by adding humor and criticism. The hypotext can be any written, visual, oral, or performative piece of any length, and it can be a specific individual text or a certain genre, sub-genre, mode, or style. The essential ingredients of parody, imitation and transformation, make the relationship between the parody and the parodied ambivalent: centrifugal and centripetal, close and distant, for and against—and this very ambivalence is what makes parody interesting.