Japanese women writers have been much in the news lately, garnering international attention for their presence on the lists of some of the most celebrated literary prizes. Ogawa Yōko (2020) and Kawakami Mieko (2022) for example, have both made the shortlist for the International Booker Prize hosted in the United Kingdom. Similarly, Tawada Yoko (2018) and Yū Miri (2022) received the National Book Award and Matsuda Aoko won the World Fantasy Awards in 2022, both awards based in the United States. Not only have these writers been feted for their works in translation, at home as well Japanese women writers are winning recognition for their literary talents, regularly securing Japan’s most coveted awards: the Akutagawa Prize, the Naoki, the Noma, and more. This confluence of both national and international acceptance has led some readers to assume Japanese women writers are finally finding their voice, as if they had no voice before the 21st century. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Japanese women have been writing since the beginning of Japanese writing. Acknowledgement of their contributions to the literary world has waxed and waned over the centuries, guided by attitudes towards the prestige and even propriety of women’s work. Influential as poets and storytellers, aristocratic women writers contributed to the earliest literary aesthetics in Japan. By the modern era, or the late 19th century, amid the increase in women’s literacy, new forms of print media, and increasing education for girls, the demand for women’s writing grew. But this interest also carried with it caveats. Expected to adhere to appropriate presentations of femininity, women felt pushed to adopt gender-specific styles. Their work was to fill a gap in the literary sphere by writing about what men supposedly could not write. They were meant to celebrate women’s issues, women’s experiences, and in a voice appropriate to women, because these were attainments beyond the masculine ken.

For example, in 1908 a group of well-known male writers, each in a position to mentor aspiring women writers, had the following to say: