Women’s Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire by Satoko KakiharaPeichen Wu

Excerpt

This book focuses on women’s writings during the Japanese imperial period. Across four chapters dealing with education, marriage, family, and labor, Satoko Kakihara discusses writers from the Japanese metropole, Manchukuo, Korea, and Taiwan in the prewar period. Her study sheds light on the writing strategies of these women, with a focus on the relationship between their works and identity construction. With the help of case studies based on selected writings from the 1940s, Kakihara demonstrates how female writers became conscious of their gender roles and constructed their identities amid modernization and colonization under Japanese imperial rule.