Reading Food In Modern Japanese Literature

READING FOOD IN M O D E R N J A PA N E S E L I T E R AT U R E Tomoko Aoyama Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature Tomoko Aoyama University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2008 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 13  12  11  10  09  08    6  5  4  3  2  1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aoyama, Tomoko.   Reading food in modern Japanese literature / Tomoko Aoyama.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8248-3285-8 (hard cover : alk. paper)   1.  Japanese literature—20th century—History and criticism.  2.  Food in literature.  I.  Title.   PL726.57.F65A59 2008   808.8'0355—dc22                                                                 2008022150 Four illustrations by Mizuno Toshikata (1866–1908) are reproduced from the 1976 reprint of Murai Gensai’s 1903 novel Kuidòraku with the permission of Shibata Shoten. Figure 1: “Natsu no maki” (vol. 2, Summer), pp. 88–89 Figure 2: “Aki no maki” (vol. 3, Fall), pp. 246–247 Figure 3: “Natsu no maki” (vol. 2, Summer), pp. 156–157 Figure 4: “Aki no maki” (vol. 3, Fall), pp. 68–69 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by the University of Hawai‘i Press production staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Contents Acknowledgments  |  vii Introduction: Why Read Food in Modern Japanese Literature?  |  1 Chapter 1. Food in the Diary  |  15 Chapter 2. Down-to-Earth Eating and Writing (1)  |  46 Chapter 3. Down-to-Earth Eating and Writing (2)  |  71 Chapter 4. Cannibalism in Modern Japanese Literature  |  94 Chapter 5. The Gastronomic Novel  |  131 Chapter 6. Food and Gender in Contemporary Women’s Literature  |  172 Conclusion: Confession of an Obsessive Textual Food Eater  |  204 Notes  |  211 Bibliography  |  249 Index  |  263 Acknowledgments A number of people and organizations have given me generous support and inspiration for this project. In the early days the Australian Research Council’s Small Grant in 1998 assisted me in a way that was not at all small. So did each of the University of Queensland’s fellowships: Promoting Women Fellowship (2001) and Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies Faculty Fellowship (2002). For this latter opportunity I would like to express my special thanks to the director of the CCCS, Professor Graeme Turner, for his generous encouragement. The preparation of chapter 6 of this book has greatly benefited from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project “From musume (daughter) to shòjo (girl).” Throughout the project my immediate colleagues at the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, and its predecessor the Department of Asian Languages and Studies, have supported me enormously in giving both moral and practical support. As I cannot fill this page with the names of all my former and current colleagues, I will name just one: Professor Nanette Gottlieb, who has always been strongly supportive, from the earliest stage of this project through to its final stage. As noted in detail in each chapter, some sections of this book are based on my earlier publications in multiauthored volumes edited by Elise Tipton and John Clark, Kam Louie and Morris Low, Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta, and also in journals such as US-Japan Women’s Journal, Japanstudien, and Japanese Studies. I am grateful to all the editors and readers at these publications for nurturing these earlier projects and allowing me to reproduce some parts of them in the present book. Above all, however, it is the University of Hawai‘i Press, and especially Pamela Kelley and the anonymous readers, whose patient