Woman as an East–West Constant: Patriarchal Continuities in Works by Mori Ōgai and Yōko Tawada

Abstract

Strikingly similar depictions of Asian–European relationships in Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl,” 1890) and Yōko Tawada’s Kakato wo nakushite (Losing One’s Heels, 1991) and Ein Gast (A Guest, 1993) communicate strong continuities in gender relations in the German and Japanese patriarchies at the end of the last two centuries. Much had changed for women by the late twentieth century, of course, and the patriarchies even show signs of weakening in Tawada’s narratives. Nevertheless, comparison of these three fictions suggests that, despite the roughly one hundred years separating their publication dates, the male-dominated societies of Germany and Japan have exploited women in comparable ways across class and ethnicity.