Women's History Review ISSN: 0961-2025 (Print) 1747-583X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20 A ‘fully bloomed’ existence for women: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko in the Soviet Union, 1927–1930 Jill Dobson To cite this article: Jill Dobson (2017) A ‘fully bloomed’ existence for women: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko in the Soviet Union, 1927–1930, Women's History Review, 26:6, 799-821, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2017.1337365 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2017.1337365 Published online: 20 Jun 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 297 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rwhr20 WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW, 2017 VOL. 26, NO. 6, 799–821 https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2017.1337365 A ‘fully bloomed’ existence for women: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko in the Soviet Union, 1927–1930 Jill Dobsona,b a School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK; bSchool of Law, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan ABSTRACT As a young woman, the Japanese writer Miyamoto Yuriko travelled to the Soviet Union in late 1927 and was transformed by the experience. In the world’s first and only socialist state, she perceived the possibility of equal relationships between men and women that were both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. In Soviet Russia, a woman could be ‘fully bloomed’: an equal citizen and worker as well as a wife and mother. Through an examination of her two self-narratives based on her time abroad - her diary and the retrospective, autobiographical novel Dōhyō (Signposts) I will demonstrate how for Yuriko, the political and personal were inseparable. Her whole-hearted endorsement of the USSR and the equality it seemed to offer women was part of the individual journey begun with her love marriage, her divorce, and her relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko, whom she left for Miyamoto Kenji, a committed communist, after her return to Japan. As the daughter of liberal-minded and affluent parents, the writer Miyamoto Yuriko (1899– 1951)1 had unusual freedom for a young Japanese woman in defining herself. Her pivotal three years in Soviet Russia and Europe between 1927 and 1930 brought about her conversion to communism and changed the course of her life and literary career. When Yuriko, in her late 20s, accompanied her partner, the student and translator of Russian, Yuasa Yoshiko, to Moscow in December 1927, she was an established writer with no political affiliations. When she returned to Tokyo in November 1930, she was a committed communist who immediately joined the All-Japan Proletarian Arts League (NAPF). Yuriko did not become a communist because of social injustice she witnessed in Japan or from exposure to Marxism, a major intellectual current in 1920s Japan following the 1917 Russian Revolution: she was transformed by what she perceived as the new social, political, and personal possibilities for women in the Soviet Union, the world’s first and only socialist state. A prolific writer whose strongest works drew closely on her own life, Miyamoto Yuriko left both diaries kept during her three years abroad, an immediate, incremental record of her experience; and an autobiographical novel, Dōhyō (translated variously as Signposts or Roadsigns), written twenty years later, in the last years of her life. These two texts provide CONTACT Jill Dobson jill_dobson2002@yahoo.co.uk School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, Shearwood Road, Sheffield S10 2TD, UK; School of Law, Waseda University, Nishiwaseda 1-6-1, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 169-8050, Japan © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 800 J. DOBSON the opportunity to explore how a Japanese woman, a significant literary and political figure who has received relatively little attention in English-language scholarship, recorded and narrated her journey—literal and metaphorical—as a female subject aspiring to autonomy within a restrictive cultural and historical context, and how profoundly her political and personal journey was enmeshed in questions of gender. I shall focus on three interrelated areas in which these two life-narratives diverge or are ambiguous: her representations of women/gender, truth vs. experience, and her relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko, revealing the complex subtext beneath the consciously constructed retrospective self-narrative of conversion in Signposts. Biographical overview: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko The writer and communist Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko (1899–1951) was born into affluence and privilege as the daughter of a Western-educated architect, Chūjō Sei’ichirō, and his wife Yoshie, the daughter of a prominent Meiji intellectual. The young Yuriko had the double advantage, as underlined by Hirabayashi Taiko,2 of liberal parents with the wherewithal to provide her with unlimited books, the best education available to an upper-class Japanese girl in this period, foreign travel, and an introduction to one of the leading literary critics of the day, Tsubouchi Shōyō, on whose recommendation Yuriko achieved publication in the prestigious journal Chūō kōron (Central Review) in 1916, while she was still in her teens. In 1919, she made a ‘love marriage’ in New York to an older Japanese man, then, even more shockingly, left him to set up house with a woman, the student and translator of Russian, Yuasa Yoshiko, in 1924. Yuasa was masculine in behaviour, dress, and speech-style and had had previous relationships with women, including a geisha; however, it was only towards the end of her life that she accepted the label of lesbian.3 Under Yuasa’s encouragement, Yuriko wrote her most enduring work, the autobiographical novel Nobuko (1928), which described the idealistic protagonist’s disillusionment with a ‘love marriage’ that turns out to be restrictive and conventional, and her struggle to maintain a sense of self. In the 1920s, the foreign and very modern notion of ‘love marriage’—as opposed to the traditional arranged marriage in which sentiment and personal fulfilment played no role—was regarded as an ‘expression of selfhood’, one that was particularly important for women, ‘who hoped to achieve a modern self through this expression of agency, equality and self-cultivation’.4 In the late 1940s, Nobuko, which had received little critical attention at the time of its publication, achieved a belated success and became known as the ‘women’s bible’.5 Yuriko herself ascribed this to the fact that more women were now experiencing the problems that she had faced twenty years previously.6 However, by this time, Yuriko’s personal journey had taken her beyond the search for individual fulfilment as a bourgeois woman to a broader socially and politically embedded meaning within socialism. Nobuko’s progress towards finding a larger purpose as a politically active writer, in tandem with a form of gender equality that did not compromise ‘femininity’ and allowed for satisfying heterosexual relationships, is the over-arching theme of Signposts. The influence of Russian literature in translation on the development of modern Japanese literature has been well-documented.7 As a precocious teenager, Yuriko was a keen reader of Russian literature, consuming the entire works of Tolstoy along with Turgenev and Chekhov;8 as an adult, her passion for Russian literature informed her view of and WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 801 love for ‘Russia’.9 In her diary of 1927, she writes that she has finished reading Dostoevsky’s The Devils, ‘truly a work of genius’ that portrays a ‘mysterious, profound Russian existence’,10 a perception of Russia that reappeared a year later in ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’ (1928), her first published writing on her Soviet experience.11 Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian Marxism exerted a powerful influence over the Japanese intelligentsia.12 The Japanese Communist Party was formed in 1922, paralleled by the growth of labour unions and the proletarian literary movement (PLM).13 Up until the suppression of left-wing, particularly communist activity, from the first mass arrests in March 1928 to the movement’s collapse in 1934, writing informed by Marxist analysis appeared in both left-wing, specialist publications and in the mainstream press.14 Before her life-changing journey to Russia, Yuriko was as yet politically uncommitted or involved, but as an admiring reader of socialist foreign authors such as Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) and Romain Rolland (1866–1944),15 and a participant in charity work in aid of the Russian famine in 1922,16 she was very much aware of events in Russia and the debates that gripped the Japanese intellectual classes in the 1920s. It was Yuasa who introduced Yuriko to Marxism, through Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism (1919), and first taught her Russian. When Yuasa went to the Soviet Union in December 1927 to continue her study of the language and thereby further fulfil her ambitions as a professional translator, Yuriko accompanied her. The decision was not an easy one: initially, Yuasa was to go alone, but the prospect of such separation was ultimately unthinkable—despite the frequent arguments and occasional ambivalence noted in Yuriko’s 1927 diary.17 After one particular argument with Yuasa, she was less keen to go to Russia, but reflected that their relationship would not survive if she did not.18 When the two women left Japan in December 1927, Yuriko was an established writer who wrote regularly for major publications such as Kaizō and Chūō kōron,19 and had just edited her first serialised novel Nobuko for publication as a book. Her experience of living in the Soviet Union and the contrasts she observed in various European cities as a traveller brought about her wholehearted conversion to communism, a move that radically changed the course of her life. When Yuriko returned to Tokyo in late 1930, she immediately plunged into political activism, joining the PLM at a time when it was under increasing government repression. In 1932, she left Yuasa Yoshiko for the young communist critic and future Party leader, Miyamoto Kenji (1908–2007); he went underground shortly after and Yuriko was arrested. Following his own arrest, Kenji was imprisoned for the next twelve years while Yuriko, increasingly isolated after the PLM fell apart in 1934, was herself subject to publication bans and periods of imprisonment, the last of which, in summer 1942, almost killed her: she suffered severe heatstroke and her health was permanently damaged. Yuriko and Kenji were among the few members of the PLM who refused to recant their beliefs (tenkō), which earned them public respect in the immediate post-war period, when the old pre-war left re-emerged and reorganised itself in the context of the new, American-sponsored democracy.20 In this context, Yuriko’s career enjoyed a second blossoming: as well as the belated success of Nobuko, in 1947 she won the Mainichi Prize for two novels, Fūchisō (The Weathervane Plant) and Banshū heiya (The Banshū Plain). In failing health, Yuriko withdrew from political activity in her last years, putting her energies into Signposts. She died of cerebrospinal meningitis at the age of 51, too soon for her Stalinist loyalties to be tested by Khrushchev’s revelations in 1954. 802 J. DOBSON Context: the status of women The context for Yuriko’s journey towards personal fulfilment and agency via political activism is the relative position of women in Japan and the Soviet Union, two countries that both underwent rapid but very different transitions to modernity.21 By her own retrospective account in Signposts, the status of women in the Soviet Union was a major factor in Yuriko’s political conversion. In political essays and articles published in the years immediately after her return to Japan, she highlighted the benefits of communism for women and children. Thus, Yuriko’s self-narratives must be understood in the material and discursive situation of women in Imperial Japan, an industrial–capitalist power with a fundamentally patriarchal polity, as opposed to that of Russian women within a new socialist modernity embodied by the Soviet Union. Following the comprehensive modernising reforms implemented by the new Meiji government22 from 1868 onwards, a gendered subjecthood23 was legally codified through the Constitution (1890) and the Civil Code (1898). While the Constitution did not explicitly mention women, they were excluded from the franchise and their relationship to the state was ‘mediated through the patriarchal family system’.24 In both their immediate and national families, women had obligations but no rights.25 From the late nineteenth century onwards, many Japanese women were opposed to their state-decreed role within modern Japan and were active in demanding political freedoms, beginning with their involvement in the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights (Jiyū minken undō) in the 1870s.26 However, women were barred by a series of laws from any kind of political activity, even attending or speaking at political meetings,27 hence the importance of women’s journals in this period as a forum for political expression and debate.28 In the 1920s, Japanese women were active within the fissiparous socialistlabour movement, but confined to women’s divisions of the various organisations and factions, a pattern that was repeated with the granting of manhood suffrage in 1925, which saw the formation of proletarian parties with auxiliary women’s organisations.29 While the goal of female suffrage on its own was criticised as a ‘bourgeois distraction’ from the bigger goal of socialist transformation, and socialist women such as Yamakawa Kikue (1890– 1980) were critical of liberal feminists, women’s voting rights were part of the platform of all left-wing parties.30 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, anarchist and socialist women and liberal feminists debated the role of the state in providing solutions to women’s issues, such as the granting of suffrage and welfare provisions for mothers and children. Women of all political stripes put forward their views in the women’s journals Nyonin geijutsu31 (Women’s Arts) and Fujin sensen32 (Women’s Battlefront).33 When Yuriko returned from the U.S.S.R. in December 1930 and entered these debates from the position of unwavering Stalinism, the far left was already under government pressure and overtly political journals were shut down—including Nyonin geijutsu. Ultimately, the right to join political organisations and female suffrage was only granted by the occupying powers in 1945.34 While full citizenship was denied them, the effects of education, economic activity, and the development of new urban lifestyles brought about significant changes in women’s lives and subjectivities not foreseen by Meiji statesmen. In the early twentieth century, women from all walks of life were consciously refashioning themselves, pursuing the Taishō-era (1912–1926) ideal of the cultivation of the modern self.35 Female identity WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 803 was dynamic, a work-in-progress, like modernity itself. In the 1910s, the ‘New Woman’— politically aware, high-minded, intellectual—was embodied by the group of women who published the journal Seitō (Bluestocking, 1911–1916), founded by the feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971).36 In her study, Sato identifies three key new, specifically urban, female identities that emerged in the interwar period: the professional working woman (shokugyō fujin), the middle-class housewife (shufu), and, perhaps the most contentious emblem of 1920s Japanese modernity, the ‘Modern Girl’ (moga).37 As a young woman who made a love marriage and pursued a literary career, Yuriko exemplified a Japanese woman who rejected tradition and sought a new way of being. At the same time, she rejected the feminist movement of her day. Near the end of her life, Yuasa Yoshiko told an interviewer that Yuriko had been contemptuous of the notion of a women’s liberation movement and very critical of the Seitō movement.38 Her negative view of the pursuit of women’s rights outside socialism was evident in letters to her husband,39 echoing the standard Party view that the battle for women’s suffrage was merely a bourgeois distraction. Yuriko acknowledges this herself in a diary entry in 1929, in which she remarks that five years previously, she had ‘despised’ the idea of women entering politics alongside men, but as an ‘adult’ she needed to ‘correct’ this way of thinking.40 Various Japanese feminist scholars have retrospectively criticised Yuriko for rejecting the ‘proto-feminism’ of her debut novel Nobuko and privileging the male-dominated communist movement and proletarian liberation over women’s concerns;41 however, Yuriko never identified as a ‘feminist’ before her travels and afterwards saw gender equality and women’s rights as a product of socialist revolution, not as freestanding aims. By contrast to Japan, the legal and political position of Soviet women in the 1920s was the most advanced in the world, as detailed by Lapidus.42 In the first few years of the Soviet regime, woman gained full citizenship. They could hold property and assume active public roles, such as participation in rural communes. Labour legislation encouraged women to undertake paid work, for equal pay. Civil registration of marriages in which both partners were regarded as equal replaced religious oversight. Divorce was made easy to obtain and abortion was legalised. Alongside this new legal equality, the role of women as mothers was accorded special protection. Female Party members such as Alexandra Kollontai and Vera Lebedeva argued for the importance of motherhood to the state and the state’s obligation to care for women and children, echoing in many ways the arguments of Japanese maternalist feminists in the same period.43 In the 1920s and 1930s, the experience of foreign cultural and political figures who travelled to the U.S.S.R. was managed by the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), which was set up with the specific aim of creating a positive image of Soviet Russia in the West. The type of excursions organised for Yuriko and Yuasa Yoshiko were entirely typical, with a focus on child and maternal welfare, education, and social rehabilitation.44 Yuriko kept meticulous track of these outings in her diary. For example, back in Moscow in 1930 after her extended European sojourn, Yuriko made the following visits: a workers’ club on International Women’s Day;45 a ‘reformatory’ that Yuriko distinguishes from a prison, because its aim is ‘enlightenment’ rather than ‘punishment’;46 a children’s library;47 the Krasnaya Rosa silk factory;48 two visits to a primary school;49 a regional literary circle;50 and a Pioneer camp.51 Even as they were making preparations to leave in mid-1930, the two women were still signing up 804 J. DOBSON for official sightseeing: a maternity hospital52 and a maternal welfare research institute.53 In ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’, Yuriko wrote of her frustration with the ‘facility sightseeing’ provided by VOKS. For a visitor wishing to explore more deeply, as Yuriko did, such guided visits were like ‘stepping-stones poking up from the surface of life in the USSR’.54 In her diaries, however, she does not comment upon or critique the function of VOKS in managing the experience of foreign visitors. In Signposts, the role of VOKS is hardly mentioned; the two women appear to discover Soviet Russia almost as independent travellers. The experience of foreign travellers to the U.S.S.R. and the vexed question of what they did or did not see or know about the actual situation relative to what they wrote and said in public back home has been the subject of several studies.55 Visitors loyal to the socialist cause, such as the Australians Katherine Susannah Pritchard and Betty Roland, who had doubts, kept them private or did not express them until much later.56 Yuriko’s ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’ contains references to less positive aspects of Soviet life—overcrowding in schools, housing shortages, beggars; however, by the time she returned to Japan, as a committed communist, Yuriko had learned to overlook such negatives for the sake of the cause. In the informational, evangelising articles written as a member of the PLM, such as ‘Red Flag Over Smolny’ (1931)57 and ‘Children’s Moscow’ (1930),58 she relays an uncritically positive view. The extraordinarily advanced position of women in the U.S.S.R. was naturally of interest to female visitors, and Yuriko’s rosy view was shared by other women, such as Jessie Street59 and Ella Winter.60 That the situation of actually existing Soviet women did not always match the official discourse could, in the first decade or so of the Soviet Union’s existence, be explained away, as with so many other discrepancies between ideal and reality, as ‘socialism under construction’.61 In ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’, Yuriko does exactly this, concluding: ‘The USSR is trying to achieve good things that exist nowhere else on earth in the twentieth century. At the same time, it also faces immense deficiencies and difficulties.’62 What I wish to point out here is that the legal and political discourse of women-as-citizens and the public enactment of this discourse—in model nurseries, plays, Party meetings, workplaces—as witnessed by Yuriko represented an ideal in the process of apparently being transformed into achievable lived reality and became a key theme in how she narrated her transformation. These perceptions created, for Yuriko, the belief that in a socialist society she could find the freedom and personal fulfilment that, for all her material and class advantages, she could not achieve as a woman in Japan. The narrative arc of Signposts is the protagonist Nobuko’s unfaltering progression towards this understanding. Signposts: the retrospective, coherent self Signposts was written over three years, 1947–1950, and published serially in the journal Tenbō (Prospect). The novel’s theme is the transformation of the protagonist, idealistic, sensitive Sasa Nobuko, into a fervent Stalinist. Through observation and deeply felt experience, Nobuko comes to understand the undeniable truth and rightness of communism, as embodied by the fledging U.S.S.R., which offers her both equality and the possibility of emotional fulfilment as a heterosexual woman. Her political and personal development is traced geographically through her experience of living in Moscow and spending time WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 805 in several major European cities (Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London), a retrospective recreation of Yuriko’s travels with Yuasa Yoshiko in 1927–1930.63 Drawing on the Japanese I-novel (shishōsetsu) tradition, Yuriko reconstructed key periods of her life in the guise of fiction, retrospectively weaving a meaningful story out of the raw, random material of lived experience. The confessional I-novel emerged as a unique Japanese genre in the 1910s–1920s, drawing on the writer’s own experience and eliding the distinction between the protagonist/narrator and the author.64 Unlike the unabashedly fictional Western novel,65 the Japanese I-novel derived its literary value from its relationship to the writer’s life, however, the facts were recrafted. While Japanese audiences did not read Inovels as autobiographies in the Western sense—that is, as a historical record purporting to be ‘true’—they understood them to be about the author’s life and experiences.66 Hirabayashi Taiko claimed that Yuriko was incapable of writing ‘objective’ fiction (i.e. not based directly on her own experience) and described Signposts as a ‘travel diary novel’.67 Yuriko herself denied that it was autobiographical and claimed she wanted to ‘universalise’ her experience,68 but the close concurrence of events in the novel with Yuriko’s actual travels, including the use of precise dates that match those in the diary and the use of alternative names for real characters that point up rather than obscure their identities (e.g. the exiled communist leader Katayama Sen69 becomes ‘Yamagami Gen’), signals Signposts’ relationship to Yuriko’s life story despite its status as ‘fiction’. The only person in a position to truly judge to what extent it was ‘crafted’, Yuasa Yoshiko, commented later in life, ‘It was maybe 70% truth and 30% fiction.’70 The ambiguity of autobiography presented as fiction is possibly more confusing for a Western than a Japanese reader, who understands that an account of a writer’s life can be simultaneously factual and fictive. In writing Signposts within the I-novel genre, Yuriko was able to present a version of her life—embodied in the fictional persona of Sasa Nobuko—which, while resisting the ‘truth claims’ inherent in an autobiography proper (as per Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’),71 demonstrated a clear teleological trajectory from her young pre-political, middle-class self to her current, midlife, committed communist self. Signposts serves as a lengthy and detailed statement of ideological credentials, combining the evangelical purpose of proletarian fiction with the form of an I-novel, the genre in which she had produced her most successful writing. In my discussion of Signposts, a long novel of three volumes, amounting to some 1000 pages, I shall focus on episodes and threads that relate to Nobuko’s development as a woman in the context of communism, which is intertwined with her estrangement from her companion Yoshimi Motoko, modelled on Yuasa Yoshiko, and her constant affirmation of a ‘natural’ femininity. The new Soviet feminine: equal but ‘natural’ Central to Nobuko’s ideological shift is her discovery that women in the Soviet Union can enjoy a fulfilling public life as citizens and workers, equal to men, without sacrificing their ‘femininity’ and the possibility of satisfying heterosexual relationships. This is demonstrated by two key encounters with female ‘signposts’ during Nobuko’s first year in the Soviet Union, the nurse Natasha and the Party worker Anna Simova. When the two women visit Leningrad in summer 1928, Nobuko is greatly impressed by her encounter with the warm, no-nonsense Anna Simova at the Party HQ, now housed in the Smolny Institute.72 Anna tells Nobuko and Motoko that her husband has gone to the 806 J. DOBSON regions to organise agricultural collectivisation. They have an infant daughter, and in a week’s time they will all have a holiday together. In this simple, joyful description of her life is ‘a lively rhythm like a song and a keen delight in life’73 that awakens Nobuko’s envy. This simple heteronormative joy embodies for Nobuko an ideal of womanhood. In the Soviet Union, relations between the sexes were being ‘rationally and emotionally liberated’, and Nobuko, who had given up on heterosexual fulfilment in Japanese society, sees Anna Simova as embodying the possibility of a ‘fully bloomed’ existence.74 The implication here is that in the Soviet Union, a woman’s desire for heterosexual relations does not require her to sacrifice her autonomy and selfhood. When Nobuko admits to envying the ‘fully bloomed’ and therefore ‘human’ Anna Simova, Motoko takes offence and suggests that she find herself a man.75 Nobuko’s lips ‘go pale in disgust’76 at this crudely physical interpretation. She is forced to reflect on the ‘hidden and abnormal thing’ in their life together as two women.77 Nobuko feels the ‘abnormality’ is more on Motoko’s side; for Nobuko, the difference between men and women is ‘as clearly made by nature’ and Motoko is no ‘compensation’ for a man—for all that Nobuko occasionally wants to brush her cheek against Motoko’s or touch her lips.78 By her emphasis on the healthy ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality and the ‘abnormality’ of Motoko, Nobuko is firmly positioned as heterosexual, despite her day-to-day existence as one half of a same-sex couple. Another female ‘signpost’ appears in the form of the nurse Natasha, who cares for Nobuko during her long hospitalisation with an inflamed gallbladder. Seven months pregnant, Natasha embodies the benefits of the Soviet regime for women: she cannot be fired during her pregnancy and is entitled to paid leave and hospital care. She is also studying medicine in the evening ‘Labour Faculty’.79 Although Nobuko has been on sightseeing tours of maternal health facilities organised by VOKS, this reality only comes alive for her by meeting Natasha,80 who makes her reflect on her own situation. When Nobuko married her first husband Tsukuda, she had not realised that under Japanese law, a woman lost her legal identity upon marriage and depended on a husband’s consent for divorce.81 She admires the conditions created by Soviet society, in which a young woman can live, study, work—even while pregnant!—and marry without fear or hypocrisy.82 Natasha is described brimming with the ‘pure, solemn beauty of a young, robust animal in litter’,83 an emblematic Soviet women whose development as a full human being in both public and private spheres was not limited by gender as it was in Japan. Nobuko’s own femininity is frequently emphasised. In a scene set in Berlin, she meets a distant relative forced on her by her mother Takeyo, Dr Tsuyama Shinjirō, an unpleasant man researching poison gas, and he asks her to talk on conditions in the U.S.S.R. at a meeting of Japanese medical scientists.84 No wives are present, and Nobuko’s ‘schoolgirl figure’ is described as being out of place in the clubby masculine atmosphere.85 Nobuko enters the room very aware that as a young woman she will not be taken seriously by these elderly Japanese men. When Tsuyama, introducing her, says she will discuss medical issues in the U.S.S.R., she protests that she has no specialist knowledge. Instead, she talks about her actual experience: the medical facilities in factories, maternal and child care clinics, her own treatment in the university hospital. In a style that is ‘conversational’ and ‘childishly rambling’, Nobuko talks about the ‘reality’ of Soviet life, which she has ‘seen with her own eyes’.86 Under the epistemological norms established by the narrator of Signposts, what is seen and sincerely experienced is necessarily true. Nobuko WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 807 counters the doctors’ specialist language with ‘straightforward language’87 and concludes by telling them they should all go to see for themselves, since Moscow is only a night’s train-ride away. Nobuko is clearly the winner in this encounter, although without undermining her femininity: she is described in terms of her ‘small figure’ and ‘the soft contour of her neck and shoulders’ picked out by the overhead light.88 Whenever Nobuko’s lived experience of the Soviet Union is shown to triumph over male scepticism, the heteronormative order is maintained by an emphasis on her soft, unthreatening feminine demeanour. Despite having witnessed publicly active women such as the maternal Anna Simova, and engaging in various political debates with cynical male characters, Nobuko reaches the end of her three years without yet having imagined herself as politically active, another confirmation of her innate ‘femininity’. When Nobuko meets the exiled Japanese communist leader Yamagami Gen and he suggests she stay on in her beloved Russia, Nobuko’s first response is to ask what sort of work she could do in Moscow. She has never thought of being ‘a woman involved in political activities’.89 The suggestion to Nobuko that she become politically active as a woman challenges her existing sense of self, which has not to date encompassed such activity. In Signposts, the feminine, modest, and intuitive protagonist is led to the ‘truth’ of socialism by observation and direct experience, but only considers political activism at the suggestion of a venerable male authority figure at the very end of the novel. Socialism: the road back to heterosexuality When the new Soviet regime abrogated the old Tsarist legal code in 1917, one effect of this was to render homosexuality legal in Russia proper.90 The immense social upheaval brought about by the Revolution and civil war led to a decade of what Lapidus calls, somewhat coyly, ‘improvisation and mobility in personal life’,91 a period of sexual freedom championed by the writer Alexandra Kollontai, the head of the Women’s Section of the Communist Party, Zhenotdel, in 1920–1922. In the early days of the Revolution, the traditional family was regarded as ‘the locus of exploitation, oppression and humiliation’ and the prime obstacle to gender equality.92 Marxism did not offer clear guidelines on sexuality, and the matter of ‘free love’ and its possible negative effects on women, children, and society in general were much debated within the Party. Lenin himself expressed concern about the ‘excesses’ of sexual liberation.93 The conservative, moralistic strain within Bolshevism proved stronger, and in the early Stalinist period the family was reestablished as the basic component of society and therefore the economy. ‘Free love’ was denounced and new laws were passed to stabilise the family unit and halt the declining birth rate: in 1934, male homosexuality was recriminalised and in 1936 abortion was made illegal except when the mother’s life was endangered. Productive citizenship, for Soviet women, became fused to an idealised motherhood. As part of the government’s efforts to harness personal life to the needs of the state, ‘deviant’ (e.g. non-productive) sexual behaviours such as same-sex relations and prostitution became the subject of censure and control.94 Thus, Yuriko and Yuasa Yoshiko came to the Soviet Union at a transitional period between the experimental chaos of the first revolutionary decade and the conservative consolidation of Stalinism. Nowhere in the diaries does Yuriko mention any perception, much 808 J. DOBSON less criticism, of herself and Yuasa as a same-sex couple. When she wrote Signposts she was firmly established within a heterosexual marriage and the narrative reflects her later-life conservative, Stalinist attitude to sexual relations. In Signposts, the positive model of modernity represented by Soviet society embodies all that is ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’,95 which precludes same-sex relationships and masculinised women. Nobuko’s growing realisation that women in the Soviet Union can enjoy a fulfilling public life without sacrificing their ‘femininity’ and the possibility of satisfying heterosexual relationships highlights another aspect of her gradual distancing of herself from Motoko: her privileging of heterosexuality. In Signposts, Yuriko asserted her heterosexuality by retrospectively re-scripting her relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko, representing it, from Nobuko’s perspective, as a very close, affectionate friendship between two professional women who had chosen to live together and share their lives.96 Motoko is not labelled a lesbian, but her masculine demeanour is unequivocally shown by her chainsmoking, her habit of wearing suits, and her use of abrupt male language in contrast to Nobuko’s feminine style of speech. Yuriko’s unacknowledged bisexuality slips through in the occasional ambiguity of the Motoko narrative, as when Nobuko returns from Paris to Moscow and assuages Motoko’s jealousy by gestures that are more lover-like than friendly.97 Nobuko’s perception of her ‘friendship’ with Motoko is challenged by a significant ‘signpost’ in Berlin, when their male Japanese companions take Nobuko and Motoko to a lesbian café.98 In my reading, this is a key scene in which Nobuko’s rejection of Motoko is justified by her association with bourgeois perversion, even though Motoko is, like Nobuko, a socialist sympathiser. As usual, Nobuko is wearing a dress and Motoko is wearing a suit, which Nobuko has always ascribed to their different body shapes. In the lesbian café, women in suits are dancing with women in dresses. They are described, through Nobuko’s eyes, as ‘thin’ and ‘sickly’, and there is something ‘weirdly dirty and abnormal’ about the pomaded hair of the women in suits.99 The recognition Nobuko perceives in the looks directed by these women at herself and Motoko disgusts her, and she is horrified that their male companions have associated them with the atmosphere of this ‘pervert’ café.100 She leaves the café with a sense of ‘lost innocence’, having ‘glimpsed the pit of degeneracy of relations between women’, and newly reminded of the ‘healthiness’ of Moscow life.101 She does not mention this to Motoko, for fear of provoking another argument like the one after their meeting with Anna Simova. Nobuko experiments with a return to heterosexuality when she spends several months alone in Paris, where she has an affair with Hachiya Ryōsaku, an economics student who guides her reading of Marx’s Capital.102 He seems briefly to replace Motoko as a mentor, in a correctly gendered body, but is ultimately rejected for lacking Nobuko’s wholehearted emotional allegiance to Soviet Russia. This realisation triggers Nobuko’s decision to return to Moscow, where she angrily denies Motoko’s accusations of infidelity. She admits to herself that she has not been entirely truthful with Motoko, but she is determined to pursue experience wherever it takes her.103 Even while she moves into a room that Motoko has rented and lovingly set up for them both, she is aware that she has been drawn back to Moscow, not to Motoko.104 Her journey towards the possibility of heterosexual fulfilment offered by socialism excludes Motoko, although since their relationship is depicted as no more than close friendship on Nobuko’s side, the depiction of their gradual estrangement contains an underlying ambiguity that in places unsettles the story’s surface. WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 809 The truth of experience Nobuko’s determined estrangement from Motoko is presented as inevitable because Motoko and Nobuko engage with Moscow—and the Soviet Union—in different ways. This is presented in terms of closed/open and intellectual/sensory: in the world of the novel, a fundamental and unbridgeable divergence. A constant theme of the novel—one which underlines Nobuko’s final decision to return to Japan because as a writer she cannot produce novels about Japan in Russia—is the superiority of understanding gained through emotionally engaged, lived experience over knowledge that is merely intellectual. The first stage of her journey is presented as a rapturous, sensory infatuation with the urban reality of Moscow. Her initial impressions are conveyed in richly described detail that consolidate her emotional connection to ‘Russia’ through its literature—a romantic, imagined Russia that she does not at first distinguish from contemporary Soviet Russia. The intensely sensory nature of Nobuko’s engagement is emphasised by her experience of a performance at the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) not long after their arrival. As they walk home in the snow, she is still trembling from its impact, a ‘freshness that hurts her skin’.105 While Motoko, a theatre connoisseur, discusses the play in technical terms with their Japanese male acquaintances, who advise her to become familiar with fashionable Soviet phrases such as ‘dialectical method’, Nobuko’s reactions are shown to be primarily intuitive and emotional.106 Even though Motoko shares Nobuko’s love of Russia and is sympathetic to the Soviet project, she is shown to respond intellectually rather than emotionally. She spends her days in their shared room studying Russian, while Nobuko is dispatched to do the shopping and run errands, despite her very basic language skills. In fact, her lack of Russian makes her sensory experience all the more intense, unmediated by language. Walking along a boulevard, Nobuko sees children in thick coats playing on sleds; a Chinese woman with bound feet selling coloured balls; a Tartar vendor whose dark face contrasts sharply against the white snow and the yellow millet he is eating: ‘The colour and movement entered Nobuko’s heart like a painting or music.’107 She then cuts through the food market in Okhotny Ryad, which is described in exotic travelogue terms of sights and smells—old women selling eggs from baskets, black, unidentifiable meat, lumps of butter, dead chickens. In the shop where Nobuko goes to buy cabbage and fish roe for their dinner, the floor is covered in wet sawdust and the air reeks of pickles and smoked fish.108 Back in the hotel room, Motoko is eager to hear about Nobuko’s experiences ‘outside’, but unwilling to sacrifice work time to go out herself. An explicit contrast is made between the ‘faint stiffness’ of the newspapers that Motoko uses as study material and Nobuko’s eyes, which ‘sparkled freshly from all the vibrant impressions’.109 The city’s strange intermingling of old and new ‘stimulates all Nobuko’s knowledge and sensibility’ and gives her fresh zeal for life, which puts a distance between herself and Motoko, whose intellectual labours only serve to distance her from the ‘real’ Russia that exists at street level, underlining that the ‘truth’ of Soviet Russia can only be discovered by wholehearted lived experience.110 Thus, Nobuko’s estrangement from Motoko is presented principally in terms of Nobuko’s full emotional engagement with Soviet Russia and Motoko’s intellectual distance. This distance is confirmed when Nobuko takes the next step towards political conversion by visiting Yamagami Gen at the Hotel Lux, the Comintern residence for foreign 810 J. DOBSON communists, without telling Motoko. Even when Motoko tearfully reproaches her for not offering her the chance to share this experience, Nobuko is resolute: she has already decided that her personal journey towards communism will exclude Motoko, regardless of Motoko’s own sympathies towards the Soviet Union.111 Motoko’s reaction does not gel with the novel’s emphasis on her intellectual distance from the Soviet Union; the real issue is sexuality, which Signposts constantly, but not always successfully, elides. The diaries: the fragmented, private self Yuriko was a lifelong diarist and made regular, if often brief, entries throughout her three years abroad. Unlike Signposts, the diaries are not a crafted, coherent narrative; in the words of diary scholar Lejeune, they are ‘dated traces’.112 She jotted down small incidents, conversations, the cost of food, arguments with Yuasa Yoshiko, the books she read, the progress of her work, going out for meals, and meeting people. The lack of deliberate, overarching narrative makes the diaries revealing in different ways from Signposts. The Nobuko of Signposts is the older Miyamoto Yuriko’s textual creation of a public self: through the novel she draws on her youthful experience to create a coherent teleological backstory for her contemporary persona as a communist writer and activist. By contrast, in the diaries Yuriko is writing as and for herself: she is not retrospectively creating an alter ego to assign a particular meaning to her experiences. Although a diary is ostensibly a private and personal form, a scholar of life-writing must take into consideration whether a diary was actually designed to be shown to other people or even published. It is my belief that Yuriko did not write her diaries to be read as they stood by third parties. There is no mention of any diary-sharing between Yuriko and Yuasa Yoshiko, her almost-constant companion during the period under study and, given Yuriko’s candour about her relationship in the diary, it is highly unlikely that she intended Yuasa to read it, as it would surely provoke yet more of the violent arguments Yuriko so hated. Additionally, Yuriko’s diaries appear as ‘raw material’, not a polished narrative like those of Higuchi Ichiyō,113 or a compelling narrative, like her contemporary Hayashi Fumiko’s bestselling Hōrōki, published while Yuriko was abroad.114 As a writer with a high regard for her own abilities, it is unlikely that Yuriko would wish to show her note-like, rather prosaic diary to anyone else. If an audience can be imagined, in the case of Yuriko, it is the prospective audience reading later, polished versions of her life, of which the account in the diary is the very first, rough and incomplete, draft. As a record of Yuriko’s spontaneous, private impressions, unshaped by the self-presentational demands of publication, the diaries reveal a less ‘processed’ version of Yuriko’s self-conception. By this, I do not mean that her diaries are transparent. Even when unwitnessed, the recording self still operates within certain context and discourses, and is not immune from self-delusion. Also, as a historical record, diaries are frustratingly incomplete. Yuriko wrote in her diaries what was uppermost in her mind at the time, constantly making choices about what was, literally, noteworthy, and overlooking, or forgetting, other incidents, impressions, and encounters that to another diarist—or another self—may have seemed significant. These choices do not always reflect what appears in Signposts. In attempting to read a life through an ‘incremental text’,115 I will examine how Yuriko recorded the impact of her travels on her identity as a woman when she was not constructing a personal mythology to dovetail with her persona at the time of writing—a dedicated WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 811 communist whose beliefs had enabled her to endure repeated imprisonment and a marital separation of twelve years. I will focus on how Yuriko wrote about women, gender, femininity, and heterosexuality in relation to herself and to the U.S.S.R., comparing the fractured, private account of the diary to the coherent but occasionally disrupted narrative of Signposts. Gender/women The female ‘signposts’ encountered in the novel—Natasha the nurse and Anna Simova the Party worker, who exemplify politically liberated yet feminine women—are minor or absent entities in the diaries. The visit to the Smolny Institute is recorded on 1 September 1928, but there is no mention of Anna Simova. The pregnant nurse Tanya (Natasha) is only mentioned in passing.116 My view is that Yuriko only retrospectively assigned symbolic importance to these women in Signposts. Although she wrote at length about the condition of women in the Soviet Union in subsequently published articles, Yuriko made little mention of women in her diary. A uniquely revealing comment about the situation of women, and men and women, in the U.S.S.R. appears in an entry for 1928: Since coming to the USSR, I’ve been impressed by many things, but I have not seen a family that I’ve thought, yes, this is a good family, where man and woman are truly bound by something human and live their life’s aims within it. They are entangled in the same old expediency, getting ahead and meanness.117 This paragraph reveals Yuriko’s own ideal of a relationship and her disappointment at not yet finding it in Soviet Russia, a place that she has otherwise accepted as her promised land. At the time of writing this passage, she had already met the Party worker who appears as Anna Simova in Signposts, but not nurse Natasha/Tonya. A similar observation appears in Signposts, but earlier in the fictional narrative than in the diary, around the time of writing ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’ (i.e. before May 1928), and in a qualified form. Nobuko reflects that while she has seen the social provisions that offer the possibility of happiness, she has not yet seen one ‘rich fresh union’ that inspires her envy.118 However, she appreciates the ‘social contract’ under which each woman is cared for as a worker, a wife, a mother, and an old woman, a contract that does not exist in Japanese society, and this awareness fills her with confidence for the future of women. In this passage, a distinction is made between an ideal relationship, which Yuriko did not encounter during her time in the Soviet Union, and the conditions that allowed for a secure and fulfilled female life— including the possibility of equal relationships with men. Yuriko’s ideal relationship—one of man and woman, not woman and woman—in which both share the same life aim, politically defined, appeared later in the short story ‘Koiwai no ikka’ (The Koiwai Family). Some scholars regard Yuriko’s later marriage to fellow communist Miyamoto Kenji as the fulfilment of this ideal.119 Yuasa Yoshiko A major theme in the diaries, as in Signposts, is Yuriko/Nobuko’s relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko/Motoko and her gradual distancing of herself from her companion of several years. When the two women were introduced by the writer Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), 812 J. DOBSON Yuasa was working as an editor for the patriotic women’s journal Aikoku fujin while studying Russian as an auditor at Waseda University. A professional woman of letters, she provided a model of how an independent, literary woman could live at a time when Yuriko was struggling to leave her first marriage. Immediately intrigued, Yuriko pursued Yuasa, who was initially wary of another entanglement with a straight woman, after being abandoned by her previous lover, but Yuriko won her over. In her relationship with Yuasa, Yuriko found the intellectual and creative support that her lacklustre first husband had failed to provide. What Yuasa could not provide, however, was sexual satisfaction, which Yuriko hinted at, in euphemistic botanical terms, in her diary: ‘the pistil calls out to the stamen’.120 In Signposts, their relationship is presented as no more than a close friendship, at least from Nobuko’s point of view. The depiction is more ambiguous in the diaries. There, the intensity and regularity of their arguments are suggestive of a couple rather than ‘just friends’. Yuriko refers to Yuasa by the endearment ‘Moya’ (R. ‘mine’), and to herself as ‘Beko’,121 a pet-name used by Yuasa. In Signposts, ‘Beko’ becomes ‘Buko-chan’, but there is no mention of or equivalent to ‘Moya’, which suggests Yuriko was playing down the romantic intensity of their relationship in her fictional life-narrative. There are no diary entries for Berlin, therefore, unfortunately, no contemporary record of the visit to the lesbian café that so disgusts Nobuko in Signposts. On the evidence of the 1927 diary, their relationship was already rocky before their departure for Russia, and their cramped living conditions in Moscow worsened the situation. Yuriko’s frustration with the relationship comes across through her frequent complaints about her lack of privacy.122 From the very beginning of their Russian stay, starting at the Hotel Passage, Yuriko had to share a room with Yuasa, which served both as their bedroom and their workspace. By early January 1928, she was already feeling the strain of such intense cohabitation. One night, when Yuasa had gone to bed early, Yuriko, enjoying sole use of the desk, wrote longingly of having ‘her desk in her own room’, where she could settle down and write.123 This theme recurs repeatedly: thinking ahead to their planned summer trip to Leningrad, Yuriko reflects, again, how wonderful it would be if she had ‘her own room in which to read and write’.124 After Yuriko’s discharge from hospital in April 1929, the two women had to share a room again. Yuriko reports Yuasa as saying, ‘Life has become unbearable since you came home.’ Yuriko concluded this diary entry with the comment, ‘I’ll certainly live by myself when I return to Japan.’125 Thus, the enforced proximity of their living conditions brought about a new desire for distance in their relationship, a distance that was realised geographically in August 1929, when Yuasa Yoshiko returned alone to Moscow to continue her studies and Yuriko stayed on in London and Paris. She recorded what seems to have been a brief affair with the economics student Taira Teizō, although this is couched in extremely vague terms, perhaps reflecting an unwillingness by Yuriko to acknowledge, even to herself, her betrayal of Yuasa. The relationship of Nobuko and Hachiya Ryōsaku as depicted in Signposts is similarly vague, although Nobuko’s reason for ending it is explicitly ideological: Hachiya’s lack of true commitment to communism. The arguments with Yuasa, the constant complaints about lack of space, the anticipation of separate lives back in Japan, and Yuriko’s experiments with such separation, read together, demonstrate that in the diary Yuriko was exploring and justifying the possibility of a life without Yuasa. At the time of writing Signposts, Yuriko’s relationship with Yuasa was already twenty years in the past. Critics such as Iwabuchi Hiroko126 claim that WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 813 Yuriko ‘whitewashed’ and downgraded the relationship in her novel, and presented an overly negative image of Yuasa, overlooking the positives, such as her devoted care of Yuriko during her long illness in 1929. In my view, Yuriko had already created the ‘negative’ Yuasa in her diaries, a perspective that enabled Yuriko to walk out of their shared house and abandon Yuasa Yoshiko for Miyamoto Kenji in 1932. Learning vs. experience The insistent theme of experience vs. learning in Signposts, with Nobuko representing the superiority of authentic, lived experience over Motoko’s claustrophobic and limited book study, is absent from the diaries. Yuriko used her diary to track her work, her reading, and her impressions of theatre and cinema, which provides a clear picture of the progression of her intellectual and literary subjectivity over the three years, even if her decision to ‘turn Red’ is never explicitly stated. In the last year, 1930, in particular, her judgements about plays, books, and other writers are confident and ideologically founded; for example, she enjoys ‘Avangard’ (The Vanguard) by Valentin Kataev (1897–1986), but she agrees with the criticism that the focus on the individual rather than the collective is a ‘flaw’ in Soviet terms.127 She criticises an Uzbek play about cotton production in Turkmenistan for having an ‘ideologically poor structure’: the communist stands alone and does not join with the poor peasant.128 Compared to the sensitive Nobuko, who apparently absorbs her knowledge of socialism almost entirely through the evidence of her senses, the Yuriko of the diaries is aggressively intellectual, consciously developing her ideological understanding and her ideas about the integration of art and politics. From the very first, Yuriko was proud of her elite, ‘masculine’ intellect and writing style: as a teenager, she rejoiced that her first story, ‘A Flock of Poor Folk’, was rejected by a women’s journal, Fujin kōron (Women’s Review), for being judged as over the heads of the readership.129 It was published by the mainstream (i.e. malestream) journal Chūō kōron instead. So why did she re-represent her alter ego Nobuko in such a way, emphasise unthreatening femininity at the expense of the questing intelligence revealed in the diary? I offer two hypotheses. First, in Signposts, the men Nobuko encounters are all described in terms of their political attitudes; for example, in Berlin she meets two young Japanese men, students of theatre with proletarian affiliations, who show her the aftermath of the May Day clashes in the working-class suburb of Neukolln, where workers were shot by police, while in Vienna, a young man from the Japanese legation shows Nobuko and Motoko the Karl Marx Hof housing complex, to demonstrate the success of the Social Democrat government.130 (The two women are not impressed.) Such scenes demonstrate that Yuriko perceived the political arena as defined and represented by men. By contrast, female characters in Signposts are presented as either warm and feminine, or cold, masculinised, and therefore unlikeable. Men talk politics, while women merely embody gendered political realities. While Yuriko envied the equality legally enjoyed by Soviet women, she regarded the intellectual–political sphere as fundamentally masculine and emphasised the importance of a form of female liberation that did not disrupt or damage ‘femininity’. Second, the Party was male-dominated, and many leading members had elite university educations, such as the writer Nakano Shigeharu (1902–1979), the theorist Kurahara Korehito (1902–1999), and Yuriko’s own husband Miyamoto Kenji all alumni of Tokyo 814 J. DOBSON Imperial University (now Tokyo University). Women were normally relegated to subsidiary roles, most notoriously that of ‘housekeeper’.131 In addition to her status as a wellknown writer before she joined the PLM, Yuriko could claim speaking authority from her actual lived experience of communism. Hence the insistence in Signposts of the superiority of a particularly feminine kind of emotionally grounded, empirical knowledge. Conclusions For Yuriko, travel to the U.S.S.R. and Europe in her late 20s was a life-defining experience. Like other female travellers to Soviet Russia in this period, she was deeply impressed by the advanced political and economic status of women and the special protections afforded them as mothers. These are the aspects that Yuriko emphasised most heavily in her writings following her return to Japan, when she joined the PLM and became politically active and latterly, in Signposts, her retrospective ‘conversion’ narrative. However, Yuriko’s conversion was also rooted in a deeper and very personal narrative: her ambivalence about her same-sex relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko and her fictional reconstruction of this relationship in order to affirm her uninterrupted heterosexuality and therefore ‘natural’ femininity. I have revealed this underlying narrative through a close comparative reading of Yuriko’s two accounts: her contemporaneous, unedited diaries and her autobiographical novel, Signposts. While Signposts foregrounds the advanced status of women in the Soviet Union as a powerful motivator for Nobuko’s ‘conversion’, there is also a subtext about ‘natural’ femininity and heterosexuality. The negative depiction of Nobuko’s relationship with Motoko is used as a narrative device to emphasise Nobuko’s development. Nobuko’s ability to experience the Soviet Union emotionally and thus understand its ‘truth’ is constantly set against the ‘masculine’ intellectuality embodied by the cynical Motoko. By highlighting their differing experiences of Moscow as the point of divergence, Yuriko retrospectively elided the bisexual element of her actual relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko and emphasised her own femininity. However, even within the bounds of the novel, this narrative is occasionally disrupted by scenes that undermine the narrator’s insistence that the ‘unnaturalness’ in the relationship is all on Motoko’s side. While the diaries do not directly contradict the account given in Signposts, they contain the subtle but noteworthy differences that demonstrate the extent to Yuriko’s public, retrospective conversion narrative was constructed to fit her subsequent emotional life and selfconception as a ‘natural’ feminine heterosexual. Yuriko’s conscious, private desire to distance herself from Yuasa Yoshiko is made explicit very early on, for reasons that are more obviously sexual, and have no relation to the much emphasised dichotomy of (feminine) experience vs. (masculinised) intellect established in the world of the novel. This dichotomy is undermined by Yuriko’s self-representation in the diary: by contrast to the ultra-feminine Nobuko of Signposts, whose conversion is brought about by emotionally engaged experience, the Yuriko of the diary evinces a critical, intellectual self that observed and judged and spent as much time reading as out on the streets. For Yuriko, communism in the U.S.S.R. was not only about female emancipation; it was a road back to heterosexuality, with the promise of equal relationships that were emotionally, physically, and intellectually fulfilling. In imperial Japan, women had no legal or political identity and even a modern ‘love marriage’ fell back on the old stifling patterns; in Soviet Russia, Yuriko perceived WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 815 that women could enjoy a ‘fully bloomed’ existence without renouncing men or ‘natural’ femininity, and this Utopian hope became part of her political, personal narrative. Notes 1. Names are given in conventional Japanese order throughout the main text, with the family name preceding the given name. 2. Taiko Hirabayashi (1979) Miyamoto Yuriko, in Hirabayashi Taiko zenshū, Vol. 10 (Tokyo: Ushio Shuppansha), pp. 91–146. 3. Hitomi Sawabe (2007) A Visit with Yuasa Yoshiko, a Dandy Scholar of Russian Literature, in M. McLelland, K. Suganama & J. Welker (Eds) Queer Voices from Japan: first-person narratives from Japan’s sexual minorities (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), pp. 31–40. 4. Michiko Suzuki (2010) Becoming Modern Women: love and female identity in prewar Japanese literature and culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 68–69. 5. Shūgo Honda (1976) Miyamoto Yuriko: sono shōgai to sakuhin, in Takiji Yuriko Kenkyūkai (Ed.) Miyamoto Yuriko. Sakuhin to shōgai (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha), pp. 15–45. 6. Hilaria Gossmann (1995) The Quest for Emancipation: the autobiographical novels of Miyamoto Yuriko and Sata Ineko, Japan Quarterly, 42, p. 336. 7. See, e.g. Marleigh Ryan (1965) Japan’’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (New York: Columbia University Press); Janet A. Walker (1995) The Russian Role in the Creation of the First Japanese Novel, Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo, in J. T. Rimer (Ed.) A Hidden Fire. Russian and Japanese cultural encounters, 1868–1926 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press & Woodrow Wilson Press Center), pp. 22–37; Tetsuo Mochizuki (1995) Japanese Perceptions of Russian Literature in the Meiji and Taisho Eras, also in Rimer, A Hidden Fire, pp. 17–21. The first Russian writer to become well known in Japan was Ivan Turgenev (1818– 1883), translated by Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), the author of Japan’s so-called first modern novel, Ukigumo (1887). Futabatei was responsible for some thirty translations from Russian, including Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Goncharov. In the 1890s, Tolstoy became established as a major influence, not only for his fiction but for his humanitarian philosophy, which inspired the humanist White Birch (Shirakaba) literary clique; both influenced the young Yuriko; see Susan Phillips (1987) Beyond Borders: class struggle and feminist humanism in Banshū heiya, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 19(1), pp. 56–65, p. 56. It was at the turn of the century that Chekhov (1860–1904) and Gorky (1868–1936) were introduced into Japan and became popular. The period following the Russo-Japan (1904– 1905) war saw a boom in translated Russian literature in Japan. After the Russian Revolution, Gorky became known as a figurehead of proletarian literature. His play The Lower Depths (known in Japanese as Donzoko) was performed repeatedly at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, founded in 1924 to showcase modern works. Gorky’s stories, in particular, Mother, were read in Japan as direct representations of the class struggle. See Nobori Shomu (1981) Russian Literature and Japanese Literature, in Peter Berton & Paul F. Langer (Eds) The Russian Impact on Japan: literature and social thought (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press), pp. 21–71; Peter Berton, Paul F. Langer & Roger Swearingen (1956) Japanese Training and Research in the Russian Field (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press). Yuriko mentions The Lower Depths and Mother in her diaries, and was very impressed by the film version of Mother, which she was shown at the Sovkino studio in July 1928. 8. Hirabayashi, ‘Miyamoto Yuriko’, p. 93. 9. See Jill Dobson (2016) Imagining the Modern City: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko in Moscow and London, 1927–1930, Japan Forum, doi:10.1080/09555803.2016.1171794, esp. pp. 10, 13, 15. 10. Diary, 20 January 1927, p. 152. All diary references are from Miyamoto Yuriko zenshū, Vol. 24 (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1979–1986). All translations from the Japanese are my own. 816 J. DOBSON 11. ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’ was published in Kaizō in October 1928 and appears in Miyamoto Yuriko (1979–1986) Miyamoto Yuriko zenshū (hereafter MYZ), Vol. 9, pp. 17–44. 12. Prior to the Revolution and the ascendancy of Marxism–Leninism over left-wing thought, Russian anarchism had a significant impact on Japanese intellectual life; see Sho Konishi (2013) Anarchist Modernity: cooperatism and Japanese–Russian intellectual relations in modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center). Thanks are due to Irena Hayter for drawing this work to my attention. 13. George Tyson Shea (1964) Leftwing Literature in Japan: a brief history of the proletarian literary movement (Tokyo: Hosei University Press); Yoshio Iwamoto (1974) Aspects of the Proletarian Literary Movement in Japan, in B. S. Silberman & H. D. Harootunian (Eds) Japan in Crisis: essays on Taishō democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 156–182; Noriko Mizuta Lippit (1980) Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature (London: Macmillan); Mats Karlsson (2008) Kurahara Korehito’s Road to Proletarian Realism, Japan Review, 20, pp. 231–273; Mats Karlsson (2011) United Front from Below: the proletarian cultural movement’s last stand, 1931–34, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 37(1), pp. 29–59. 14. Miriam Silverberg (1990) Changing Song: the Marxist manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 48. 15. In a diary entry for 9 July 1927 (p. 193), Yuriko writes that passages in Henri Barbusse’s Christ made a deep impression on her. On 26 January 1928, she records reading Rolland’s ‘Enchanted Soul’ (Diary, p. 245). Historian Michael David-Fox says of Romain Rolland, ‘Perhaps the most distinguished European intellectual friend to consistently defend Stalinism in public—and remain silent during the Purges’; Michael David-Fox (2012) Showcasing the Great Experiment. Cultural diplomacy and Western visitors to the Soviet Union 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 208. 16. Phillips, ‘Beyond Borders’, p. 57. 17. Yuasa’s quick temper is frequently mentioned; e.g. she snaps at Yuriko on her birthday (Diary, 13 February 1927, p. 159) and is cross when Yuriko goes to the cinema with another friend (25 August 1927, p. 209). On 15 August, there is a long entry on how Yuasa cannot fulfil her physically and the difference between love (which the women share) and passion (p. 202). On 19 August, Yuriko writes of her relief at being alone when Yuasa goes to Kyoto; she misses Yuasa but in her absence, Yuriko can ‘get her own feelings in order’ (p. 206). 18. Diary, 28 August 1927, p. 210. 19. In this period, Chūō kōron and Kaizō were the two major current affairs monthlies, both with circulations of around 100,000; see Gregory J. Kasza (1988) The State and Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 44. Not only did they have a reputation for being liberal-left and open to foreign ideas, they also served as significant mainstream platforms for proletarian and leftist works. Both were forced to close down in mid-1944 for failing to respond to government editorial ‘guidance’; see Jay Rubin (1983) Injurious to Public Morals: writers and the Meiji state (Seattle: University of Washington Press), pp. 262–270 and Kasza, The State and Mass Media, pp. 229–231. 20. In the immediate post-war period, the communists gaoled under the right-wing militarist government, including Miyamoto Kenji, were released, and trade union and left-wing political activity flourished. From 1947, the U.S.-dominated Occupation authorities rolled back many of these new political freedoms in favour of U.S. cold war priorities; the so-called ‘Reverse Course’. See Elise Tipton (2008) Modern Japan: a social and political history (London: Routledge). For the reorganisation (and re-factionalisation) of the PLM in the post-war period, see Donald Keene (1998) Dawn to the West: Japanese literature of the modern era. Fiction (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). 21. The standard descriptions of modernity, a much debated concept, encompass ‘the complex constellation of socioeconomic phenomena which originated in the context of Western development but which have since manifested themselves around the globe in various forms: scientific and technological innovation, the industrialisation of production, rapid urbanisation, an ever-expanding capitalist market, [and] the development of nation states’; WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 817 see Rita Felski (1995) The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 13. In the newly forged Soviet Union, a vast, only recently (1862) de-feudalised society, modernity was being unshackled from capitalism in a unique, anti-capitalist narrative of modernisation. As Susan Buck-Morss points out, the utopian dream of industrial modernity came in two parallel forms—socialism and capitalism—although in the post-1989 world, the hope embodied by socialism in the early twentieth century is usually overlooked. Susan BuckMorss (2000) Dreamworld and Catastrophe: the passing of mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Thanks are due to Irena Hayter for drawing this work to my attention. The Meiji era, named after the emperor, ran from 1868 to 1912. Prior to the opening of Japan to the West and the ‘restoration’ of the emperor in 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate had ruled the country from 1600, with the emperor relegated to a ceremonial role. Vera Mackie (2005) Embodied Subjects: feminism in imperial Japan, in H. Tomida & G. Daniels (Eds) Japanese Women: emerging from subservience, 1868–1945 (Women in Japanese History) (Folkestone: Global Oriental), pp. 95–118. Vera Mackie (2003) Feminism in Modern Japan: citizenship, embodiment and sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 5–6. Ibid., pp. 6, 22. Sharon L. Sievers (1983) Flowers in Salt: the beginnings of feminist consciousness in modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press); Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan. For example, the 1890 Law on Assembly and Political Association (Shūkai Oyobi Seiha Hō) and Article 5 of the 1900 Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hō). Angela Coutts (2006) Gender and Literary Production in Modern Japan: the role of femalerun journals in promoting writing by women during the interwar years, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32(1), pp. 167–196; Angela Coutts (2013) How Do We Write a Revolution? Debating the masses and the vanguard in the literary reviews of Nyonin geijutsu, Japan Forum, 25(3), pp. 362–378; Sarah Frederick (2006) Turning Pages: reading and writing women’s magazines in interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Vera Mackie (1997) Creating Socialist Women in Japan: gender, labour and activism, 1900– 1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 97–99. Ibid., pp. 104, 141. Nyonin geijutsu ran from 1928 to 1932. Fujin sensen was published by the Musan Fujin Geijutsu Renmei (Proletarian Women’s Art League) and appeared from March 1930 to June 1931. Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, pp. 158–159. Sharon H. Nolte & Sally Ann Hastings (1991) The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women 1890– 1910, in G. L. Bernstein (Ed.) Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 155; Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, pp. 5–6. Suzuki, Becoming Modern Women, pp. 6–7. Joan E. Ericson (1997) Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and modern Japanese women’s literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), pp. 39–41; Jan Bardsley (2007) The Bluestockings of Japan: new woman essays and fiction from Seitō, 1911–1916 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan); Dina Lowy (2007) The Japanese New Woman: images of gender and modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Barbara Sato (2003) The New Japanese Woman: modernity, media, and women in interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Miriam Silverberg (1991) The Modern Girl as Militant, in G. Bernstein (Ed.) Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 239–266; Vera Mackie (2000) Modern Selves and Modern Spaces. An overview, in E. K. Tipton & J. Clark (Eds) Being Modern in Japan. Culture and society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), pp. 185–199. Hitomi Sawabe (1990) Yuriko, dasuvidāniya: Yuasa Yoshiko no seishun (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū), p. 204. 818 J. DOBSON 39. Hiroko Kondo (2002) Shigeharu Yuriko oboegaki: akogare to nigasa (Tokyo: Shakaihyōronsha), p. 234. 40. Diary, 10 April 1929, p. 400. 41. For example, Hiroko Iwabuchi (1996) Miyamoto Yuriko: kazoku, seiji, soshite feminizumu (Tokyo: Kanrin shobō); Kondo, Shigeharu Yuriko oboegaki. 42. Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (1978) Women in Soviet Society: equality, development and social change (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 54–61. 43. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, pp. 56–57; Sato, The New Japanese Woman, pp. 23–25; William Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck & Arthur E. Tiedemann (2005) Sources of Japanese Tradition. Vol. 2, 1600 to 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 498. 44. See Sheila Fitzpatrick (2008) Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union: the view from the Soviet side, in Sheila Fitzpatrick & C. Rasmussen (Eds) Political Tourists. Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press); David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment. Intourist was responsible for ordinary tourists. In the late 1920s, VOKS hosted about 1000 visitors a year; by the mid-1930s, this had risen to 1500; Fitzpatrick, ‘Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union’, p. 3. 45. Diary, 8 March 1930, p. 495. 46. Ibid., 21 April 1930, pp. 507–508. 47. Ibid., 24 April 1930, p. 509. 48. Ibid., 23 May 1930, pp. 520–521. 49. Ibid., 28–29 May 1930, pp. 524–525. 50. Ibid., 2 June 1930, p. 528. 51. Ibid., 9 July 1930, p. 543. 52. Ibid., 12 October 1930, p. 568. 53. Ibid., 13 October 1930, p. 569. 54. Miyamoto, ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’, p. 23. 55. Paul Hollander (1981) Political Pilgrims: travels of Western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press); David Caute (1988) The Fellow-Travellers: intellectual friends of communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press); David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment; Fitzpatrick & Rasmussen, Political Tourists; Ludmila Stern (2007) Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union 1920–40. From Red Square to the Left Bank (New York: Routledge). 56. John McNair (2008) Comrade Katya and Jeff Sparrow (2008) Guido Baracchi, Betty Roland and the Soviet Union, both in Sheila Fitzpatrick & C. Rasmussen (Eds) (2008) Political Tourists. Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). 57. ‘Red Flag Over Smolny’ was first published in Osaka mainichi shinbun in January 1931 and appears in MYZ, Vol. 9, pp. 152–191. 58. ‘Children’s Moscow’ was published originally in the October 1930 issue of Kaizō and appears in MYZ, Vol. 9, pp. 89–144. 59. Fitzpatrick, ‘Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union’, p. 17. 60. Ros Pesman (2008) ‘Red Virtue’. Ella Winter and the Soviet Union, in Fitzpatrick & Rasmussen, Political Tourists, pp. 102–121. 61. Fitzpatrick, ‘Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union’, p. 17. 62. ‘Record of Moscow Impressions’, p. 44. 63. For a detailed analysis of how Yuriko represented her experience of Moscow and London, two quintessentially ‘modern’ but ideologically opposed cities, see Dobson, ‘Imagining the Modern City’. 64. Edward Fowler (1988) The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press); Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1996) Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as literary genre and socio-cultural phenomenon (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University); Sharalyn Orbaugh (2003) Naturalism and the Emergence of the Shishōsetsu (Personal Novel), in Joshua Mostow (Ed.) The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (New York: WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 819 Columbia University Press), pp. 137–140; Tomi Suzuki (1996) Narrating the Self: fictions of Japanese modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Merely fabricated tales were traditionally looked down upon; hence critic Kume Masao’s (1891–1952) famous dismissal of Madame Bovary and War and Peace as mere ‘popular fiction’; Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 511; Seiji M. Lippit (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 8. Suzuki, Narrating the Self. Hirabayashi, Miyamoto Yuriko, pp. 110, 114. Iwabuchi, Miyamoto Yuriko, p. 235; Kenji Miyamoto (1976) Dōhyō no sekai, in Takiji Yuriko Kenkyūkai (Ed.) Miyamoto Yuriko. Sakuhin to shōgai (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha), p. 324. Katayama Sen (1859–1933), a founding leader of the Japanese Communist Party in 1922, left Japan in 1914 after being imprisoned for his involvement in the 1911–1912 Tokyo streetcar strike and spent the last years of his life in Soviet Russia working for the Comintern. See Robert Scalapino (1967) The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 6; also https://www.marxists.org/archive/katayama/1918/labor_ movement/ch07.htm (accessed 17 November 2014). Yuasa Yoshiko (2003) Mosukuwa de sodatta Yuriko. Kanojo no gaman tsuyosa, in Miyamoto Yuriko zenshū (2000–2004 edn), Vol. 27, geppō 27 (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha), p. 7. Yuasa’s own records of her time in the Soviet Union are very sparse. The letters she sent Yuriko during their separation in 1928 and a brief diary have been edited and published by Ariko Kurosawa (2008) Miyamoto Yuriko to Yuasa Yoshiko: ōfuku shokan (Tokyo: Kanrin shobō). Even after Yuriko’s negative fictional portrayal of her, Yuasa never published her own account of their relationship—although later in life she spoke to women who wrote on her behalf; see Sawabe, Yuriko, dasuvidāniya and Jakuchō Setouchi (1997) Kokō no hito (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō). See Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson (2010) Reading Autobiography. A guide for interpreting life narratives, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press), p. 207. Signposts, Vol. 1, pp. 282–288. All references to Signposts are from Yuriko Miyamoto (1994) Dōhyō (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha) (3 vols). Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., pp. 291–292. Ibid., p. 292. Ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 294. Signposts, Vol. 2, pp. 106–110. Natasha appears under the name ‘Tanya’ in ‘Children’s Moscow’, which contains a lengthy description of the maternal benefits and protections offered by the Soviet Union. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 253. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 455–456. It remained illegal in other territories of the former Russian Empire. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, p. 87. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., pp. 112–113. 820 J. DOBSON 95. Yuriko’s repeated use of the word ‘nature/natural’ (shizen) in Signposts to affirm a male-centred society and heterosexual relationships, and the difference between the sexes, is the subject of a study by Harumi Ōkawa (2001) Dōhyō. Haijo suru ‘shizen’, in H. Iwabuchi, S. Kitada & K. Numazawa (Eds.) Miyamoto Yuriko no jikū (Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō), pp. 276–292. 96. In her analysis of letters between Yuriko and Yoshiko, Ōgata uncovers a relationship that was retrospectively ‘erased and warped’ in Signposts and the preceding novel in the Nobuko series, Futatsu no niwa (Two Gardens); see Akiko Ōgata (2006) Miyamoto Yuriko no tegami. Yuriko to Yuasa Yoshiko, Special issue of Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō: Miyamoto Yuriko no atarashisa, April, pp. 188–198. 97. Signposts, Vol. 3, p. 340. 98. Ibid., pp. 304–308. 99. Ibid., p. 305. 100. Ibid., p. 307. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., Vol. 3. 103. Ibid., pp. 311–312. 104. Ibid., p. 340. 105. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 35. 106. Ibid., pp. 39–40. 107. Ibid., p. 51. 108. Ibid., pp. 52–53. 109. Ibid., p. 54. 110. Ibid., pp. 60–61. 111. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 449–451. 112. Philippe Lejeune (2009) On Diary, J. D. Popkin & J. Rak (Eds), K. Durnin (Trans.) (Honolulu: Published for the Biographical Research Center by the University of Hawai’i Press). 113. The diaries of the iconic female Meiji-era writer, Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), were modelled on the classical Heian-era women’s diaries and published posthumously. 114. Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951) made her debut with a racy fictionalised diary, Hōrōki (Diary of a Vagabond), serialised in Nyonin geijutsu from October 1928 to October 1930. Hayashi presented a female self who was a tough, resilient denizen of the Tokyo shitamachi, living off her wits, physically mobile, moving continually between low-paid jobs, shabby lodgings and shabby men, sometimes despairing but fundamentally optimistic. The novelty of this vibrant, lower-class, female voice made Hōrōki a bestseller. Hayashi rewrote sections in sequels and new editions, treating her ostensible life story as a mutable fictional text rather than as fixed historical/autobiographical fact. See Ericson, Be a Woman, p. 63. 115. Marjorie Dryburgh (2013) The Fugitive Self: writing Zheng Xiaoxu, 1882–1938, in Marjorie Dryburgh & Sarah Dauncey (Eds) Writing Lives in China, 1600–2010. Histories of the elusive self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 110. 116. Diary, 1 April 1929, p. 375; 2 April, p. 383. 117. Ibid., 19 November 1928, p. 324. 118. Signposts, Vol. 1, pp. 241–242. 119. For example, Noriko Mizuta Lippit (1978) Literature, Ideology and Women’s Happiness: autobiographical novels of Miyamoto Yuriko, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 10(2), p. 5; Eileen Mikals-Adachi (1997) Miyamoto Yuriko, in V. C. Gessel (Ed.) Japanese Fiction Writers, 1868–1945 (Detroit: Gale Research), p. 120. 120. Diary, 15 August 1927, p. 203. 121. ‘Beko’ is a northern Japanese (Tōhoku) term for ‘cow’; see Kurosawa, Miyamoto Yuriko to Yuasa Yoshiko, p. 3. Yuriko often stayed at her grandparents’ estate near Koriyama city, in Fukushima. 122. Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes the chronic housing shortage caused by the huge population increase in Moscow (from 2 million to 3.6 million in 1926–1933). In 1930, average living space per head in Moscow was 5.5 square metres. This was the era of the kommunalka, the communal apartments set up in residential buildings seized by the state after the WOMEN’S HISTORY REVIEW 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 821 revolution, in which one family lived in one room and shared all other facilities, immensely stressful conditions in which privacy was impossible. Sheila Fitzpatrick (1999) Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary life in extraordinary times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 41–42, 46–49. Diary, 13 January 1928, p. 242. Ibid., 6 May 1928, p. 271. Ibid., 14 April 1929, pp. 405–406. Iwabuchi, Miyamoto Yuriko, pp. 298–326. Diary, 7 May 1930, pp. 514–515. Ibid., 22 June 1930, p. 537. Ericson, Be a Woman, p. 5. Signposts, Vol. 2, pp. 248–250, 202–204. See Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, p. 222, n. 14; Ronald P. Loftus (2004) Telling Lives: women’s self-writing in modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), pp. 248–249. Acknowledgements This research was completed during doctoral studies at the University of Sheffield, U.K. I am indebted to Professor Gaye Rowley and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Funding This work was supported by a faculty scholarship and a one-year Japan Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship taken up at Waseda University, Tokyo. A JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship, also taken up at Waseda, enabled the writing of this article. Notes on contributor Jill Dobson completed her PhD on the Soviet and European travels of Miyamoto Yuriko at the University of Sheffield in 2014. As a JSPS postdoctoral researcher at Waseda University, Tokyo, she continued her work on Japanese women travellers in Europe in the Taishō-prewar Shōwa period. Her research interests also include modernity and the city.