Women's History Review
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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),
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.