Rape as a theme in contemporary Japanese women's literature

Rape represents a re-occurring theme within Japanese women’s literature. Even the earliest works created by Japanese women tell of rape of women, although over time their stories have been usurped and reinterpreted as tales of seduction and eroticism. While the latter is the product of an androcentric worldview that shapes our perception of rape of women to this day, it has not been free of criticism or counter-concepts from Japanese women writers. Since the 1980s, as the discussion about sexual violence against women set off in Japan, Japanese women authors have been using their literary works to challenge those androcentric conceptualizations of rape and raped women by producing texts from a female rape survivor’s perspective. In doing so, they’ve been not only criticizing the often romanticized and eroticized depictions of raped women within literature by male authors, they’ve also been contributing to breaking the taboo surrounding the rape of women in mundane life, providing insight into what it means for a woman to experience and survive something as traumatizing as rape and how rape fundamentally affects their lives.
This presentation takes a close look at selected works written by contemporary Japanese women writers since the 1980s centring around the experience of rape by a female character within the story. It discusses how rape is conceptualized within the selected stories, how the rape trauma as such is depicted and how the diegetic surroundings respond to the rape of the female character. The discussed works will be compared with each other to demonstrate as to what extent there have been changes regarding how raped women are perceived within the diegetic Japanese society.