An Experiment in Gendered Reading: Enchi Fumiko's "A Bond

for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings"

Junko Umemoto

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 47, Number 3, 2010, pp. 369-378

(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cls.2010.0022

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/398716

[ Access provided at 23 Aug 2022 09:45 GMT from McGill University Libraries ]
 an experiment in gendered reading:
enchi fumiko’s “a bond for two lifetimes—gleanings”

Junko Umemoto
Japanese women writers entered the canon of world literature about a
decade ago, when Anglo-American critics, who had long been seeking to
recover a feminine tradition of literature, extended their project to Japanese
women’s literature and began treating them from a gender studies point of
view. The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing
(1996), a seminal volume that emerged from a 1993 Rutgers conference on
Japanese women writers, consists of essays anchored in the idea of gendered
reading, and it proves how theories derived from Western discursive practice
can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of Japanese women’s writing—and,
conversely, shows how Japanese women’s writing can make a contribution
to discussions of world literature by women writers.1
Enchi Fumiko (1905–86) is one of the Japanese women writers analyzed
in the Rutgers conference volume. Her work stretches from the 1936 novel
散文恋愛 (Sambun ren’ai) [Her Love Diary] to an autobiographical trilogy
finished in 1968 and includes the 1957 and 1958 novels 女坂 (Onnazaka)
(translated as The Waiting Years) and 女面 (Onnamen) (translated as Masks).
Enchi did not reject Japanese traditional values, but she did try to anatomize
women’s bodies in terms that suggested sensuality and mystery. Her writings
and thought were the forerunners of the modern feminist writers who
described the sensual and physiological aspects of women. She skillfully
treats sensitive and psychological problems derived from physical troubles,
thereby challenging the old taboo of directly describing the female body. In
so doing, she realized her mission as a female writer in the postwar period.
The most distinctive features of feminist writing are seen in Enchi’s
works relating to the sexuality of middle-aged women. Why did Enchi focus

comparative literature studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2010.

Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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on middle-aged women? Many scholars believe that she was influenced

strongly by the loss of her womb to cancer.
二世の縁 拾遺 (“Nise no en—Shui”) [“A Bond for Two Lifetimes—
Gleanings”], published in 1957, is only a short novel, but it is one of Enchi’s
most representative works in the way it reproduces Japanese classics from
the Edo period (as reinterpreted by her).2 In addition, no other work more
clearly depicts Enchi’s obsession with female organs than this one. It includes
the unusual expression “shikyu ga dokiri to natta” (“My very womb cried out
in longing” in Phyllis Birnbaum’s translation), which Doris Bargen, one of
the contributors to the Rutgers conference, among other scholars, was taken
with.3 Enchi makes the heroine realize her sexuality through the dull pain
of her womb. It is a challenging description that shocks readers, underscor-
ing as it does the tenacity of Enchi’s consciousness as a woman. Enchi’s
obsession with her lost womb is heightened by her use of onomatopoeia:
“dokiri” indicates a throbbing sound (Birnbaum’s English translation does
not replicate the onomatopoeia). Enchi thus spoke out using the female parts
of the body as a symbol of “womanliness” and might be fairly described as
a warrior armed with female consciousness.
One of the most distinctive features of Enchi’s literature is her
reinterpretation of the Japanese classics. Enchi, the only daughter of a
famous linguist and professor at Tokyo Imperial University, was well
versed in Japanese classics, from the 源氏物語 (Genji monogatari) [Tale of
Genji] to the comic literature of the late Edo period (1600–1867). She was
introduced to them in her teenage years, and they color and enrich her
works, endowing them with the elusive and eerie beauty that many of the
classic Japanese tales have.
Knowledge of classic Japanese literature is helpful to understand-
ing the female protagonists Enchi created. For example, the behavior of
Mieko, the protagonist of Masks, is never directly explained and can be
inscrutable. Mieko uses her daughter-in-law and her own daughter, as well as
the two men in love with her daughter-in-law, to wreak vengeance on her
husband for betraying her in the early years of her marriage. Obviously,
Mieko has spent many years plotting her revenge, which can be explained
as the curse of an evil spirit, born of the abnormal passion of a noble widow
with a broken heart from the Tale of Genji. Enchi depicts a woman who has
changed into an evil spirit unconsciously. After her beloved son’s death, her
hidden passion, which had been long repressed as she played the role of a
good wife and wise mother, emerges and rages out of control.

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 AN EXPERIMENT IN GENDERED READING 371

Juliet Carpenter, the translator of Masks, describes its leitmotifs as

follows:

The novel is filled with allusions to spirit possession in the Tale

of Genji, shamanism, and the occult in general, as well as to noh
drama and noh masks (the masks of the title are noh masks of female
characters). It deals with interwoven themes of love and hate,
bereavement, betrayal, revenge, sacrifice, and retribution.4

Carpenter continues:

The fulfillment of Mieko’s desire is accomplished at great cost,

culminating in the loss of Yasuko’s [Mieko’s daughter-in-law’s]
freedom and, above all, the death of Harume [Mieko’s handicapped
daughter]. By aborting the child, Mieko could have saved Harume.
But she deliberately refused to do so, thus sacrificing her own living
child on the altar of revenge.5

Carpenter notes that according to Mishima Yukio, Enchi was possessed

of both a “moral side and a deeply immoral side” and that Enchi agreed
with Mishima’s assessment. However, her treatment of the protagonist of
Masks can be only considered immoral if we fail to take into account her
circumstances. What is special about Enchi is that she dared to bring the
dark part of a woman’s heart into the light. She understood it was time
that women were delivered not only from physical repression but from the
psychological yokes that had long tormented them at a subconscious level.
Unlike the protagonist of Masks, who is far from the traditional idea
of a Japanese wife, the heroine of The Waiting Years, modeled on Enchi’s
grandmother, is patient and tolerant, dedicating her life to her arrogant and
ruthless husband, who has had many mistresses. This work is believed to
have been influenced by the famous ghost story 四谷怪談 (Yotsuya kwaidan)
from the Edo period, in which the body of the murdered heroine roped to
a wooden board was thrown into the river by her husband. In The Waiting
Years, the heroine, who is on her death bed, begs her husband to throw
her body into the river. Her final wish was first and foremost a challenge to
her husband, who had long tormented her with his infidelities. That is why
her final cry sounds so harsh and threatening. The English title, The Waiting
Years, is quite different from the literal translation of onnazaka, meaning

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 372 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

“ups and downs of her life,” but nevertheless the title rather effectively
conveys to Western readers that the heroine was forced to bear her burden for
a long time. At the same time, “a waiting woman” is one of the most repre-
sentative images of the patience demanded of a traditional Japanese woman.
Enchi first introduces this idea of female passion in “Gleanings,”
which is realized by the widowed heroine in the final part of the story. The
heroine had been so busy working to survive after her husband’s death during
the World War II that she had buried her passion. But when the widow
happens to enter into a trance, her passion is suddenly awakened, and at that
moment, she is delivered from the yoke of a male-dominated society. The
flush of trance acts as a lightning rod, giving focus to the heroine’s feelings
and initiating her liberation.
Like Masks, “Gleanings” is a two-layered fiction whose first-person
narrative frame is complemented by a fragment of 二世の縁 (“Nise no en”)
[“A Bond for Two Lifetimes”] from 春雨物語 (Harusame monogatari)
[Tales of Spring Rain] written by Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) in the Edo
period. In “Gleanings,” the protagonist widow, Mrs. Noritake, is earn-
ing money by transcribing “A Bond for Two Lifetimes,” which her old
teacher Professor Nunokawa is orally translating from Akinari’s original
into modern Japanese from his sick bed. “Gleanings” unfolds in two scenes.
The first scene takes place at Professor Nunokawa’s house and the second
in the rainy dark street from his house to the nearest station.
In Akinari’s work a wealthy farmer hears the sound of a bell ringing
from underground one night and decides to find out what it is. To the
villagers’ surprise, a mummified priest ringing a bell is pulled from the
ground. The villagers guess that the priest was one of those who once tried
to attain Buddhahood through self-mummification in a process called
nyuujoo (entering the state of enlightenment).6 Thanks to the villag-
ers’ kindness the failed priest, whose name is Josuke, comes back to life
and begins devouring foods. For a while the villagers revere him as the
reincarnation of a saint, but as he reveals his ordinariness, they become
disappointed with him. It is clear that the priest’s lingering attachment for
this world had caused him to ring the bell. His desire had prevented his
flesh from decaying. In the end, he starts working as a peasant and gets
married to a widow in the same village. His lust overcomes his asceticism.
Akinari’s sardonic view of Buddhism is clearly expressed in this work.
The priest is an antihero in his rebellion against nyuujoo. Many priests in
medieval Japan sacrificed themselves for the religious cause: however, the
priest in this story fails in this. The main theme is the priest’s strong obsession

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 AN EXPERIMENT IN GENDERED READING 373

with worldly matters; in particular, the story emphasizes his lust, which
enables him to survive in severe conditions for a very long time. The priest
proves to be simply an ordinary man with worldly desires.
Enchi is faithful to the story Akinari’s “A Bond for Two Lifetimes.”
While copying it out in shorthand, Mrs. Noritake has the chance to imagine
various things, including not only the author Akinari and his characters but
also Professor Nunokawa, who is translating it, and herself as his ex-student.
The work of copying “A Bond for Two Lifetimes” ultimately stimulates the
heroine’s passion, which had been repressed. Her passion is at last freed from
the constraints of her moral consciousness. Just like the priest in Akinari’s
story who recovered his libido, the heroine in Enchi’s recovers her own desire
that has been repressed since her husband’s death.
The recovery of her desire is brought on by a short trance she experiences
on her way home. She imagines she is being attacked by a man who reminds
her of the priest in “A Bond for Two Lifetimes.” The trance is nothing other
than her imagination stimulated by the story she is transcribing. Her lust
emerges from this trance. It is a very brief experience, but her trance awakens
her long-lost passion, enabling her to achieve a degree of fulfillment.
Birnbaum fully understands the sarcastic tone of Akinari’s original story
and interprets Enchi’s appropriation of it as follows:

The fragment from Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Spring Rain floats within
the spirit of a modern heroine and serves as commentary on her life.
Akinari’s tale spoofs the popular Buddhist belief that a priest could
go into a lengthy trance and later emerge physically untouched by
the ordeal. In this case, the “priest” who emerges from the trance is
hardly the pious, awe-inspiring figure of Buddhist legend. The widow
in this story reflects seriously on the priest’s reappearance because
she still longs for her husband, who might also, by some miracle,
return. For in her mind reverberates the old teaching that marriage
is a bond that extends over two reincarnations. A sentence in this
story, “My very womb cried out in longing,” caused a stir when the
work was published.7

The phrase nise no en is a pledge of fidelity or eternal love that a

couple makes to each other that is meant to hold not only in this world
but also in the next. This eternal commitment comes from the Buddhist
understanding of “life,” which stresses the eternity of the knot of a married
couple, “eternity” conceived of as a stretch of time beyond two lifetimes.

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In her exclaiming that her womb cried out in longing, the widow gives
expression to both her pining for her deceased husband and her subconscious
desire for a man.
Yoko McClain first focused scholarly attention on “Gleanings” in the
early 1980s. She describes Enchi’s story as a narrative of female sensuality that
combines realism with fantasy in an essay titled “Eroticism and the Writings
of Enchi Fumiko.”8 According to her, Enchi became more confident as a
writer after establishing herself with The Waiting Years, which imbued her
with the boldness to write more provocative works.” In The Waiting Years,
many women aside from the stoic heroine have already violated the old
feudal morality by committing adultery and seducing young men. Enchi
was interested in the eroticism of middle-aged women, and her late erotic
works were the product of the strong emotional impact of the loss of her
female organs. McClain introduces “Gleanings” as one of the works written
in this vein.
McClain, quoting the last part of “Gleanings” underscores Enchi’s
sensory descriptions of the man in such phrases as “flabby hand” and “sharp
canine tooth.” In addition, she draws attention to the effect of the description
of the atmosphere—the gloomy autumn rainfall and the bamboo grove—
which seems to symbolize the lonely widow’s mind. Within such a framework
the word “womb” is more a visceral way of describing women’s desire for
men than, say, “heart” would have been. McClain concludes with Mishima
Yukio’s remark that Enchi’s work surpassed that of the great Taishoo-era
writer Akutagawa for its sensuousness and ghastliness.9
Building on McClain’s insights, Wayne Pounds emphasizes the
metaphysical dimension of Enchi’s thinking. Pounds repeatedly quotes
McClain’s claim that Enchi treats sex in fantastic and nonrealistic terms
and that she is more interested in sexual impulse than in the act itself.10
According to Pounds, in both Masks and “Gleanings” the women characters’
sexuality finds expression through an encounter with the supernatural that
ultimately intensifies their sense of “the pathos of things,” a rough English
translation of the Japanese “mono no aware” that might be said to express
the sudden awareness of aesthetic perception.11
In addition, Pounds insists that “Enchi’s frame story alters Akinari’s
social satire to a satire of the patriarchal literary tradition.” “Neither the
Professor nor Josuke (the ex-priest),” Pounds argues, “originates anything
to add to the tradition; and even Akinari, whom the text compares to the
professor on two occasions, bases his story on a twelfth century work whose
ultimate source is the anonymous folk.” Pounds concludes that “Enchi’s
story thus suggests the patriarchal tradition to be sterile, repetitious,

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non-originative, and obsessively concerned with dominance, of which male

sexuality is one expression.”12
According to Pounds the contrast of the two energies, male death
energy and female creative energy, is highlighted in war, which he calls
“patriarchal violence.” Ultimately Pounds defines the relationship between
“Gleanings” and Masks by saying that “Gleanings” provides a commentary
on the male tradition and on women’s relation to it that makes it a satisfying
complement to the examination of women’s literary tradition—principally
Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji—in Masks. Furthermore, considering that
the vengeful female spirit of literary heritage is a male construct, Pounds
concludes that Enchi’s concern with the supernatural shows her interest in
the potential energy lying in traditionally distorted images of women and
male-female relationships.
In her “Translation and Reproduction of Enchi Fumiko’s ‘A Bond
for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings,’” Bargen discusses how Enchi reproduces
Akinari’s work from a gendered viewpoint.13 Bargen, who considers
“Gleanings” to be one of the best of all Enchi’s short stories, points out
the commonalities between “Gleanings” and “Enchantment,” which Enchi
completed just before “Gleanings.” Bargen regards “Enchantment” as a
preparatory work for “Gleanings,” which she used as a means of gauging
how far she could go in challenging a social system that assigned women
subservient or secondary roles in her writing.
Bargen evaluates the effects of translation in the work, focusing on
the degree to which Enchi transforms Akinari’s tale. By embedding his
story in the frame of “Gleanings,” Enchi draws the reader’s attention to
her appropriation of it. Enchi’s borrowing is more than an embellished
reproduction of the original, because her story makes it an “integral part
of the male-female contest.”14 Bargen uses the word “metaphysical” to
describe Enchi’s treatment of the theme of gender and sexual desire, which
echoes McClain’s and Pounds’ interpretations.15 According to Bargen, in
the process of reproducing Akinari’s work, Enchi turns a man’s story into a
woman’s story by representing her heroine as engaging in nyuujoo, a practice
that traditionally only men had access to. Enchi also turns a male author’s
story with a hero into a story with a copyist as a heroine via the sexual
comments that Professor Nunokawa makes as she transcribes, which lead
her to recollect her college days, calling up fond memories of her deceased
husband. The undermining of masculinity is further hinted at, Bargen argues,
by the fact that in the process of recitation, Professor Nunokawa takes a rest,
suggesting that his physical strength and mental creativity are compromised.
Bargen understands this interruption to reflect the weakening masculinity

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 376 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

of Professor Nunokawa. It is ironic that the heroine ends up being moved

by the ailing Professor Nunokawa, Akinari in his declining years, and the
fictional Josuke, who drops out of the priesthood.
Bargen argues that the female protagonist of “Gleanings” is a “shamaness
who, in a trance, not only recalls her husband’s dead spirit as a collective male
spirit but also controls male sexual power by infusing it with femininity.”16
“Shamaness” is defined as the opposite of a male ascetic. This understanding
of feminine power, Bargen suggests, can be seen in Mineko, the common-
law wife of Professor Nunokawa, whose nickname is “Usume no Mikoto,”
which means “goddess of the Narrow Eyes” and refers to the goddess who,
according to ancient Japanese myth, performed a rousing dance baring her
body in order to tempt the Sun goddess from the cave where she had hidden
herself and left the world in darkness.17 It is doubtful that Enchi considered
Mineko a “shaman,” as Bargen claims, but it is possible to consider a volup-
tuous “Mineko” a good match for Professor Nunokawa, who once seduced
his student—all the more because Mineko stands in a sharp contrast to the
heroine, who has almost lost her passion in the wake of her husband’s death.
Enchi was not satisfied with the male-centered value system in Japan,
which prohibits women from entering Buddhahood (enlightenment), and
her female protagonist is likewise not content with her peripheral role.
According to Bargen, Enchi incorporates two views into this story: Enchi, a
modern woman author, rewrites a classical male author’s story about an ascetic
from the perspective of the ascetic’s counterpart, the shamaness, criticizing
the notion that nyuujoo can only be practiced by men. Bargen insists that
Akinari was referring to “The Legend of Bell” in composing his own story
and that the same legend figures in Enchi’s story. Bargen suggests that the
umbrella, whose image sends the heroine into her trance, is equivalent to the
bell in Akinari’s story and concludes that the female potential for physical
reproduction corresponds to male religious enlightenment as experienced in
nyuujoo. Bargen’s interpretation seems to rest on the fact that a male’s nyuujoo
is translated as “entering a trance” by Birnbaum. Did Enchi intend to have
her story understood in this way? I still wonder whether the heroine does
indeed experience nyuujoo, even if we understand her experience in terms
of sexual rapture rather than religious enlightenment.
Bargen uses the word “trance” to refer to both the heroine’s imaginary
experiences and the male priest’s religious enlightenment in nyuujoo. She
insists that Enchi’s sentence “My very womb cried out in longing” is more
than a scandalously unabashed female affirmation of sexual lust, that it
constitutes no less than the female protagonist’s “trance-lation” (Bargen’s
pun) of nyuujoo into a female idiom. Although Bargen rejects Masao

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 AN EXPERIMENT IN GENDERED READING 377

Miyoshi’s claim that Enchi was not a feminist writer,” she does admit that
the liberation of the heroine in “Gleanings” is circumscribed: “Only in the
liminal state of her trance can the female protagonist play all the parts herself,
as if attempting to deconstruct gender binarism. When she awakens from
this illusory effort, she is frightened of losing her identity to that of ‘stray
dog.’ Nevertheless, she has opened up an alternative to male-dominated
tradition, as here defined by Kūkai’s nyūjō , Akinari’s ‘The Destiny That
Spanned Two Lifetimes,’ Japan’s traditional theater, and the contemporary
male power structure.”18
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several works have
mentioned Enchi’s “Gleanings.” One of them is Linda M. Flores’s doctoral
dissertation, “Writing of the Body: Maternal Subjectivity in the Works of
Hirabayashi Taeko, Enchi Fumiko and Oba Minako.” She argues that despite
Enchi’s emphasis on the “corporeal body,” most of Enchi’s protagonists are
not able to reproduce because of their age, their physical problems, and
other reasons. Flores argues that “Gleanings” repeatedly invokes sexual and
corporeal language. Her stress on language is meaningful.19
Enchi describes the sexuality of her character with language, and her
treatment might make the protagonist’s experience seem to be nothing but
a daydream or a hallucination instigated by her subconscious lust. However,
Enchi’s loss of her uterus is more than an imagined experience, and the
controversial “My very womb cried out in longing” both gives ”Gleanings”
a reality only a woman could fully comprehend and a quality that calls for
its being read from a gendered viewpoint.
Nihon University

Notes
1. The Rutgers conference presentations are summarized in Midori Y. McKeon, “Amerika
ni okeru Nihon josei bungaku kenkyū no dōkō,” Nichibei Josei Journal 14 (1993): 35–52.
2. Enchi Fumiko, “Nise no en—Shui,” in Sakaguchi Ango, Funabashi Seiichi, Takami Jun,
Enchi Fumiko (Tokyo: Shoogakkan, 1987), 1000–1010.
3. Enchi, “Nise no en,” 1009; Enchi Fumiko, “A Bond for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings,”
in Rabbits Crabs, Etc.: Stories by Japanese Women, trans. Phyllis Birnbaum (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1982), 25–47.
4. Juliet W. Carpenter, “Enchi Fumiko: A Writer of Tales,” Japan Quarterly 37.3
(1990): 353.
5. Carpenter, “Enchi Fumiko,” 353.
6. Nyuujoo was a popular practice observed by Buddhist saints in which they waited for
their deaths by sitting in their caskets while meditating. Birnbaum’s translation reads: “This
is what is called ‘entering a trance,’ which is one of the ways priests die, as Buddhism teaches”
(Enchi, “Gleanings,” 31).
7. Enchi, “Gleanings,” 25–26.

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8. Yoko McClain, “Eroticism and Writings of Enchi Fumiko,” Journal of the Association of
Teachers of Japanese 15.1 (1980): 32–46.
9. McClain, “Eroticism and Writings of Enchi Fumiko,” 37–38. Mishima considered this
work as rather pedantic and concluded that the image of Josuke is projected onto that of the
female protagonist. See Yukio Mishima, Enchi Fumiko (Tokyo: Kawade Shobou Shinsha, 1964).
10. Wayne Pounds, “Enchi Fumiko and the Hidden Energy of the Supernatural,” Journal
of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 24.2 (1990): 167–83.
11. Pounds, “Enchi Fumiko and the Hidden Energy of the Supernatural,” 177.
12. Pounds, “Enchi Fumiko and the Hidden Energy of the Supernatural,” 178.
13. Doris G. Bargen, “Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumiko’s ‘A Bond
for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings,’” in The Women’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese
Women’s Writing, ed. Paul G. Schalow and Janet A. Walker (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 165–204.
14. Bargen, “Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumiko’s ‘A Bond for Two
Lifetimes—Gleanings,’” 169.
15. Bargen, “Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumiko’s ‘A Bond for Two
Lifetimes—Gleanings,’” 174.
16. Bargen, “Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumiko’s ‘A Bond for Two
Lifetimes—Gleanings,’” 189.
17. Enchi, “Gleanings,” 34.
18. Bargen, “Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumiko’s ‘A Bond for Two
Lifetimes—Gleanings,’” 193.
19. Linda Marie Flores, “Writing the Body: Maternal Subjectivity in the Works of
Hirabayashi Taiko, Enchi Fumiko, and Oba Minako” (PhD diss., University of California,
Los Angeles, 2005), 127–32.

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