Gender, Sexuality and Generation in Ariyoshi Sawako's Ki no Kawa

Ariyoshi Sawako was a prolific writer in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Aging is a pervasive theme in Ariyoshi‘s corpus, with her first published narrative depicting the fraught relationship between a daughter and her elderly master samisen-player father. Ariyoshi was, furthermore, the author of Kôkotsu no hito (1972, The Twilight Years), the blockbuster account of a woman caring for a father-in-law stricken with dementia. This work forced post-war readers to confront aging as a function of the Japanese economic miracle. This presentation examines issues of gender and sexuality in Ariyoshi‘s first long novel, Ki no kawa (1959, The River Ki). Narrating the lives of three generations of women from Wakayama, Ki no kawa closely examines the relationships between grandmothers, mothers, daughters and granddaughters. Although received by the male-dominated literary community of the time as populist and lightweight, the novel, in fact, provides a complex and non-essentialist account of the diverse lives of aging women in modern Japan. Particular attention will be given to the multiplicity of Ariyoshi‘s representations of women of age in the novel and the manner in which, although strongly aware of the restrictions placed upon them, they quietly subvert hegemonic norms as opportunities arise.