Yoshiaki Yamamoto

"Enbon" books, cheap editions sold at the price of one yen, had a great popularity during the TaishoPeriod. Because of their availability, those books reached a wider range of readership and economically benefited writers with large royalties. But, on the other hand, they marginalized more traditional literary works and magazines. As a result, in the midst of the continuing depression of the day, many publishers suffered from a business slump and many writers had economic difficulties. Naturally younger writers among them were directly damaged. In this essay, focusing on the relation between literature and the marketplace, I will argue about the commercialization of literature between the Taisho and the early Showa Periods.

In Junan-sha, Osamu Ema represented the heroine Reiko as a "comfort woman" who tries to satisfy every need of her lover-artist. Dispite such banal stereotyping, the contemporary critics such as Tetsuro Watsuji and Kazuo Hirotsu praised her image and found the "ideal of female beauty" in it. Thus Junan-sha, one of the most popular novels at that time, played the ideological function of reproducing male-centered images of woman. In this essay, I will make clear how the gender politics of the mid-Taisho Period was reflected in the text, while reading other male texts (for example, Naoya Siga's novels) in this very context.