Digging the Depths of Silence: Fumiko Enchi and the Female Experience in Postwar Japan, 1950s-1970s

Digging the Depths of Silence: Fumiko Enchi and the Female Experience in Postwar Japan, 1950s-1970s
The literature of Fumiko Enchi quietly but insistently unearths the oppression and silence of women that has persisted at the feet of postwar Japan, despite its proclamations of democracy and liberation. From a perspective that straddles the prewar and postwar periods, she continues to look at the distortions that modern Japan itself has contained.

Although the defeat of the war led to the legal rejection of the patriarchal system and the establishment of gender equality as a principle, in the society of the 1950s, women still played a subordinate role in the family, sexuality, and the body. While literature that spoke of war was foregrounded, issues of domestic oppression, aging, and desire were excluded from the public discourse. Enchi turned his attention to this unspoken realm.

Avoiding direct social criticism, she depicted women's resentments and repressed emotions through classics such as The Tale of Genji and the mythological imagination. The silence that emerges is shown not as the character of an individual but as a structure formed in history.

During the period of rapid economic growth, the family is idealized as a symbol of happiness, but Enchi depicted the distortion behind this through aging, illness, and sexual decline. The quiet strength of Enchi Fumiko's literature lies in the fact that she continues to look at the oppression that remains even after liberation has been achieved.