Abstract
Nagai Michiko and Ariyoshi Sawako Rewrite the Taikō Susan Westhafer Furukawa (bio) Of the three men who helped unify Japan at the end of the sixteenth century—Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616)—Hideyoshi has been the most widely reimagined in popular literature.1 As Hideyoshi rose through the ranks and took control of the realm, he put into practice many innovative policies that would become the framework for the Tokugawa government (1603–1867) and have long-lasting impact on Japan. At the same time, however, during the final decade of his life and political career, Hideyoshi made a series of choices that tarnished his legacy. Among these were two unsuccessful invasions of the Korean peninsula in 1592 and 1597, and the forced suicides of his adviser Sen no Rikyu in 1591 and of his nephew and heir Hidetsugu in 1595. Hideyoshi died in 1598, having failed to conquer Korea or establish a government stable enough to ensure his young son Hideyori's rise to power. Yet these failures do not seem to have dampened interest in Hideyoshi's legacy. During the first half of the twentieth century, this last decade of Hideyoshi's life and career was all but absent from popular narratives about him. Early postwar fictionalized renderings of him—by authors such as Yoshikawa Eiji, Shiba Ryōtarō, and Kasahara [End Page 59] Ryōzō—focus on his ingenuity and perseverance and describe him as an ideal example of loyalty, hard work, and strong leadership.2 It is not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that we begin to see chips in the veneer of this legacy. Starting with Tsutsui Yasutaka (Furukawa 2015), the possibility of a nonheroic Hideyoshi emerges, as authors begin to more clearly depict the misjudgments and ruthlessness of his later years. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, fictional accounts written by well-known women authors openly contest mainstream narratives generated by male authors, which have focused on Hideyoshi's ability to persuade people, his prowess in battle, and his rapid rise to success while underplaying his failures, and which insist that figures like Hideyoshi can be read as Japanese heroes and/or the foundation of the Japanese state. In particular, two late 1960s novels by the historical fiction writers Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–84) and Nagai Michiko (b. 1925) offered readers stories that challenge the construction of patriarchal histories, reflecting a growing resistance to the apotheosis of flawed men like Hideyoshi. At the time, Japanese women were seeking to skillfully negotiate the intersections of their increasingly complicated identities as women, wives, and mothers who were expected to be self-sufficient and hard-working subjects in a nation intent on economic ascendancy. Both Ariyoshi's Okuni of Izumo (Izumo no Okuni, serialized 1967–69) and Nagai's The Monarch's Wife: Hideyoshi's Wife Onene (Ōja no tsuma: Hideyoshi no tsuma Onene, serialized 1969-70) created fiction that deconstructed heroic interpretations of the past while simultaneously resisting the limiting notions of Japanese womanhood that result from such interpretations. The Monarch's Wife, which appeared in 310 installments in regional newspapers such as Sanyō Shinbun and Saitama Shinbun from December 1969 until October 1970 and was first published as a novel by Kōdansha in 1971, tells the story of the rise and fall of the Toyotomi clan from the perspective of Hideyoshi's primary wife Onene (1546-1624). Okuni of Izumo, serialized in Ladies' Review (Fujin kōron) beginning in 1967 and published in a three-volume set by Chūōkōronsha between 1969 and 1972, depicts the life and times of Izumo no Okuni (b. ca. 1571), an itinerant female performer who is considered to be the founder of kabuki.3 By portraying the difficulties endured by the women in Hideyoshi's immediate circle as well as those in his realm, and by focusing on the constraints placed on these characters vis-à-vis their position in the patriarchal social structure, these novels by Ariyoshi and Nagai provide a feminist critique of the structures that put figures such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi in positions of power. The two novels explore the ways in which women sought to...