Japan's modernization in the early part of the twentieth century grappled with issues of old versus new as well as East versus West. One of the most contentious sites of modernization was the "woman problem." What does this newly modernized nation do with its women, especially as cultural and geographic borders became permeable to modern western influences? The forms of literature we will address in this panel - stories about children, Japanese-American immigrants, and detective fiction in which the focus is the dismembered female body - all problematize Japan's modernity by articulating the perspectives of people who for various reasons did not fit into Japan's "modern" puzzle.
Joan Ericson examines the gendered view of nostalgia and modernization as experienced by women through stories for children. Sari Kawana's paper "A Murder is Advertised" examines the literal "de- construction" of the Modern Girl's body in Japanese detective fiction. In her paper, Anne Sokolsky's argues that labeling Tamura's Toshiko as a New Woman erases her socialist writing of the 1930s that deals with gender and race issues. Thus these papers reconsider genres and writers who articulate new permutations to Japan's modernization process.