These days when we speak of modern Japanese women's literature in the West a fairly clear picture comes to mind. This area of study has since the 1980's gained continual ground as it has defined its canon and its critical approach in the face of preceding decades of silence or at best random cultural foot notes devoted to truly seminal female writers. This trend in Japanese studies has mirrored a similar process of recuperation of various women's writing from other literatures as well. As feminist practices have become more commonplace throughout the literary academia it has become quite politically incorrect if not outright unacceptable to disregard women's writing when looking at a nation's literature. But what are the political implications of conceptualizing a text as 'women's writing'? What are the constraints imposed on a text through the very process of critically defining it through a specific vocabulary? In the case of Japanese women's literature it is undeniable that the thrust of literary criticism has been necessary for developing this heretofore absent space of forum for these women's texts. However, because this process was necessarily a political one in that it had to react against patriarchal trends in literary criticism, it has been largely informed by a pervasively political bent. The direction of criticism, which is based on interpretations that show women's texts and subtexts as resisting dominant patriarchal discourses, also indirectly marginalizes the texts themselves. I suggest that in order to go beyond this necessary but ultimately limiting category of discourse we need to open up the way we read and discuss Japanese women's literature. I will briefly look at the critical reception of Kurahashi Yumiko to illustrate my point.