Hitomi Kanehara, 21, sits on the edge of a leather sofa in a Tokyo hotel, long legs evident in a pleated schoolgirlish skirt. Sheeny hair frames a startlingly pretty, childish face and an expression of sweet innocence. You could be excused, then, for viewing Kanehara as the embodiment of all those enduring male fantasies of what makes the ideal Japanese woman: naive submissiveness, ornate femininity and girlish sexuality.
It is a view that alters rapidly when you read Kanehara's first novel, Snakes and Earrings, a bestseller in her native Japan that has shocked the country with its violent and graphic opposition to the traditional cultural expectations of how Japanese women should be.
Kanehara is part of a burgeoning subculture of contemporary women expressing the same loud, emphatic message through fashion, graphics, comics, subversive graffiti, photography and fiction. It underscores a growing generational divide, a significant shift in values and attitudes.
Snakes and Earrings, which won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in Japan, is a visceral, gut-churning tale about Lui, a young, beautiful woman whose desire for ever more extreme body piercing, tattoos and violent masochistic sex leads her on a picaresque descent into a deadly, nihilistic world.
Kanehara describes it as the book she had to write. That urge was clearly strengthened by her own experience of being a troubled outsider: she was anorexic and a self-cutter in junior school, then dropped out of class altogether at 11 because, she says, "I had more important ways to use the time."
This caused what would seem an enduring conflict with her mother, whose comment on her novel, she says, was to say there was too much sex.
"Everyone who is young in the current Japan has a degree of despair," Kanehara says. "I have felt at a mental level that there was no hope. But I don't see myself speaking for my generation. I'm just writing what I feel."
Her aim is to write about how it feels to be a young, urban woman of her generation. The point about her characters, she says, is that they make choices for themselves, as she does, deciding how they want to live, rather than conforming. "Writing about sex graphically and disturbingly was an essential part of that."
But why are young women feeling the need to rebel in a way that is so thoroughly antithetical to the way Japanese women are perceived? Forty-year-old Mayka, a Tokyo-born woman who left Japan when she was 19 to go and live in England, has thought about this a good deal as she has two teenage daughters herself.
"I left Japan because I saw that a creative freedom of choice was not possible in my country, because my parents had very traditional expectations for me. But I think what is happening now is more extreme," she says. "It's a profound questioning of the way Japanese society sees and treats women. They are absolutely expected to be answerable to what men want, to marry, have children, and accept the fact that a lot of men will have an intimate life outside the home."
post-boom generation
But this generation is living after the economic boom, explains Mayka. During that time of prosperity, western material flooded Japan, the very liberated and libertine lifestyles of Europe and America influenced the young, and suddenly they saw that there were other ways of being, but without always understanding quite what they meant.
Japan does not have a strong religious or spiritual belief system to help guide and shape the way the young grow up, she says.
"It doesn't surprise me that there are a lot of them who are looking for kicks, but who experience a very frightened nihilism as well because, in a way, they are turning their backs on what has held Japanese society together for centuries without knowing what they want to replace it with," she says.
In fact, in-your-face sexuality has surely been a hallmark of female expression for decades. Japanese journalist Yo Yahata has railed against this subculture in Sekai magazine. Neo-masochism defines the young, he says, and picks on the "number one fashion among Japanese youth," Goth-Loli, which, as the name suggests, is a combination of the Gothic and the Lolita look, as symbolising "something we call the tendency towards the dark".
Youth fashion has, certainly, expressed the challenge to convention and tradition as effectively as anything, going through several incarnations. In the 1980s the dominant style was kawaii, meaning cute and essentially childlike, adorable, innocent and vulnerable. There seemed to be little subversive about it in its early saccharine form.
But, according to journalist Sharon Kinsella, "It evolved to a more humorous, kitsch and androgynous style", and in due course became "the more knowing chou-kawaii" (super-cute).
Kogal followed in the early 1990s, defined by knee-length socks, bleached hair, distinct makeup and short school uniform skirts. This had the required effect of appalling older Japanese with its "impertinent panache, independence, sexuality and self-confidence".
From the kogal fashion came subversive graffiti photos taken by and featuring very young women, using basic little cameras. In them, the young women caricature sexy poses and classic beauty, or they subvert femininity altogether by pulling grotesque faces and attempting to look repulsive.
Associate professor Laura Miller, a specialist in Japanese studies at Loyola University, Chicago, explains the motivation behind this rebellion.
"Japanese girls are constantly bombarded with messages from a beauty industry and the media that exhort them to be feminine and sexy. They are simultaneously admonished at home and at school to be chaste and submissive through confining gender norms," she says.
Through fashion, comics, graffiti and language, they can show their disdain for such contradictory messages, she says.
But it is fiction that takes the contemporary female attitudes and politics to the widest audiences in Japan. Before Snakes and Earrings came Vibrator by Mari Akasaka, winner of the Noma literature prize for best new writer. This novel is the tale of a bulimic, alcoholic young journalist who takes a lift with a trucker and goes on a journey of graphic sexual intensity. The heroine, Rei, appears to be struggling with what it means to be a woman.
secret lives
"If you live in a world that's controlled overwhelmingly by men, and if you don't want people making remarks about things that are really none of their business, you've either got to be totally indifferent to how you look or else go around looking beautiful all the time. I attempted to look beautiful all the time. But there are limits to how much you can do," Rei says.
It is, however, Natsuo Kirino, now in her 50s and the author of 13 novels, who is seen as one of the most important feminist voices speaking for contemporary women. Her novel Out was described in the New York Times as "mingling biting feminist commentary with engrossing storytelling... a scathing allegory about the subjugation of women in Japanese society and the secret lives this forces them to lead".
It is also a disturbing tale of four women working in a packed-lunch factory who collude in the murder by one of them of her violent husband: together they dismember and dispose of the body. It also reflects attitudes to women in Japan, how they are used as a commodity and what happens when women attempt to assert themselves.
Japanese women writers are clearly using popular fiction to raise questions about their society, says Rebecca Copeland, who teaches Japanese literature at Washington University, St Louis. She explains that Kirino "takes readers through the dark and dangerous world of the pornography industry where women are exploited as objects of desire". But at a deeper level, Kirino is questioning contemporary sexuality in Japan.
Yet what is it that makes these young women choose to write about violent sex as their way of rebellion? Could it be that after centuries of being depicted as passively accepting how men have used and abused them sexually and they find it empowering to write about women who seek out and enjoy violent sex because it is their choice? This seems to be what Kanehara is saying. While Kirino, writing about women meting out violence is more straightforwardly showing that women can be as powerful and violent as men when they feel misused.
A new anthology of writing by Japanese women, Bad Girls of Japan, due to be published here in November, explores the way deviant women who have defied patriarchies have long provoked moral panic in Japan.
The book examines bad-girl photography, extreme makeup and brand consumption among contemporary Japanese girls and women. "Bad Girls reveals much about the politics of propriety, the boundaries of gender and the kind of delight huge audiences take in being shocked by the misbehaviour of these young women," says its editor, Jan Bardsley.
Yet, in the end, is there a qualitative difference in the rebellion of young Japanese women and those in Europe and America? Perhaps the things they do to shock are not so different, suggests Mayka, but: "Japanese women come from a society with repressions and ritual that the west has not known in the same way. I think it is healthy that they are finding their way of saying change is essential for women, but it will be sad if the strong, protective side of family life gets lost in the process."
Kanehara's second novel, Ash Baby, exploring the friendship between a young woman and a paedophile, has already been published in Japan. She is writing her third novel, which is about a young woman with an eating disorder. She pushes a strand of hair that has fallen over her pouty lips behind one ear and reflects on how the worst reactions to Snakes and Earrings have come from women "of the slightly older generation. They assert themselves very strongly. I've had horrible message cards from those women." But that will not stop her challenging her country's taboos.
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