Literary Daughters' Recipes

Aoyama Tomoko

Contemporary Japan, 2001, vol. 12, issue 1, 91-116

Abstract: This essay examines the representations of food, cooking, and taste in the writings of Mori Mari and Kôda Aya. The critical attention these two writers have received derives mainly from their status as “literary daughters” of canonical writer-fathers. This essay, however, shifts the focus to investigate a neglected area of their writing, their evocation and exploration of female subjectivity, which is effected through a delineation of a relationship with a father in texts to do with food. Food may be represented as a token of the generosity and refinement of the parents, or as a source of domestic and/or social conflict. Cooking may be represented as a means toward aesthetic and ethical enlightenment, as a burden and chore forced on women, or as a contribution toward domestic and social harmony. The daughters' texts reveal how, through writing, they coped with the spell of the dead father. Mori Mari developed her principle of “luxurious poverty” and constructed a unique love story of a “carnivorous” girl and her father. Kôda Aya mastered fine techniques that allowed her to apply to her writing what she learned from “cooking lessons.”

Date: 2001
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DOI: 10.1080/09386491.2001.11826869

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