Thoroughly incapable of casually browsing a Japanese bookstore (or understanding why they are organized by publisher, of all things), I asked trusted coworkers their favorite writers.
One Japanese lit teacher I asked showed me the names of people she liked who appeared in this year’s Contemporary Japanese textbook and then, after a pause, said with some embarrassment, “They’re all women writers…”
And I said, “That’s great, I have no interest in men’s voices.”
It was kind of a joke, but it’s also not.
I think every woman alive has had that moment where they think about their favorite films and books and realize an astonishingly large amount are created by men.
Now, we could talk about how what matters is the narrative not the gender of the person who wrote it, and we could talk about quotas, and how you can’t promote the voice of a substandard woman over a man just to give women a chance.
But it’s 2018, and we’re past that fucking conversation I hope.
Women’s voices are not heard. We have made progress. This progress is the topographical equivalent of an anthill in a side-by-side comparison with Mt. Fuji.
My rule at the library now is to check out as many books as I can physically carry, but a woman writer must always be included.
This is harder than it seems, and not just because the selection at the local library isn’t stunningly vast.
In the meantime, I have thought of books I have loved or books that have challenged me, and I have made a list of women writers who I liked or who made me think. I Googled other people’s lists, but a lot of the writers were from the last two centuries and were obvious choices. Of course, I understand the brilliance of Virginia Woolf, but she’s not all that’s out there, right?
So in no particular order, if you too are sick and tired of men and their voices and their voices talking about women and themselves and other bullshit, some women writers:
- Banana Yoshimoto
Banana Yoshimoto is one of my favorite writers period. Four or so years ago, I read Kitchen, and then every other thing she wrote that has been translated into English. Very little happens in her books, but they feel profound and revealing, less for what they show about the author or her characters, and more for that they show you about yourself. Above all, I love the atmosphere of her books, which forces you to be very quiet and still in yourself, and think about what really is important in this little life you’ve got going on.
I appreciate especially that a lot of her main characters are women at loose ends. They aren’t in states of panic, but they often have some strange listlessness holding them back from the world of normal people. It’s refreshing to see women like this, with problems that don’t amount to nervous breakdowns or thriller-esque psychoses (I am looking at you, Gone Girl, which I also love, but just not in the same way).
2. Miaojin Qiu
I don’t have anything to say about her. I have never read anything so personally meaningful. Her work isn’t for everyone, and also it’s very brutal. Maybe not the best choice if you are in a fragile state of mind, but in her ability to devastate, Qiu shows a solidarity that women (particularly queer women) are almost never afforded. Notes of a Crocodile is my favorite book, full stop.
3. Amy Bloom
I have only read one book of her short stories, and I read it yesterday so I haven’t had a lot of time to sit with it. However, I was so deeply impressed by her characters. Her women were fully formed, some brutally unmaternal and selfish, some falling over themselves to find unlikely human connections, all terribly human. I especially loved her women who appeared to have lost their manual for how to live in a society as an accepted adult sometime at birth, because their disjointedness with the world was so familiar and realistically undramatic.
4. Miranda July
The same disclaimer and same praise as above applies to Miranda July. I have been reading a lot of interesting criticism of her work that has called her whimsical and compared to Noah Baumbach, but as much as I love and adore and live my life by Frances Ha, the characters in her short stories are anything but whimsical, and infinitely more real than anyone Baumbach has created. Her women are so destructive and willful, and totally unlike anything women are usually allowed to be. Her realism is what Wes Anderson’s and Baumbach’s films, Ruby Sparks, and every other dude-propelled indie story are cute facsimile’s of. (She’s also a director, hence the film comparisons.) I would be afraid to encounter her women in real life, even as I recognize myself in most of them with simultaneous fear and relief.
5. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I read Americanah in one sitting when I was as far from America as I could be, physically (bullet train through Chinese countryside, 2014). It’s a cliche to talk about how books “transport” you, but I felt immediately like I was back home in New York while being shown a side of New York I had never experienced. The New York of a black woman from Nigeria is vastly different from the New York of an upper middle class white child, but it’s also not in some ways, and the intersection of those two worlds in the same spot on Earth was revealing. The way in which we approach place and in which place imprints on us is uniquely different, and changes according to race, gender, sexuality, and class. Adichie’s book is such a good representation of that fact, and such an enjoyable one.
6. Ying Hong
This is another situation where I read one book of Hong’s and then read everything else she wrote. I was so determined, I requested her collection of short stories, A Lipstick Called Red Pepper from some other university across the country under seriously dubious pretexts and waited weeks for it. I can’t say I understood the stories, and being stories on young queer Chinese women in the late 20th century they weren’t written for me anyway, but I loved them. Of her novels, I especially loved Summer of Betrayal for its political themes that were expository but not didactic; exciting, but not melodramatic.
7. Jhumpa Lahiri
I really appreciate Lahiri’s work for a similar reason that I appreciate Adichie’s, which is that it shows me a side of my home that I don’t have personal experience with. Lahiri’s characters are the children of immigrants, going to university, falling in love, trying and often failing to understand their parents, falling out of love… With such light strokes, Lahiri illustrates complex characters whose grievances and precious things stretch backwards and forwards across generations. Also, The Namesake was made into a really, really good movie that my mom got completely sucked into a few years ago when I was watching it.
8. Jincy Willet
I first read Willet’s short story collection Jenny and the Jaws of Life, and honestly the stories creeped me out and made me feel weird and not good. But at the same time, she completely snagged me, and I remember speeding through The Writing Class while sitting in the window sill of my first apartment, which is not even a comfortable place to sit. She’s really not popular, and I guess I can see why because reading her book feels like she has engineered a story to make you feel uncomfortable and is watching you through a microscope while you squirm. I don’t know about you, but I like that feeling. It feels like a challenge, and it forced me to think about why I was uncomfortable, and why certain kinds of behavior are considered inappropriate or weird.
9. Norma Field
Norma Field’s is an academic and a translator, but she has written two autobiographical books. In the Realm of the Dying Emperor is not so autobiographical I guess, but she writes about Japan’s relationship to the emperor after World War II with a kind of sensitivity that is not really found in academic writing. From My Grandmother’s Bedside is definitely autobiographical, on Field’s childhood and early adulthood growing up as the child of a Japanese woman and an American GI. Her descriptions of everything are gentle and sharp at the same time, and I fell so deeply in love with the world she wrote about. (And not really relatedly, I met her once because she was the mentor to one of my favorite professors, and she was so nice and elegant.)
10. Xiaolu Guo
I can see now that my Chinese politics degree has biased my literary choices, but I think if it weren’t for that degree I wouldn’t know any Chinese writers, and that’s really a shame. Xiaolu Guo is, in my mind, linked to Hong Ying thematically, as both women write about youth in China with traumatic pasts trying to make sense of their country’s new modern age. I especially liked Village of Stone, which for some reason reminded me of Mishima’s The Sound of Waves.
So these are ten women I’ve been fortunate enough to stumble across or have recommended to me, but if you have any women writers to recommend, please please let me know! Also, women I’d like to mention but who I didn’t feel I could write well enough about/ran out of room to write about:
Ursula K. LeGuin, Yiyun Li, Margaret Atwood, Diane Wei Liang, Mizuki Tsujimura, Kyoko Okazaki (manga), Kiriko Nananan (manga), Gillian Flynn, Toni Morrison, Isabelle Allende, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nadine Gordimer, Shamim Sarif.
Presently Kate 