Article,
Fabricated Feminine Characters: Overemphasised Femininity in the Japanese Translation of Bridget Jones’s Diary and the Japanese novel Kitchen
Norwich Papers, (2009)
Abstract
This paper examines gender marking in two contemporary novels: the Japanese translation of Bridget Jones’s Diary (BDJ , translated by Yoshiko Kamei in 1998) and the Japanese novel Kitchen (by Banana Yoshimoto, 1988). As a benchmark to see the gap between literary language, supposedly authentic women’s language, and real women’s language, a linguistic analysis of Japanese women’s conversation (Okamoto and Sato 1992) is used.
I begin by placing these two novels within a broader context where gender marking in many forms of written communication serves a distinctly ideological agenda. A literary movement known as genbun-itchi in the Meiji period was a key to the implantation of women’s language in literature. During the period, gendered language was promoted by the literary movement, which played a crucial role in spreading the belief that women and men should speak differently (Ueno 2003: 24). Thus the linguistic norms of gendered language use in literature were established. That is, literature functioned as a mediator of the norms.
A Japanese translation of the Russian writer Turgenev triggered the movement, and the convention of gendering language in literature started from translation. Modern Japanese prose benefited considerably from translation due to the conventions in the Japanese literary world. After more than a century since the genbun-itchi movement, women’s speech in literature is still artificially represented (ibid), and the over-feminising tendency in Japanese translation and literature shapes gender ideology in Japanese society.
