Fumiko Enchi is the most outstanding woman Japanese writer, she was the representative of Showa period in Japan. She was a daughter of a very prominent family, her father was a philosopher of Imperial Tokyo University. She had a very poor health, her father decided to educate her at home. At the early age, educated by her grandmother, she read the novels of Oscar Wide and other writers and philosophers. Her debut was marked by the play “Birthplace”, “A noisy Night in Late Spring” was so good, that the Tsukij Little Theater decided to put it on stage. She married Yoshimatsu Enchi in 1930, they had a daughter, Fumiko started writing short novels, mostly fiction. She had a continuous health problems, she had a cancer and after couple of surgeries she struggled with pain and inconveniences. After the bombardment of Tokyo during the Pacific War she suffered an enormous trauma and break down, she stopped writing for a couple of years. Mid fifties is a prime time of her success, she wrote vividly, her novels such as “Days of Hunger”, “The Waiting Years”, 'Masks” gave her an international acclaim and fame. Her favorite topic was portraying aging women, their eroticism and, complex erotic life, sometimes rich and rape, the perfect mood notion represents “Growing Frog”.
Fumiko was fascinated by women, their role in Japanese life, their turning point, sometimes, One may have a feeling that females were hyper-visualized objects, Fumiko focuses on their shame and lack of it, Fumiko's women are vicious, jealous, filled with powerful emotions of passion and hate. In novel “Masks” Fumiko sketches the woman, draws her demeanor, her body (not as plain and polish like a porcelain, despite the fact that she is aging, still, she is beautiful, and represents the embodiment of fertility). The major topic is vengeance, usually, a result of a fatal love, the heroine is fame fatal, heartbroken often hopeless and dangerous; the novel describes the Tale of Genij.
“...Just
as there is an archetype of woman as object of man's eternal love...”
Enchi
forces Us to think, to undertake a challenge and understand her
picture of a female, she describes the modern woman of Japan, who
undergoes transformation, the transformation in thinking. The gender
differs, starts believing in a different sets of values and
principles. Harsh, often, too sudden changes change the psycho, the
body and mind. Female characters in Ench's novels are like statues, sometimes, still, with no emotions on the surface, indifferent. The
body shows anger, sadness, disappointment and resignation. The body
speaks for itself. Enchi describes the gender, which dynamically changes the values women believed in so far, women are not submitted to
men, in contrary, they live in isolation, woman is reflected by her
body not by her mind, the spirit is about to bound the body and the mind to become
one. Enchi knows the body cannot be perfect, she herself suffered
lots of deformation and health difficulties, she wants to shake the
image of a porcelain doll off. The average woman is not that beautiful. In contrary, her mind might be. Woman is a woman when all her feminine organs are intact, she is a woman when she senses she
still is, lack of these attributes make woman empty, barren, the male
and female difference vanishes, there is no gender diversification any more.
Enchi restores to the Bible and shows the origins of women, and gender
at the same time;
“...a
woman made out of the rib of the man...”
In
Enchi novels the man is a dominant figure, supreme, he creates the
background, the disobedience of woman, spoils the background, yet, helps her
to find her identity by masterminding revenge. In her writing Enchi
defines gender and feminine values as indispensable part of both –
body and mind. The character is like a flower, it blooms, comes out to
the light. She broke conveyances and taboos, her analysis is brave, straightforward, for her the imperfection is a failure of mind, the
psyche which is incoherent like a broken image. All words, sentences are having a very metaphorical meaning, represents dualism of what is written and of what should be depicted and understood.
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