WORKING GIRLS AND WORKINGWOMEN IN SATA INEKO’S PROLETARIAN STORIES
WORKING GIRLS AND WORKINGWOMEN IN SATA INEKO’S PROLETARIAN STORIES

Summary/Abstract: Working Girls and Workingwomen in Sata Ineko’s Proletarian Stories. Sata Ineko (1904-1998) is one of the Japanese female writers who, throughout her long literary career, experienced crucial moments of Japan’s modern history. After coming into artistic consciousness as a proletarian writer in the late 1920s, just as her country was slipping into authoritarianism, military dictatorship and imperialism, Sata was forced by the political environment to renounce her political adherence to communism, “convert” and join forces with Japan’s imperial war machine, as a propaganda writer. Then, in the wake of Japan’s defeat in World War II, she tried twice to rejoin the ranks of the Japan Communist Party, only to be expelled each time. She spent the last third of her relatively long life reflecting on her literature and life in memoirs and continuing to write semi-autobiographical fiction and leading feminist organizations, as well as a peace activist. The present research aims to provide an analysis of the evolution of Sata’s female protagonists in some of her main proletarian literature stories, and their evolution from characters based largely on the author’s own experience to fictional personas struggling to deal with the challenges of political commitment and renunciation, while questioning the category of gender and its place in Sata’s prewar proletarian works.

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