IGS Seminar
“Gender, Food, and Empire: Eating the Other in Hayashi Fumiko’s Novels and Naruse Mikio’s Adaptation Films”

Date: Friday, 25 November, 18:30-20:00
Venue: Room 125（本館125室）, Main Building, Ochanomizu University

Speaker
Noriko Horiguchi(University of Tennessee)

Coordinator/Moderator
Laura Nenzi (IGS, Ochanomizu University/ University of Tennessee)

Hayashi Fumiko was the first modern Japanese writer to depict hunger and food from women’s perspectives. Her heroines/narrators pursue, work with, and represent food as they physically move from prewar naichi in the 1920s to wartime gaichi in the 1930s and early 1940s, and then to postwar Japan in the late 1940s. Also, it is these women’s specific perceptions, principles, and practices of food that expose the plight of subjects of the empire who are marginalized because of their class, gender, and ethnicity. In exploring Hayashi Fumiko’s literary texts and Naruse Mikio’s film adaptations of them, I explain how their food narratives and memories illuminate the juncture between physical hunger and political aspiration, and between culinary consumption and the economic and political accumulation of capital, thus both challenging and recreating the national and imperial identities of Japan.

☛ Prior registration required（Admission Free） Registration Form

Organizer: Institute for Gender Studies