Japanese writer Mitsuyo Kakuda is one of the three great female writers in Japan today. Her novel "Home on the Slope" was adapted into a series broadcast last year and received a high score of 9.0 on Douban. The story revolves around the housewife Rishazi. Risha resigned after marriage, focusing her life on the family and taking care of her 3-year-old daughter. The "change" stemmed from her juroring a case of a mother abusing and killing a child as a juror. As the case unfolds, Li Shazi gets closer and closer to the defendant's mother, and through the unfortunate experience of the defendant's mother, he sees his family life, as well as the depreciation and malice of the people around him.
Writer Zhang Lingling and interface culture reporter Lin Ziren
On May 27, writer Zhang Lingling and interface culture reporter Lin Ziren made a guest appearance on the ninth issue of "Island Hopping FM", from "Home on the Slope" and Mitsuyo Kakuda to today's housewife literature. Zhang Lingling said: "In fact, male writers will also face multiple identities, they are sons, fathers, lovers, employees, but we will not list father literature and employee literature separately. Women are mothers, daughters, wives, who are faced with the problem of compound identities when they first write, and they are rightfully placed in a position of anonymity and inability to speak. So when today's housewives start to stand up and say, I'm going to write about my current situation, I think it's extremely valuable. ”
00:00
...
"Island Hopping FM" No. 9 (Demo Version)
Where is the true individual happiness of women?
In "Home on the Ramp", as Rishako participates in the trial for longer and longer, her self-confidence is slowly restored. One of the revelations this has taught her, Lin Ziren said, is that one of the big dilemmas of a housewife is her lack of communication and recognition from the outside world. "This recognition is very important, and I feel that everyone, male or female, needs a certain sense of accomplishment and self-actualization to survive, and this aspect may be as important as the economic reward."
"Home on the Ramp"
She mentioned that Chizuru Ueno said in Patriarchy and Capitalism that the domestic work that women do within the family is also a kind of reproduction labor. "Reproduction labor" in the social sense is the production of commodities that are well understood by everyone. But man is actually to reproduce, and man's reproduction is to raise offspring and take care of the old, weak, sick and disabled, but this part of the labor is placed within the scope of the family and there is no way to get paid.
Tv stills from Home on the Ramp
"What are we going to do to lift this burden on women? Globally, there will be two ways to solve this problem, one is to make it public, and the state will provide related benefits, such as providing childcare funding or establishing public kindergartens. Another way is to marketize, such as hiring part-time workers, hiring nannies, and outsourcing housework. Lin Ziren said that both methods have actually encountered problems in Japan, "First of all, the ideology of Japanese society is still very conservative, believing that child-rearing is an internal matter of the family and should not be taken over by the state." Japan is a middle-class society for the whole people, and its manpower is very expensive, which means that if a family wants to hire a nanny, it may even be worth the monthly salary of one of the family members. Under these conditions, is it not cost-effective to insist that both husband and wife go out to work? If it's not cost-effective, is there a person who needs to quit the workplace? And because of the traditional gender division of labor, the person who quits the workplace is often a woman. ”
Zhang Lingling added that in fact, there are also men around who make sacrifices for the family, but if women return to the family, they are often not regarded as "sacrifices".
She found that the "post-90s" or "post-00s" entered the family earlier than she expected, and many people chose to become housewives, which is different from the "post-80s" or "post-70s" who are actively looking for jobs. "Some people will think that being a housewife is a comfortable choice. When I watched Monroe's Escape, she told a funny question about freedom. Today our women are actually faced with more and more choices, you can work, you can have children, you can also not have children or do not work. You can be in family life, you can also escape from family life, but the core is the next step? With today's abundance of free choice, where is the true individual happiness as we understand it? This is important. ”
"I am the beauty of yarn"
Housewife writing overflows with housewife identity
In Zhang Lingling's view, the topic of Kakuda Mitsuyo's novel is actually very broad, not only writing about the trivial life of a housewife. For example, "I Am Yarn and Beauty" has a discussion of technology and ethics, which will remind people of Kazuo Ishiguro's "Don't Let Me Go"; "She on the Other Side" is not only about how housewives re-employ, but also about school bullying and real friendship between women.
"She on the Other Side"
"Kakuda Mitsuyo did write about the dark side of family life and childcare, but on the other hand, Kakuda Mitsuyo did the overflow of housewife status." Zhang Lingling said, "When women start writing, they will inevitably face an identity problem. It's a very normal way of thinking that you're writing your own stuff from your own standpoint, and our love of literature has led to a change in identity, or at least the emergence of flexibility for a certain identity. Kakuda Mitsuyo completed the overflow of a housewife status on top of her housewife status, which is also a very good point for her. ”
As an example, Monroe was also a housewife and wrote a lot about the lives of housewives, but the reader could still see deeper and broader issues, which was particularly respectable. "Monroe has some works that are written about very typical housewife life, but like 'Jakarta' starts with Monica-style housewives on the beach and extends to the confusion of people who write about the whole of the 20th century. She is not limited to the stove, derived from the stove, pointing directly to a deeper human reality. There is also an article called "Jacaranda Hotel", which is equivalent to what she calls a pastime novel, but a large part of it completely overflows the basic category of housewife novels. Readers can also fully feel the resonance from a male perspective. Zhang Lingling said that if she really just wrote a housewife novel, she might be judged by men's frivolity.
"I think the essence of Kakuda Mitsuyo's writing is still a kind of family novel, but her work reflects the new changes in family fiction." Zhang Lingling said that the family novels that have been inherited from the British improvementism of the 18th and 19th centuries have shaped some women with relatively high morals, but today the women in family novels are no longer noble. "Mizuho is a very typical representative, she has fangs. Kakuda clearly wrote about the dissolution of a family relationship. Compared with Britain and the United States, the disintegration of family relations in Japan is relatively slow. The basic disintegration of family life is closely related to our modernization process. We are becoming more and more personal. ”
Mitsuyo Kakuda at Shanghai International Literature Week 2019
In the future, there will be more housewife literature rooted in China's local experience
Some readers wonder why there are no works like "Home on the Ramp" or "Jin Zhiying, born in 1982" in China.
Zhang Lingling responded that in fact, many of Qiong Yao's previous works also wrote about the dilemma of housewives. "After the 1970s and 1980s, why didn't women's novels write much about housewives?" Because writing about housewives would be considered relatively conservative. Like a group of female authors who came out in the eighties, they want to write about the more avant-garde women's lives, and they want to write about individuals. In addition, when there is no channel for publication, journals and publishing houses are the only two opportunities for writers to reach the public. Judging from the choice of journals, this type of novel is not very popular and there is no market. ”
"But today is really different, today we have Douban reading." Because I was in charge of the review of Douban Reading, I saw a large number of housewife novels. Zhang Lingling said that one of the copyrights she bought before is called "Xiao MinJia", which is to write about the choices made after several generations of women divorced, "so I don't quite agree with the statement that there are no housewives in China, and I believe that the situation of housewives will be more and more realized." ”
It is also said that women's liberation in China was actually done earlier and better. But Lin Ziren disagreed: "Once we said that women can hold up half of the sky because the country needs more people to become the working population." In other words, the female body is a field of discourse to be expropriated. So there was the 'Iron Lady' at that time. Women are even encouraged to abandon their female identity and become people who can do the same work as men, and they are the ones who contribute to the construction of society. ”
That is to say, women's rights and interests are not protected by women themselves, but by workers. In order to be able to requisition women's bodies, there were many childcare benefits at that time. So our parents will think it is easy to raise children, go to work during the day, you can throw your children in the nursery in the unit, and then go to pick them up after work at night. However, after the reform and opening up, the entire country has entered the economic logic of market-oriented operation. Under this logic, these public measures are gone. Women have to take on these parenting responsibilities again. Is hiring women a non-cost-effective thing for employers? It is equivalent to taking on the responsibility of procreation and marriage for her, so now in the past ten years, it is obvious that it is more and more difficult for women to find jobs. ”
In Lin Ziren's view, this factor has led to more and more housewives in China, because many people may not have a choice. "If you want to have children, you may be forced to interrupt your career. After she had children for a few years, it was difficult to leave the family. The explosive growth of China's local housewife literature and women's literature is in such a context of the times. ”