After Betweenness and “New Women” Murata Sayaka’s Konbini Ningen as a Challenge to Japanese Ethics

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show how Murata Sayaka’s symbolisms in her bestselling short story, The Convenience Store Woman, cast a great doubt on the foundation of contemporary Japanese ethics and Japanese feminism. The English translation tends to make it look like a quirky and humorous story about an ordinary Japanese woman in Tokyo, navigating through a psycho-existential complex of patriarchal social expectations. This western reception fails to capture the devastating existential blow that Murata brings to the establishment of modern Japanese philosophy. To show this point, this article will firstly revisit the “structures” of arguments, which Watsuji Tetsurō and Japanese women thinkers as Yosano Akiko and Hiratsuka Raichō provided for theorizing their sense of what it means to be an “authentic” human being or a woman in twentieth-century Japan. Then we will examine how the arc of Murata’s story takes up these conceptual frameworks and ultimately questions if they can indeed produce a reasonable sense of being a human or a woman in the present historical condition of living in the twentieth-first century Japan. The main goal of this dialogue between Japanese philosophy and literature is to show that Murata’s literary work can undermine our confidence in the theoretical framework of philosophical arguments, which seem to sustain Watsuji’s Rinrigaku and the works of Japanese women thinkers.