East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

How Strange! Are My Eyes Mistaken?": A Study Of Arakida Reijo And Her Book Of Fantastic Tales, Ayashi No Yogatari, Miriam Karavias

Masters Theses

Arakida Reijo has been described as the most prolific female writer in Japanese premodern history, with her literary output encompassing a huge number of texts in a variety of genres. However, her works remain for the most part untranslated from the original classical Japanese, and she is almost a nonentity in modern literary academia. Given the widespread lack of female education in the Tokugawa period combined with the era’s general image of male societal domination, an argument might be made for Reijo’s inclusion in modern scholarship due to her status as an educated woman alone. However, Reijo’s masterful handling of …