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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Traditional Tropes And Familial Incest In Banana Yoshimoto’S Kitchen, Michele Gibney
Traditional Tropes And Familial Incest In Banana Yoshimoto’S Kitchen, Michele Gibney
Michele Gibney
Kitchen, written in 1983, by Banana Yoshimoto, contains one novella and one short story. The novella is entitled Kitchen and the short story which follows it is called Moonlight Shadow. In Moonlight Shadow, the structure of a Japanese Noh drama enfolds, wherein the ultimate end of the main character is to live on in a semi-incestuous relationship with her dead boyfriend’s brother. In Kitchen, the images that one is assailed by are those of desire coexisting with food, and love contingent on incest. The idea of food as a comfort conflates into that of a woman as comforting.
These two …
Ono No Komachi: Love And Desire, Michele Gibney
Ono No Komachi: Love And Desire, Michele Gibney
Michele Gibney
The poetry of Ono no Komachi can be read in many lights. The two ways in which I feel its message and context can be best appreciated are through feminine independence and masculine subjection. Ono no Komachi wrote poetry that was evocative of the feminine ideal of longing for a male, but she also wrote poetry which denigrated the need for a woman to rely on a male. Through a self-critical reader analysis of some of her poems, I will show that Komachi’s poetry can be read as comprising a longing for the world of men, and men in particular, …