A New Perspective on Mary Carmichael: Yuriko Miyamoto’s Novels and A Room of One’s Own

Abstract

This chapter examines the ambivalent inspiration Yuriko Miyamoto (1899–1951), the renowned Japanese feminist novelist and critic, draws from A Room of One’s Own. With Virginia Woolf – and especially the persona Mary Carmichael – in mind, Miyamoto develops the representation of Asian women characters in her autobiographical novel Dōhyō [Road Signs] (1948–51). I argue that Dōhyō performatively represents Miyamoto’s turn towards modernising Japanese women’s novels by generating a new textual space for modern Asian and Transeurasian women writers. Miyamoto’s protagonist can be construed as a modern Transeurasian woman who, through an acute observation of disparate modernities among Western and Asian nations, explores an alternative relationship between Asian women whose very existence is hidden and whose desires have yet to be fulfilled.