With a rebel yell

Japanese youth culture has long embraced bizarre fashion, subversive comics and sexual graffiti. Now a new wave of violent female fiction is causing shockwaves.

Hitomi Kanehara, 21, sits on the edge of a leather sofa in a Tokyo hotel, long legs evident in a pleated schoolgirlish skirt. Sheeny hair frames a startlingly pretty, childish face and an expression of sweet innocence. You could be excused, then, for viewing Kanehara as the embodiment of all those enduring male fantasies of what makes the ideal Japanese woman: naive submissiveness, ornate femininity and girlish sexuality.

It is a view that alters rapidly when you read Kanehara's first novel, Snakes and Earrings, a bestseller in her native Japan that has shocked the country with its violent and graphic opposition to the traditional cultural expectations of how Japanese women should be.

Kanehara is part of a burgeoning subculture of contemporary women expressing the same loud, emphatic message through fashion, graphics, comics, subversive graffiti, photography and fiction. It underscores a growing generational divide, a significant shift in values and attitudes.

Snakes and Earrings, which won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in Japan and is published here this week, is a visceral, gut-churning tale about Lui, a young, beautiful woman whose desire for ever more extreme body piercing, tattoos and violent masochistic sex leads her on a picaresque descent into a deadly, nihilistic world.

Her aim is to write about how it feels to be a young, urban woman of her generation. The point about her characters, she says, is that they make choices for themselves, as she does, deciding how they want to live, rather than conforming. "Writing about sex graphically and disturbingly was an essential part of that."

In fact, in-your-face sexuality has surely been a hallmark of female expression for decades. Japanese journalist Yo Yahata has railed against this subculture in Sekai magazine. Neo-masochism defines the young, he says, and picks on the "number one fashion among Japanese youth", Goth-Loli, which, as the name suggests, is a combination of the Gothic and the Lolita look, as symbolising "something we call the tendency towards the dark".

Youth fashion has, certainly, expressed the challenge to convention and tradition as effectively as anything, going through several incarnations. In the 1980s the dominant style was Kawaii, meaning cute and essentially childlike, adorable, innocent and vulnerable. There seemed to be little subversive about it in its early saccharine form. But, according to journalist Sharon Kinsella, "It evolved to a more humorous, kitsch and androgynous style", and in due course became "the more knowing Chou-Kawaii" (super-cute).

But it is fiction that takes the contemporary female attitudes and politics to the widest audiences in Japan. Before Snakes and Earrings came Vibrator by Mari Akasaka, winner of the Noma literature prize for best new writer. This novel, which reached the UK in March, is the tale of a bulimic, alcoholic young journalist who takes a lift with a trucker and goes on a journey of graphic sexual intensity. The heroine, Rei, appears to be struggling with what it means to be a woman: "If you live in a world that's controlled overwhelmingly by men, and if you don't want people making remarks about things that are really none of their business, you've either got to be totally indifferent to how you look or else go around looking beautiful all the time. I attempted to look beautiful all the time. But there are limits to how much you can do."

It is, however, Natsuo Kirino, now in her 50s and the author of 13 novels, who is seen as one of the most important feminist voices speaking for contemporary women. Her novel Out, the only one of hers published here, and nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe award for best novel, was described in the New York Times as "mingling biting feminist commentary with engrossing storytelling . . . a scathing allegory about the subjugation of women in Japanese society and the secret lives this forces them to lead".

It is also a disturbing tale of four women working in a packed-lunch factory who collude in the murder by one of them of her violent husband: together they dismember and dispose of the body. It also reflects attitudes to women in Japan, how they are used as a commodity and what happens when women attempt to assert themselves.

Japanese women writers are clearly using popular fiction to raise questions about their society, says Professor Rebecca L Copeland, who teaches Japanese literature at Washington University, St Louis. She explains that Kirino "takes readers through the dark and dangerous world of the pornography industry where women are exploited as objects of desire". But at a deeper level, Kirino is questioning contemporary sexuality in Japan.

Yet what is it that makes these young women choose to write about violent sex as their way of rebellion? Could it be that after centuries of being depicted as passively accepting how men have used and abused them sexually and they find it empowering to write about women who seek out and enjoy violent sex because it is their choice? This seems to be what Kanehara is saying. While Kirino, writing about women meting out violence is more straightforwardly showing that women can be as powerful and violent as men when they feel misused.

Yet, in the end, is there a qualitative difference in the rebellion of young Japanese women and those in Europe and America? Perhaps the things they do to shock are not so different, suggests Mayka, but: "Japanese women come from a society with repressions and ritual that the west has not known in the same way. I think it is healthy that they are finding their way of saying change is essential for women, but it will be sad if the strong, protective side of family life gets lost in the process."

•	With a rebel yell Now a new wave of violent female fiction is causing shockwaves The Guardian (UK), Monday, May 30, 2005 Byline: Angela Neustatter