Ghostwriting as connecting : authorship, media, and same-sex love in the case of Nakazato Tsuneko and Kawabata Yasunari's literary collaboration

Abstract

This thesis examines the case of ghostwriting by female writer Nakazato Tsuneko (1909–1987) for male writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972). Otome no minato (Girls’ Harbor, 1937–1938) and Hana nikki (Flower Diary, 1938–1939) are two girls’ novels serialized in the girls’ magazine Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend, 1908–1955) under Kawabata’s name. The two novels had been regarded as Kawabata’s written works until Nakazato’s manuscript was found in 1989, showing her ghostwriting for Kawabata. Despite Kawabata-centered scholarship reading this case of ghostwriting as either a literary training or male exploitation of a new female writer, in this thesis I emphasize the practice of ghostwriting as a structure of relation that illuminates how writers collaborate in literary production to write about homosexuality and relate themselves to the past, readers, and different literary venues. I argue that for Nakazato and Kawabata, the practice of ghostwriting is a way of making interpersonal and intertextual connections through which writers could authorially link themselves to a broader literary market and readers’ community and textually link the self to distant others, including the same-sex lover and the past self. This study explores a way of reading ghostwriting by combining textual analysis of ghostwritten texts and “single-authored” novels by Nakazato and Kawabata and contextual analysis of writers’ letters, criticisms, and readers’ columns in Shōjo no tomo. I highlight ghostwriting as a significant node in the two writers’ long-term communication and literary creation, especially their exploration of the theme of same-sex love. The study reveals that for Nakazato, ghostwriting—which veils her name to avoid disparaging her as a popular female writer for a commercial girls’ magazine—allows her to romanticize her adolescent experience of female-female intimacy and revive her dead lover in texts. The attempt to remember and extend girls’ love in the ghostwritten novels affects her long-term literary exploration of independent womanhood and the female bond in her famous “Marianne Series” (Mariannu mono). Likewise, Kawabata’s role in ghostwriting as an editor reading and framing female drafts extends into his novel about boys’ love, Shōnen (The Boy, 1948–1952). Kawabata, who shares the sentiment and desire to revive the past of same-sex love in female writings, connects to the boy lover through reading and quoting young girls’ and women’s words. By identifying connections at the textual, authorial, and social levels, this study highlights the potential for ghostwriting in expressing same-sex love and illuminating the workings of writers’ networks, opening up a way of reading ghostwriting that is more attentive to various links and relationships within and outside a text. This study of ghostwriting questions the conventional belief in single authorship and opens a window for studying other cases of literary collaboration between male and female writers in 1930s Japan in relation to issues of gender, queer sexuality, and popular media.