Women's Role In Japanese Tales

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Women have always – and currently – played an important role in society, even if this fact has not always been recognized as so. This opposition is obvious in literature around the world from medieval/pre-medieval times. Women did important things such as continuing the lineage through childbirth, keeping house, etc.; however, there is a common theme of a woman’s role in Japanese tales and how these women are portrayed that is contrary. The way a woman’s role in Japanese tales is portrayed is less than what their role actually was in that time period. A woman’s role in tales was more focused on having children, being a wife to the husband, and providing men with pleasure/whatever they may want. Having children was important to populate the world as well as continuing bloodlines. In the Kojiki, Izanami and Izanagi have many, many ‘children’ and when Izanami dies from giving birth to a fire deity, Izanagi goes to the underworld or afterlife to bring her back because they have not finished constructing the world – meaning that they needed to reproduce more. …show more content…

This idea comes across in many different tales. In both tales, “She Died Long Ago” and “Astride the Corpse” the woman dies because the husband leaves her. Thirdly, women can just play the role of giving men pleasure no matter what the cost is. There is a Japanese tale called “The Loving Fox” in which the beautiful woman – the fox – tells the man that if they have sexual relations the man will die. The man did not believe the woman and kept pressuring her to have sex with him. She finally relents and tells him that she will die in his place. The man wants pleasure so much, that he doesn’t even care in the moment that she will die. Afterwards, he finds a dead fox and feels bad, but that didn’t stop him the night

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