Illustrating with the Kimono: Kimono and Western Dress in Prewar Magazine Fiction

• In Event: Reshaping the “Kimono” in the 20th Century

Abstract

The paper analyzes the relationship between women’s “kimono” and “western dress” in magazine fiction of the 1920s and 30s, with attention to the interaction between illustrations and text. While there is a tendency to read kimono as traditional and western dresses as modern, this paper highlights the ways that kimono are also used to represent modernist styles and diverse sexualities. For example, the interaction between western clothing and kimono worn by characters in Yoshiya Nobuko’s fiction is often used to develop emotional relationships among women and to tie characters to one another outside the bounds of marriage or parent-child relations. This technique develops in the 1910s and 20s series Flower Stories. Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and other modernist authors used similar approaches in their works as well. Meanwhile, illustrators such as Nakahara Jun’ichi and Takabatake Kasho reflected those themes and created their own methods for representing kimono and western dress in the 1920s to transform the representation of gender and sexuality and to move outside the bounds of east/west or traditional/modern dynamics.

Author

• Sarah Frederick, Boston University