12 www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/gjaps Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 7:1 (2010), 12-31 Oedipus, Ajase, Enchi Fumiko: A Comparative Psychoanalytic Approach to Feminist Anti-Canonism in Onnazaka Jordan A. Yamaji SMITH University of California, Los Angeles and California State University, Long Beach oyabaka@ucla.edu Abstract Critical debate on Enchi Fumiko’s historical fiction Onnazaka (tr. The Waiting Years) has overlooked her text’s dialogue with transnational psychoanalysis and feminist reappropriations of its canonical parables. This paper examines Enchi’s engagement with the Oedipus myth of European psychoanalysis and the Ajaatas’atru/Ajase myth of Buddhism, which Japanese psychoanalyst Kosawa Heisaku used to formulate an alternative to the Oedipal paradigm. I argue that Enchi critiques both traditional and psychoanalytic readings of the Buddhist sutra as inherently anti-feminist. Although she acknowledges the moral and ideological power of the parables of Oedipus and Ajaatas’atru, she ultimately rejects both models of subjectivity within the family and forwards a new model of feminine subjectivity. AT A tenuous moment for feminist politics in mid-twentieth century Japan, Enchi Fumiko’s historical novel Onnazaka (1958; translated by John Bester as The Waiting Years, 1971) was no sooner published than appropriated by clashing ideological factions: conservative legislators and feminist activists. Conservatives were attempting to revive the legal mandate of a patriarchal and largely Confucian household system. Under this system, defunct for five decades at the time, the almost universally male head of household could control the marriage, adoption, inheritance and divorce of all family members, and concubines had a legal status in many ways equal to that of a wife. In her story designed to depict the corrosive effects of the household system on both women and the family in general, Enchi traces the wealthy and troubled Shirakawa household through three generations from just prior to the Meiji restoration in 1868 to around the end of the nineteenth century. Though it drew little attention when published originally as a serial, when published as a novel in 1958, many saw it as providing such a candid picture of the very household system being forwarded by the conservatives of her day that it quickly insinuated itself into the political debates. From the title—which literally translates as Woman Slope, a reference to the uphill battle that Tomo, the story’s female protagonist, must fight both literally and