Neither a Good Wife nor a Wise Mother: Destabilization of Female Gender Conventions in Japanese Detective Fiction

The purpose of this comprehensive exercise is to explore how female criminals in Japanese detective fiction serve to destabilize gender conventions. By looking at the novels All She was Worth by Miyabe Miyuki and Out by Kirino Natsuo, I will compare how each author challenges the Good wife, wise mother ideology by presenting tensions a woman experiences and struggles with when attempting to balance her work and personal life. Because both of these novels were written and take place during the recession after the burst of the Japanese bubble economy, I will explore how the women\u27s status as working women added an additional challenge to the work-home life balance, as the jobs they held did not protect them from facing financial distress. In addition to this, I will also explore how the use of female criminals in trying to destabilize gender conventions leads to an ambiguous outcome for the women, as their troubles are often overlooked, while the marginalized male characters in the novel gain redemption from their interactions with the women. Taking all this into consideration, I hope to open up discussion as to how dismissing women\u27s plights may be contributing to Japan\u27s declining birthrates