Shino's Gender Variance in Hakkenden: Derision and Interiorisation as Coming-of-Age Trial

In nineteenth-century Japan, parents could raise their child as the opposite gender when they feared the child might die in infancy. In The Chronicles of the Eight Dog-Heroes (Nansō Satomi hakkenden, 1814-1842), Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848) represents this folk custom in the story of Inuzuka Shino, one of the titular dog-heroes. In the narration, Shino is often “laughed (in scorn) at” (warai/azawarai) by his relatives and neighbours because, although biologically male, he has a girl’s name and wears girl’s hairstyles and clothes. As a consequence, Shino grows self-conscious of his “diversity” (koto) and when he comes of age takes a man’s name and wears man’s hairstyles and clothes. The paper aims to analyse the complex ways in which Bakin uses humour in relation to Shino’s gender variance to craft his narrative. The paper will argue that the laughter of relatives and neighbours is prompted by Shino’s break of cis-normative expectations. To back up this argument, the paper will read testimonies of contemporary real-life young men brought up as girls/women and show that said men were also derided because their attires did not match their anatomical sex. Furthermore, the paper will suggest that humour in Hakkenden also fulfills a serious role because it drives Shino to change and grow up to be a man in name, appearance, and in the opinion of his community. In this manner, laughter works as a motivating force in Shino’s coming-of-age arc. The paper will use as primary sources: to study Hakkenden, Chapters 16-21 of the original text, the illustrations accompanying the work, and relevant entries from Critique of the Dog-Heroes (Ken’i hyōbanki, 1818) and Proceedings of the Tōen Association (Tōen shōsetsu, 1825), “miscellanies” (zuihitsu) in which Bakin discusses Shino’s gender variance and gender variance in current society; to study the cases of real-life gender-variant men, newspapers articles and “brocade images” (nishiki-e) from the 1860s-1880s. The paper will adopt a multidisciplinary framework by integrating the approaches of history, gender history, and cultural history and will interpret the sources using historical discourse analysis. The paper will fill an important gap in the state of the art because, while previous research has examined Shino’s gender variance to gain information on the folk custom of rearing a child as the opposite gender as practised in historical reality, this is the first study to explore how Bakin incorporates this phenomenon in the logic and economy of his fiction.