Background

Minako Oba was born on November 11, 1930, in Tokyo, Japan; the daughter of Saburo Shiina, a naval doctor, and Mutsuko Shiina. As a child, she moved around frequently because of her father’s job.

Education

Oba attended fourteen different schools before finishing high school. She loved to read, spending hours with fairy tales, myths, and legends, especially the stories of the Brothers Grimm.

During World War II, Oba and her family lived in the small town of Saijou in Hiroshima Prefecture. Oba attended the local girls’ high school, where she and her schoolmates frequently took refuge in nearby barley fields during air raids. After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, she and her classmates went to care for the survivors of the attack; the experience of being surrounded by dead bodies and horribly mutilated survivors for whom she could do nothing to help left her with lasting emotional scars.

After graduating from high school in 1949, Oba entered Tsuda Women’s College in Tokyo, where she majored in literature and drama. She moved with her husband to Sitka, Alaska, in 1959, and ended up staying there until 1970. During this time, Oba periodically left her family to study art and literature at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Washington, and she also traveled widely through the United States.

Career

Oba’s first major publication was Sanbiki no kani, which she submitted to a literary magazine in 1968. It tells of the adventures of a frustrated housewife living in Alaska. Though she has everything she is supposed to want—a husband, a child, and a comfortable life—she is not happy with her lot. Nauseated at the thought of holding yet another bridge party with an insipid conversation, she leaves for the night, wanders through an amusement park, meets an American man called only "Pink Shirt," and has sex with him under a flashing neon motel sign that reads "The Three Crabs." The protagonist is honest about her feelings, and though she admits she did not find what she was looking for in her one-night stand, she might well repeat the experience some time. She is consumed with hatred for her female body, which traps her in a gender role she has not chosen.

These themes of dissatisfaction with patriarchal rule and the prison of the female body are repeated in Funakui mushi, in which Oba condemns the conventional maternal virtues of selfless maternal love. The themes are echoed in the novella Higusa, which tells the tale of the daughter of a Tlingit chief in Alaska. The woman is thrown out by her father when he discovers that she has taken a slave as a lover, wanders in the swamp until she meets and marries the chief of a rival clan, becomes the lover of his nephew, and is finally killed by her husband. Once the disruptive woman has been removed, life can return to normal.

Oba’s nonfiction is included in Woman’s Hand, edited by Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker. Oba’s story Urashimaso tells the story of a young woman returning to Japan from many years abroad and is organized around the legend of Urashima Tarou, a young fisherman who has a magical undersea adventure and returns home to find that three hundred years have elapsed. Like Rip Van Winkle, her female protagonist must relearn the Japanese culture that she is assumed to know from birth. Oba uses this story to analyze Japan’s recent past and its conclusion with the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Oba has constantly explored the relationship between the sexes. In Garakuta Hakubutsukan she releases the pent-up energy of a Japanese woman who is denied self-expression and assertiveness. Her female protagonists, all expatriates in a small Alaskan town, use their individuality to establish their identity, though the price of this is a certain loneliness. Her story Yamauba no bisho is a satire about a wife and mother who sacrifices her entire life to the needs of her husband and children. In Katachi mo naku Oba explores the concept of marriage and the myths that surround it, searching for a state beyond the conventional expectations of the institution. Kiri no tabi expresses the author’s search for female identity, while Naku Tori no is an autobiographical work narrated by a housewife who becomes a novelist because "she could no longer stand not being able to tell anyone what was really on her mind." Oba returned to Alaska for Umi ni yuragu ito. In this work the narrator follows the threads of life without trying to disentangle them, twining Japanese legends with Tlingit native American myths and juxtaposing dreams with reality.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Oba continued to travel and study in the United States and the rest of the world. She served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa and Rutgers University and started lecturing at many locations in the United States. In 1979 she taught a modern literature seminar at the University of Oregon and turned that experience into Oregon yume juuya ("Oregon, Ten Nights of Dreams"). She began to reassess Japan’s literary tradition and produced several translations of ancient texts and rewrote some old folk tales. These include Ise monogatari, Taketori monogatari, and Shinshu otogi soushi. She has also written a number of children’s stories from around the world, retelling them for an audience of modern Japanese children.

In addition to her novels and short stories, in 1990 Oba wrote a biography of the founder of her alma mater, Tsuda Women’s College. Umeko Tsuda was sent to America in 1871 at the age of seven and returned to Japan with a B.S. from Bryn Mawr College eleven years later. This period of exile made her feel like a kindred spirit to Oba. The writer based the biography on hundreds of letters that Tsuda wrote to her American foster mother, which were found in 1984. Tsuda’s observations on Japanese and American society are matched by Oba’s own interpretations of the two cultures, and the biography turns into an intimate dialogue between the two women.

Oba was very famous in Japan. Despite her travel and participation in writers’ workshops the over world and the fact that several of her works were translated into German, English, and other languages, her writing has not received that much attention from the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, she made a major contribution to both women’s literature and modern literature in general.

Achievements

• Minako Oba has been listed as a notable writer by Marquis Who's Who. She was one of Japan's most important postwar writers. Minako authored thirty novels and some of them won high awards such as Akutagawa Prize, Tanizaki Prize, Noma Literary Prize and Gunzo Prize for New Writers.

Works

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  • Sanbiki no Kani 1968
  • Of Birds Crying 2006
  • Larmes de Princesse 2006
  • La Fleur de l'oubli 2002
  • Mae Kae Katatsumuri 1984
  • Yawarakai Feminizumu 1992
  • Yuki 1993
  • Warabeuta Mutan 1995
  • Nihyakunen 1993
  • Tsuda Umeko 1990
  • Naku Tori No 1985
  • Yōbaidō Monogatari 1984
  • Kakeru Otoko no Yokogao 1984
  • Onna Otoko Inochi 1985

Views

Minako Oba explored the meaning of relationships between the sexes, the female body, and the cultural heritage contained in traditional literature from Japan and other nations. Since launching her writing career at the relatively late age of thirty-eight, Oba produced a continuous flow of novels and short stories that give women a voice and describe the natural world with the metaphorical language of a poet.

Oba’s literary style is characterized by a fluid narrative full of free association and poetic imagery. At the outset, she consciously rejected the coherence of Western narrative with its emphasis on plot and structure and developed her own "nonform" of writing that allows for a spontaneous flow of thoughts and images. She has used a great deal of plant and animal imagery to lay bare the physical and mental state of humans. She has also refused to categorize life into fact and fiction or to classify people strictly by national origin.

Membership

Minako Oba was a member of the National Academy of the Arts.

Connections

Minako Oba married Toshio Oba, a businessman, in 1955. Their marriage produced a child - Yu.

Father:

Saburo Shiina

Mother:

Mutsuko Shiina

Spouse:

Toshio Oba

child:

Yu Oba

References

• Gender is Fair Game: (Re)Thinking the (Fe)Male in the Works of Oba Minako This is a critical study of the major novels and short stories of Minako Oba.
  1998