Yoonmee Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the University of Pennsylva-nia. In the following essay, she uncovers the latent feminist expressions in Shiga Naoya's "Han's Crime," focusing on the "subtext" or the story-within-the-story that can antagonize or disrupt the author's apparent intentions.

Shiga Naoya has hardly been considered a "feminist" writer. After all, Han's dissatisfaction with his wife in "Han's Crime" (1913) reaches a violent breaking point because she does not cook dinner fast enough for his liking. In its day, the Shirakaba group, or "I-novelists," that Shiga helped to found was radical in its often oppositional attitudes to social conventions that hindered the development of the individual self. But these writers were deeply conservative in that their conceptions of the "true" self were based on traditional, masculinist notions. While they proposed that the self should have the right to transgress social mores...