“God Knows Five Daughters is Enough for Anyone”: Gender Issues in India and Japan

Abstract

Gender issues are evidently among the most pressing problems in all contemporary societies, but the gap between women and men is undoubtedly rather wide in two countries which apparently do not have much in common otherwise—India and Japan. A parallel between their cultures can be found in the works of two twentieth century authors whose lives were a strange mixture of Occidental and Oriental ingredients: the recently deceased Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—a European who, having married an Indian, spent more than two decades in India—and Natsume Sōseki—a Japanese whose brief two-year visit to London greatly influenced both his subsequent life and writing.

This article is part of the research project “National, Regional, European and Global Framework of Social Crises, and Contemporary Serbian Literature and Culture”, financed by the Serbian Ministry of Education and Science (Project No. 178018).