MASCĂ ŞI IDENTITATE ÎN PROZA LUI FUMIKO ENCHI
Mask and Identity in Fumiko Enchi’s Fiction

Summary/Abstract: Fumiko Enchi is one of the most prominent Japanese women writers of the post-war period. Her exquisite novels The Masks and The Waiting Years are set in early modern Japan and spans several generations, the aim of the author being to fully express the new conditions and opportunities (or even lack of opportunities!) women were subject to. Active as a playwright, Enchi made a conscious decision in the 1930s to switch to prose fiction, in order to more fully probe the interiority of her protagonists. The great majority of her narratives feature women who are either birth mothers or who have a mother type relationship with another young person. Due to this specific context, Enchi’s heroines prove to be manipulative women, able to make use of masks and all types of dissimulations in order to command over those around.

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