Crime Fiction and Feminisim between Japan and Britain: Kirino Natsuo and Paula Hawkins

Nowadays more than then, questions like feminism and its bond with all aspects of life, including obviously literature and writing, are taken up and studied. In this dissertation I aim to explore the bond between contemporary crime fiction and feminism; in particular I would like to draw attention to the background of this theme both in Japan and in Britain. The two writers to whom I will refer are, respectively, Kirino Natsuo and Paula Hawkins. The crime novels which I am going to analyse are, respectively, Out and The Girl on the Train. Also, I should specify that I will be working on the English version of Out, by Stephen Snyder. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I set out to speak about crime fiction literature in Japan and in Britain, and its social background concerning both female writers and female characters in the novels. Furthermore, I will linger on the connection between deviance and crime fiction by means of stylistics, that is an analysis made on literary and non-literary texts using linguistic operable principles, therefore on a scientific basis; in fact, such a discipline allows to reach an objectivity which literary criticism sometimes seems to lack. Especially, deviance will be explored through the domains of linguistics, genre and sociology. In the last part of this chapter, I am going to dwell on feminist stylistics too, in order to demonstrate how gender is represented in texts, and how our perception of a book can change when we know a priori that it has been written by a woman. I intend to dedicate the second chapter to the comparison, through linguistic and stylistic categories, of the works of the two authors, Kirino and Hawkins; in particular, I will concentrate on the sub-genres (hard-boiled and thriller) of the two novels and the connection of these ones with the writers' works. Moreover, I think it will be efficacious to describe the two protagonists of the novels as ¿outsiders¿, or deviant, since their social behaviour and speech features make them contrast with the rest of society in the context of the work: Tokyo and London, respectively in the case of Kirino and of Hawkins. The two crime novels come to be different by narrative structure: here I am going to refer to the standard crime novel's narrative and compare it with the two texts in analysis. Finally, another important fact to consider is the difference between heterodiegetic narrator and the homodiegetic one and the viewpoint in the writing choices of the two authors. Lastly, I will leave the third chapter to a reflection on the connection between crime fiction and feminism. Here it will be useful to bring to light an interesting connection between gender and genre and to introduce important notions from discursive psychology. Many times, detective stories are used as cultural strategies to give visibility to a range of social problems, such as the condition of women in contemporary society. My study, as mentioned above, will be based in particular on Japanese and English society.