Neither Girl Nor Woman : The Lexical Identities of onna and musume in Izu no odoriko and Their Implications for Translation

This paper explores the lexical identities of two key gendered terms in Kawabata Yasunari's 1925 novella Izu no odoriko—onna and musume—examining the semantic boundaries delineating them in the context of the story, and how these boundaries are interpreted in the English translations of the novella by Edward Seidensticker and J. Martin Holman. The paper then considers the implications of the observed subtly differing lexical identities between Japanese and English, suggesting how semantic equivalence between such basic terms as onna and 'woman' can never be taken for granted.