Nature and people of the Far East and Siberia in the Japanese travel writings in the beginning of the twentieth century

The subject of the discussion is the description of nature and images of the Far East and Siberia in the works of some Japanese female writers, like Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951), who traveled by the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1912, 1930 and 1931. The paper deals with some transformational possibilities of these writings (into newspaper sketches, essays, novels, poetical anthologies and complex artistic works which prosaic textual bodies included small poetic forms, Japanese five-lined verse «tanka»). The study of these works has been also carried with the special attention to the so-called «woman gaze» at the nature and people of the Far East and Siberia. Besides the comparative analysis of the imagery and the genre possibilities of these travel diaries, in the present paper have been studied the main features of kikoubun, or modern Japanese travel writings, in comparison with the pre-modern diaries like the masterpieces written by Matsuo Basho (1644–1654).