Abstract

Angela Carter spent a few years in Japan, from 1969 to 1972, and though the experience apparently impacted on her creative imagination so much as to transform her writing style drastically thereafter, the details of her life in Japan have not previously been revealed. With original information drawn from interviews with Carter’s former Japanese boyfriend, combined with the examination of her unpublished journal entries, this paper attempts to bring to light the scale of the impact that Japanese society, culture, literature, and her romantic and devastating encounter had on her literary career. Short stories compiled in Fireworks as well as the novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman seem to be inspired by her own emotionally draining relationship with this Japanese boyfriend, whom she calls “my friend S” in her essays. Her journal entries further suggest that Carter experienced her relationship with him as what she names “a philosophic assassination,” a loss of subjectivity in the mirror of the other, although she also confesses that she loves him “desperately.” The paper tries to suggest how Carter may have become better equipped as a postmodern feminist writer in her literary project of subverting masculine discourses, empowered by these personal ordeals she had in Japan.