Japanese Manga Adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s Salome has always been a popular play in Japan, where many adaptations have been made in various media, including manga. Interestingly, most of the manga adaptations are written by women. One unique idiosyncrasy of such manga adaptations is that they characterize Salome not as a dreadful femme fatale, but as an adolescent girl with vulnerability and subjectivity, struggling to escape from the violent order of patriarchy: while visually and thematically approaching Western decadence in their aesthetic escapism based on the suspect on social modernization, Japanese female manga artists, through their dramatization of women’s subjectivity, have unintentionally criticized their fin-de-siècle artists’ misogyny. On the other hand, by adopting Wilde’s ironical perspective on Salome’s romantic imagination for love and self-empowering affirmation of femininity, they have self-reflectively explored the genre limitations and potential of female-oriented manga, which has always struggled between heteronormative conventionality with the dominance of the romantic love plot, and feminist expressions of women’s discontent with androcentric society. This essay will consider the reciprocal interpretations of Wilde’s aesthetics and Japanese female-oriented manga regarding gender and sexuality by analyzing two manga adaptations of Salome by female artists, Teradate Kazuko and Maki Miyako.