Kazuki Sakuraba is a novelist in contemporary Japan who has switched between the Light Novel and the popular novel market. Her works replete of a diversity of femininities, including the representation of issues such as complicated family relations, violence, gender and sexuality, have been highly evaluated, and she was awarded with a Naoki Award in 2007. Sakuraba’s Fuse- Gansaku: Satomi Hakkenden is a novel published in 2010, in which she revisits her origins as a Light Novel writer, creating a dark fantasy story about the conflicts between humans and half-beasts based on Kyokutei Bakin’s Nansō Satomi Hakkenden. In Sakuraba’s novel, Bakin’s son, Takizawa Meido, appears as a supporting character who is writing the (allegedly) real story behind his father’s epic novel.

Sakuraba’s novel not only suggests a revision of Bakin’s popular story, she recreate the characters with new background and personalities. This paper proposes to analyze how the characters reimagined by Sakuraba reflect the new models of femininities (and in contraposition masculinities) in contemporary Japan. By adopting a comparative method, this analysis critically highlights the elements that transcend the almost 200 years that separate these works, and observes how the differences represent the social changes. This study is intended to add to an overview of the representation of femininities in Sakuraba’s work, and ultimately discuss about feminine ‘realities’ in Japan during Heisei era.