In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist (review)

Teruko Craig's previous full-length translations—Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai (University of Arizona Press, 1988), The Autobiography of Shibusawa Eiichi: From Peasant to Entrepreneur (University of Tokyo Press, 1994), and Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro (University of Hawai'i Press, 1999)—set such high standards that one opens her latest work with considerable anticipation. The reader's expectations are fully rewarded: In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, Craig's translation of the first two volumes of Hiratsuka Raichō's (1886-1971) four-volume autobiography, Genshi, josei wa taiyō de atta (first published 1971-1973), is a tour de force of meticulous scholarship and exquisitely rendered English.

Volumes 1 and 2 of Raichō's autobiography cover the first thirty years of the author's life, through 1916 and the demise of Seitō (Bluestocking) magazine. Raichō recalls a charmed childhood—her home "quiet and orderly, with not a harsh word spoken" (p. 15), presided over by a refined Edo-born and raised mother, a distant but affectionate father who would occasionally take his daughter fishing, and a doting grandmother with whom she would go on long outings, to Yasukuni shrine, Chidorigafuchi, Hie shrine, the Sakuradamon gate of the palace, Ginza once a month to buy rice crackers. Rain or snow, she walked with her elder sister the two miles from their home in Hongō Akebono-chō to Ochanomizu Girls' High School, past the First Higher School and the main entrance of Tokyo Imperial University. In her memoir, the streets and sights of Meiji Tokyo are vividly brought to life, as is the world inhabited by middle-class girls and women.

Raichō's descriptions of the humorless high seriousness of life and study at Japan Women's College, which she attended 1903-1906, are hilarious: founder Naruse Jinzō's lectures on "practical ethics," the "self-improvement" meetings at the dorm in the evenings, the college Field Days, when five thousand members of the public would crowd in to gawk at the girls, wearing matching kimono and hakama, as they circled the sports ground on bicycles, picking up red and white balls with long scoops (p. 71). It is no wonder that Raichō remained dissatisfied with her education. Devouring books about religion and philosophy, she entertained a brief flirtation with Christianity before discovering in Zen Buddhism both the discipline and mental freedom she had been searching for.

Raichō's parents never pressured her to marry; instead, she lived at home, supported by a generous allowance from her mother and income from part-time work as a stenographer. Her days were full:

there was daily zazen, English and classical Chinese classes, trips to the Ueno Library and the Ōhashi Library in Niban-chō. I took on assignments in shorthand, and if I heard of an interesting lecture, I rushed to attend it. I went from one pursuit to the next, as though borne on a swift current, with energy to spare. Never again, in all my days, did I live on such a heightened plane of spiritual awareness or feel so vibrantly alive.

(p. 94)

Raichō also recalls with bemusement the youthful folly of her relationship with Morita Sōhei (1881-1949), lecturer in Greek tragedy at the Keishū Literary Society she attended. Morita was obsessed with Gabriele D'Annunzio's Triumph of Death (Trionfo della Morte, 1894), known in Japan at this time via the English translation by Georgina Harding first published in 1898; and Raichō for her part was "charmed and attracted by [Morita's] obsessive love, his wild imaginings about literature, his muddleheaded good nature, even his physical ungainliness" (p. 112). In March 1908, in the mountains beyond Nikkō, they embarked on a folie à deux in which Morita was to kill Raichō and thereafter live out his days "in a lone cell in a snowbound...