Thinking Like a Man: Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825) (review)

In the first full-length study in a Western language of the writer Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825), Bettina Gramlich-Oka offers a valuable analysis of an eclectic and original thinker who was also a woman, a daughter, and a wife. In doing so, she illuminates the challenges facing Tokugawa intellectuals who, while steeped in Confucian ideals and conforming to them in fundamental ways, were also extremely critical of the political and social world in which they lived. Gramlich-Oka seeks to examine Makuzu first and foremost as a thinker and attempts to link her ideas and texts to major intellectual currents and movements of the time. At the same time she foregrounds issues of gender, for it was Makuzu's status as a woman, Gramlich-Oka argues, that both circumscribed and enabled her extraordinary literary production.

In the introduction, Gramlich-Oka situates Makuzu's work in the two major genres and analytical categories in which it has generally been placed: "Japanese literature" and "Japanese intellectual history." In the first instance, Gramlich-Oka shows that although Makuzu was an accomplished writer of wabun, placing her writings in the category of joryū bungaku, or "women's literature," as has often been done, is inadequate and inappropriate, for Makuzu also wrote essentially political treatises such as Hitori kangae (Solitary Thoughts, 1817-1818), in which she criticizes everything from Confucian notions of human relations to bakufu monetary policy. In the confines of mainstream Japanese intellectual history, Makuzu has fared no better. Although she was a student of Kokugaku, she did not espouse any single intellectual orthodoxy. Rather, her writings reflect a wide range of ideas and influences, culled from her studies of Kokugaku, Rangaku, and the mercantilist theories of thinkers like Kaiho Seiryō (1755-1817). While Makuzu's eclecticism links her to various schools of thought, she was for the most part barred from direct participation in academic debate by virtue of her gender, her family circumstances, and her residence in the far northeast, in Sendai. And yet, as Gramlich-Oka points out, although she was widowed and isolated after the death of her parents, husband, and many of her siblings, Makuzu transformed her place on the geographic, academic, and social margins into a unique vantage point from which to observe and critique the world as she saw it.

Because Makuzu's texts are so intimately linked to events in her life, Gramlich-Oka devotes the first half of Thinking Like A Man to discussing Makuzu's biography and its relationship to her thought and writing. In chapter 1 she shows how the figure of Makuzu's father, Kudō Heisuke (1734-1800), a physician and scholar in the service of the Date house of Sendai who was posted in Edo, dominated her personal and intellectual universe. Heisuke's intellectual interests were wide-ranging, and he consorted with some of the brightest and most open minds of his day, from high-ranking officials to eminent Rangaku scholars. He also counted among his close friends famous kabuki actors and female courtesans and performers. Today Heisuke is best known as an expert on Russian affairs and an advocate of engaging in trade relations with the Russians in Ezo, ideas he put forth in Akaezu fūsetsu kō, a work submitted to the shogunal government in 1783 that earned the support of the then senior councillor (rōjū) Tanuma Okitsugu (1719-1788). Until Tanuma's fall from power in the mid-1780s, the future seemed bright for the Kudō family, and it is no wonder that Makuzu spent much of her adult life longing for the vibrant world of her youth, when her father was in his prime and the household thriving.

In chapter 2, Gramlich-Oka shows that Heisuke's legacy to Makuzu was built on the strong foundation of formal and informal education he offered his oldest daughter and, perhaps more importantly, the example of wide-ranging curiosity and intellectual ambition he himself provided. As her principal teacher and...