Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (review)

My first reaction to Woman Critiqued was to immediately assign it to my students. How else to effectively teach a story such as Kanai Mieko’s “Usagi” (Rabbits, 1976) in which a daughter, taking delight in her father’s slaughter of rabbits, dresses up in a huge rabbit suit herself and inadvertently causes her paterfamilias to suffer a fatal heart attack? We need some context in the North American classroom, which Copeland and her group of coeditors and translators bravely provide. The book includes essays and printed taidan (discussions) by Japanese men and women that illuminate the position of female writers in twentieth-century Japanese literature, works that have never before been translated into English and assembled in one place. Reading Woman Critiqued is like struggling up a hill until we get to the top and turn around: below spreads a panoramic view of modern women’s writing in Japan. Not always a picturesque view, it nevertheless covers the gamut of opinions, both thoughtful and ridiculous, that female writers have provoked in Japan from 1908 up to the present day.

In its range of genres, from essays published in high-brow and popular journals to published taidan, to a surrealistic piece of writing on genitalia, Copeland and others also illuminate the chatty nature of Japanese literary discourse, its origins lying not in the academy but in the scrappy world of literary journalism and public performance. Some of the energy and the entropy of this literary machine come through in this book, showing how literary debates in Japan have always been deeply political, with writers arguing over the future of the nation and the place of the subjects within it (particularly the male ones). The very mention of literature’s decline in a number of essays in this book (a decline linked not coincidentally with the rise of women writers) reveals the reach of the Japanese writer/intellectual in modern Japan even as younger writers chafe against this paradigm. The editors include three taidan in the book, fitting bookends to frame the collection. In these conversations, we hear the vitality of critics’ and writers’ voices (for good and for bad), giving English readers some sense of the communal and public nature of literary debate in Japan through the modern period.

Rebecca Copeland provides an illuminating introduction to the volume, alerting readers to the threads that link the disparate chapters. Her main point in assembling the volume is to explore how the “woman writer” has been shaped by the critical context in which she wrote. The book is arranged chronologically, and to make the volume even more accessible, the essays are grouped by themes such as “Womanliness and the Woman Writer,” “The Essential Woman Writer,” and “The Narcissistic Woman Writer.” In addition, five coeditors—Jan Bardsley, Tomoko Aoyama, Barbara Hartley, Joan Ericson, and Amanda Seaman—have written introductory essays to each chapter, providing an overview and an indispensable guide to the plethora of names and faces within. With these introductions, and with plentiful reference material and suggestions for further reading in the back, the book works beautifully in the classroom.

Perhaps the strongest point of the volume is its ambition to show that women’s writing in Japan has never been monolithic nor has it provoked a simple response either for or against. Even as women fought the obstacles that hindered progress, they showed tremendous diversity of opinion. One thread that runs through the volume is gendered language. Yosano Akiko, writing in 1921, takes apart the term onnarashii (womanly), suggesting that by denying women any role beyond the reproductive one, men turn them into dolls and “cooking puppets.” Tomioka Taeko, writing in 1983, taps into the revival of interest in nativism and folk culture that suffused Japanese literary debates at the time and finds that women’s language, banished from the cultural center, now becomes the source of imaginative strength. What lies on the margins plays a symbolically central...