The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction (review)

What a difference a decade makes. I made this same remark in a book review seven years ago, when I was better at math. ¹ The sentiment references the sea change that followed the 1993 Rutgers conference on Japanese women writers—from which emerged The Woman's Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women's Writing (eds. Paul Schalow and Janet Walker, 1996)—and catalyzed a bookshelf of studies in English on gendered dynamics in Japanese literature. Add nearly another decade, with the extension of this gender focus, conceived broadly to encompass studies of sexuality and history, more generally, and we have witnessed the formation of a kind of critical mass in Japanese studies that puts gender and feminist perspectives at the center of our contemporary scholarship. That has pluses and minuses.

"What a difference a decade makes" is also the closing observation of Julia Bullock in The Other Women's Lib: Gender and the Body in Japanese Women's Fiction. Here Bullock is celebrating the "imaginative subversions of gender norms" (p. 167) that were possible in the early seventies, during the heady high water of the Japanese Women's Lib (uman ribu) movement, in contrast to the rigidly confining gender conventions of the sixties. But the heart of Bullock's study is an impressive display of feminist criticism of the fiction from the sixties and early seventies of three women writers—Kono Taeko (1926-), Takahashi Takako (1932-), and Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-2005)—who opened up a space for reimagining a realm of female subjectivity prior to the arrival of second-wave feminism and, in particular, prefigured the discourse of Japan's Women's Lib.

Bullock makes a strong case for a critically self-aware feminist analysis of works by Kono, Takahashi, and Kurahashi. Their style was sharp and their stories often disturbing, in striking contrast to the conventions for popular women writers of the previous generation, who had been categorized as joryu sakka (women writers) of joryu bungaku (women's literature). Each author has had some of her stories translated into English, but only two of the dozen works that receive sustained scrutiny by Bullock are available in full for English readers (Kono's "Bone Meat" and "Toddler-Hunting," both translated by Lucy North). Bullock provides extended translations of passages that support her argument, illustrating how these authors challenged norms of femininity, even as their characters may have been crushed or complicit in their own violation.

Bullock's strength is in employing the insights of feminist theory to explore how the plots and characterization of these Japanese authors were fundamentally disruptive to "oppressively narrow ideologies of gender" (p. 14). I am generally rather skeptical about the notion that the writings of Western theorists should be the main lens through which we read Japanese literature, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Bullock does a very fine job in succinctly presenting successive concepts and, crucially, in connecting theoretical perspectives to sustained and insightful analyses, in ways that better inform our reading of these stories. I was particularly impressed with her discussion of Luce Irigaray's "sexual indifference" and its relevance for a critical appreciation of Kurahashi's phantasmagoric "Snake" (Hebi, 1960), an absurdist farce on the face of it that, Bullock shows, can be understood as profoundly subversive of gender norms.

Bullock argues that the straitjacket of gender norms became increasingly polarized during the sixties as a means to sustain the Japanese corporate warrior soldiering for high economic growth. Women were confined to marriage and motherhood through the ideology of binary and complementary gender roles that, according to Bullock, were ubiquitous and virtually inescapable. I could certainly go along with the pervasiveness of gendered expectations that were perceived as norms, or ideals—a point that Bullock connects with Michel Foucault's concept of biopower, those "formal and informal disciplinary mechanisms that permeate all levels...