Telling Lives: Women's Self-Writing in Modern Japan (review)

Telling Lives is an account, in the form of paraphrase, summary, and straight translation, of the autobiographies of five women: Oku Mumeo (1895-1997), Takai Toshio (1902-1983), Nishi Kiyoko (1907-1995), Sata Ineko (1904-1998), and Fukunaga Misao (1907-1991). All five women were active in radical left-wing circles before and during Japan's Fifteen-Year War, and it is their experience of these years that Ronald Loftus has chosen to highlight, rather than the authors' activities in the postwar period. His book thus contributes to the growing collection of English-language writing on labor movements, left-wing politics, and women's lives before 1945.

The introduction comprises a brief (fourteen-page) overview of "feminist criticism of self-writing." Loftus is good at summarizing in plain English what others have said more flamboyantly (see, for example, his summary of Sidonie Smith, pp. 4-5). But he does not take issue with any of the theorists whose arguments he quotes. Indeed, in chapter 1, entitled "Producing Writing Subjects: Women in the Interwar Years," he explicitly declines to commit himself to any opinion of them. "[I]t may well be," he writes, "that Japanese women invented self-writing during the Heian era only to have the nikki form they pioneered appropriated by men . . ." (p. 30). Does Loftus actually believe that Japanese women invented self-writing? Does he agree that men later appropriated the genre? Here, as elsewhere, he begs too many questions; despite his careful citing of previous scholarship and other scholars' responses to that scholarship, the overall impression is of a book still in search of an argument.

Chapter 2, "Politics Rooted in Everyday Life," based on Oku Mumeo's Nobi aka aka to (Fires Burning Brightly, 1988; translations here and below are Loftus's), follows Oku as she recounts her trajectory from avant-garde founder, with Hiratsuka Raichō and Ichikawa Fusae, of the New Women's Association (Shin Fujin Kyōkai) in 1920, to self-styled "rear guard fighter" of the women's movement, concerned more with "the price of a diaper or a serving of tofu" than with "-isms" (pp. 72-73). Chapter 3 is based on Takai Toshio's Watashi no jokō aishi (My Own Sad History of Female Textile Workers, 1982). Chapter 4, on Nishi Kiyoko's Tsuioku (Reminiscences, 1988), is the only one to give significant space to the author's postwar experiences, in particular her account of labor disputes at Yomiuri shinbun in 1946. Chapter 5 concerns novelist Sata Ineko's Nenpu no gyōkan (Between the Lines of My Personal Chronology, 1983), and chapter 6 is an account of Fukunaga Misao's Aru onna kyōsanshugisha no kaisō (Recollections of a Female Communist, 1982). There is a short concluding chapter, in which Loftus suggests that the autobiographies he has examined exemplify the characteristics of women's self-writing as Western feminist critics have described them. Each text is a "site of resistance," a "manifesto," where "crucial political and cultural contests are enacted" (pp. 274-75).

The stories told by the five women are by turns heartbreaking and inspiring. They work twelve-hour days at physically demanding, low-paying jobs; they plough through Lenin's State and Revolution, memorize Marx's Communist Manifesto, study Hilferding's Theory of Finance Capital; they are arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, released; their husbands and children die prematurely; they are betrayed by men, publishers, the Party; they despair, they are furious, they keep going, they regret nothing.

Loftus's method is to connect sections of translation with bridging passages of summary and comment. When they summarize events that Loftus has decided to omit from his translation, these bridging passages are useful, but in many cases he opts instead to paraphrase, even quote, material that he has just provided in translation. For the most part, then, these bridging passages are wearyingly repetitive and increasingly exasperating interruptions to otherwise interesting narratives. Oku recalls her...