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Reviewed by:
  • Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan
  • Edward Mack (bio)
Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan. By Sarah Frederick. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2006. x, 251 pages. $54.00.

The attention that "women's magazines" (fujin zasshi) have received in recent English-language scholarship is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the materiality of literary publishing and of public discourse in [End Page 198] general. Sarah Frederick's Turning Pages contributes to this understanding by illuminating the heterogeneity within the category through detailed examinations of three influential women's magazines: Fujin kōron (Ladies' review), Shufu no tomo (The housewife's friend), and Nyonin geijutsu (Women's arts). In so doing, she builds on other scholarship in English, including that of Jan Bardsley, Rebecca Copeland, Joan Ericson, Maeda Ai, Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Barbara Satō, and Ulrike Wöhr. Studies on these traditionally marginalized magazines are so abundant (relatively speaking) that they have come to dominate scholarship on the publishing industry in English; hopefully the cumulative affect will not be one of re-isolation even as this abundance addresses the magazines' marginality and highlights the ramifications of gendered categorization. As Frederick and others have pointed out, these magazines were fully integrated into and played a central role in the publishing industry.

Turning Pages does not address the broader publishing industry in this way, but it does join the other studies in situating the category in a larger social context: namely, the reconsideration of the roles of women in modern society. It does this through close readings of the magazines as objects. By explaining the three titles listed above in their specificity, it not only differentiates them from one another, it also reassembles the disembodied contents of given issues into the heteroglossic forms in which they were originally consumed. This attention to the structure of the magazines—including everything from page layout to financing—allows Frederick to provide new insights into the complex (and often contradictory) messages they presented (marketed) to readers. She speculates on "what reading practices are encouraged by different texts and the conditions under which they are available to be read, keeping in mind that some publications are produced in forms that may encourage cultural transgression more than others and that editors and writers attempted with varying success to induce particular effects with their publication" (p. 24).

Frederick begins with Fujin kōron (1916–present), which was directed at "upper- and middle-class women readers" and which focused on the "so-called woman problem (fujin mondai)" (p. 26), that is, the relationship between women and modern society. In the course of her discussion of the magazine, Frederick addresses a wide variety of issues: its establishment as Chūō Kōronsha's response to the influential journal for women, Seitō (Bluestocking); the division of the magazine into sections, such as kōron (public debate) and sōsaku (creative writing); examples of the magazine as a site of public debate and scandal mongering; the potential impact of the site of publication on works of fiction; and the magazine's role as a site of literary experimentation, with the "photographic fiction" (shashin shōsetsu) of the 1930s. Along the way, Frederick focuses on the various articles that appeared over the first nine issues of the magazine under the heading "Taishō [End Page 199] New Greater Learning for Women (Taishō shin Onna daigaku)" and that, in Frederick's opinion, "map out the range of issues and contradictions involved in this magazine's mission of writing to enlighten the modern woman and help define a new role for the public intellectual in writing about women's issues for an audience of women" (p. 39).

Frederick explores Yamakawa Kikue and Takamura Itsue's 1928 debate on love, which she sees as "the pinnacle of what it was possible in this space for feminists to write—a space that marked their writings as part of the construction of public intellectual discourse in a commercial publication" (p. 53). She also examines three fictional works—Satō Haruo's Tokai no yūutsu (Melancholy in the city, 1922), Tanizaki Jun'ichir...

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