Yakudoshi: A Critical Age for Japanese Women and Japan

The Mountain is Moving: Japanese Women's Lives by Patricia Morley. New York: New York University Press, 1999, 226 pp., $28.50 hardcover.

Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military by Maria Rosa Henson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 94 pp., $19.95 paper.

The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan by Myra H. Strober and Agnes Miling Kaneko Chan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, 276 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers by Nina Cornyetz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 302 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Although these books vary in the complexity of their presentation, each is useful for the scholar examining contemporary Japanese women, literature, politics, and economics. Patricia Morley's The Mountain is Moving: Japanese Women's Lives is the most engaging and useful for the non- specialist. Morley's perceptions will be used to provide insights into the other books in the course of this review essay. Maria Rosa Henson's Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military is a straightforward, painful account, simply told. Myra H. Strober and Agnes Miling Kaneko Chan compare the family and work configurations of male and female university graduates ten years after commencement in The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan. Finally, Nina Cornyetz's materialist-feminist, psychoanalytic approach in Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers, the most complex of the four books, analyzes a Japanese literary trope, the dangerous woman, in the writings of Izumi Kyoka, Fumiko Enchi, and Kenji Nakagami whose works span the Meiji and Showa eras.

Patricia Morley, Professor Emerita in Concordia University's English department, Montreal, Canada, was a founding member of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute there. Her book, The Mountain is Moving: Japanese Women's Lives, is based upon individual interviews with hundreds of Japanese women in many parts of the country and utilizes research from varied sources including Japanese-English language newspapers, poetry, and autobiographical works, as well as fiction by contemporary Japanese women writers. Morley's title, in keeping with the way she includes insights from Japanese women of letters to illuminate the lives of Japanese women past and present, comes from a feminist poet, Akiko Yosano (1878-1942). Yosano wrote the poem, "The Day When the Mountains Move," for the first issue of Seito (Bluestocking), a journal created by the second wave of Japanese feminists in 1911. Morley uses the end of that tanka: "Believe only this: Women who have been sleeping / Begin to awake and move" (1). Morley notes that young women of her acquaintance presented with the poem in 1993, found it spoke urgently to them. The topics in Morley's book provide pertinent historical and cultural context for the life situations of contemporary Japanese women. In addition to those discussed here, Morley investigates homemakers, education, concern for the environment, and care of the elderly, sometimes illuminating these topics by references to works of fiction. For example, Sawako Ariyoshi's The Twilight Years (1984), is the organizing text around which the chapter on aging is researched and written, making for a clear and interesting exposition. Morley also uses the fine arts, acquainting the reader with the work of painters Iri and Toshi Maruki as they attempt to arouse the Japanese collective conscience on war issues.

Henson's Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military is a powerful account of a woman's life controlled by men, both Filipino and Japanese. During World War II, as Japan sought dominance in Asia, there was not even a pretense of employment for Filipina women as Japan extended its conquest of the Philippines. The women, who averaged in age between seventeen...