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Reviewed by:
  • The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911-16
  • Reiko Abe Auestad
The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16. By Jan Bardsley. University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2007. 308 pages. Hardcover $70.00; softcover $26.00.

In a review I wrote last year of a volume of translations by female authors dating from 1883 to 1912, I expressed the hope that "the project of 'recovering lost voices'" through translation would continue.1 That earlier volume, The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (edited by Rebecca Copeland and Melek Ortabasi, Columbia University Press, 2006), ended with Tamura Toshiko's "Lifeblood," which appeared in the inaugural issue of Seitō, the journal initiated by Hiratsuka Raichō and devoted to publishing women's writings. Jan Bardsley's Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16, which translates various selections from Seitō, picks up where The Modern Murasaki left off. Besides well-known pieces such as Raichō's manifesto, "In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun," and Yosano Akiko's "Rambling Thoughts," which appeared in the same first issue of Seitō, Bardsley translates contributions by twelve female writers who were variously involved in the activities of the Bluestocking Society (Seitō-sha) in different periods during the magazine's life. As Bardsley points out, some of these authors—Raichō, Itō Noe, Fukuda Hideko, Nogami Yaeko (whose "Persimmon Sweets" is translated in The Modern Murasaki), Yamada Waka, and Yosano Akiko—are likely to be familiar to English-language readers, while others, such as Araki Ikuko, Iwano Kiyoko, Katō Midori, Kobayashi Katsu, Ogasawara Sada, and Harada Satsuki, may be new. In combination the pieces in the volume "represent the work of some of Seitō's most frequent contributors and most active Bluestockings" (p. 16). It is thus indeed high time that their "lost voices" be recovered in the form of translation, and we must congratulate Bardsley for having so beautifully rendered them in English.

The volume consists of an introduction and twelve short chapters, each "organized around a different Bluestocking" with a "brief biography, a translation of one or more [End Page 195] of her Seitō contributions [Hiratsuka Raichō and Iwano Kiyoko have three pieces, Itō Noe, two, and the rest, only one; RAA], and some commentary on the work translated" (p. 16). The commentary consists mostly of Bardsley's references to other critics' discussions interspersed with her own observations. Additionally, she uses brief epigrammatic quotations at the start of each chapter to communicate what she considers to be the gist of the translated pieces.

The introduction starts by summarizing the impact of the Bluestockings on Japanese society during the time they were active, citing the exciting encounter of the young Uno Chiyo, eleven years Raichō's junior, with the magazine at the "all-girls high school" that she attended. "Deeply stimulated by a then fashionable motto, 'In antiquity, woman was the sun,' [her] friends at the school and [she] thought that [they] might really be the sun" (p. 8). A reprimand by their teacher for their involvement in a small literary magazine of their own apparently did not prevent them from continuing with their literary endeavors outside of school, luckily, we must say, for the later readers of Uno Chiyo's writings.

Under the influence of Naturalism and confessional writing, "personal fiction" (shishōsetsu) was the fashion in early twentieth-century Japan. Reading personal fiction as a subtext illuminating the author's life was a common practice, and the public (including newspaper gossip columnists) eagerly conflated the lives and works of the Bluestockings. This no doubt was frustrating for some of them at times, but it must also have enhanced the sense that what they had to say in their writings had bearing on real life. Bardsley points out that this mode of writing and reading personal fiction functioned as "a way to use literature as the means to write into existence the New Woman." The Editors' Notes, discussing news of the Bluestockings, and the essays that spoke about the contributors' struggles to become New Women also "contributed to the sense that each issue of Seitō offered...

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