Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (review)

The term “poison woman” (dokufu) was applied generically to several Japanese women in the late 1870s who had poisoned or otherwise dispatched their husbands and lovers. Their tales were widely published over the ensuing decade, including serializations, elaborately illustrated reprints, plays, and even kanbun editions. Two in particular acquired canonical status: reprints of Kubota Hikosaku’s Torioi Omatsu kaijō shinwa (1878) and Kanagaki Robun’s Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (1879) remain widely available in collections of Meiji literature, and Takahashi Oden, executed in 1879 for murder, remains a cultural icon.

Previous scholars (Maeda Ai, Asakura Kyōji, Hirata Yumi, Matthew Strecher, and Mark Silver, to name a few) have recognized the importance of these stories, but Christine Marran is the first to devote an entire volume in English to their cultural implications. To be sure, Marran’s book extends well beyond the usual boundaries of the dokufu genre, taking into consideration confessionals produced by female ex-convicts, accounts of women implicated in political terrorism, scientific discourse on sexology and psychoanalysis, and a selection of postwar films. The inclusion of women as diverse as Shimazu Omasa, Fukuda Hideko, Kanno Suga, and Abe Sada into the same narrative may seem a stretch at first glance, but Marran clearly demonstrates how their stories fit into an evolving symbolic realm, often serving the ideological needs of the political, medical, and military establishments. Such needs were rarely met straight on. Marran shows how meanings shifted with unintended consequences, how attempts to undermine authority were often accompanied by even stronger affirmations, and especially how a consistent focus on the deviance of the criminal female body and psyche functioned to mask and silence any substantive discussion of political or economic subjectivity. By analyzing such twists of discourse with a careful attention to a wide range of contexts, Marran carefully avoids the anachronisms and overstated continuities of nation and culture that sometimes trouble such histories.

Central to Marran’s approach is the idea, following Michel Foucault’s mentor Georges Canguilhem, that normativity is produced and naturalized by the identification of exceptionalism. The normativity in question is that grand scientific matrix of modernity, which locked the national body onto various juxtaposed maps of civilizational development, individual development, and species evolution and locked women into a “biocentric discourse” that conflated womanhood with physicality and libidinal temperament. While pre-Meiji discourse had regularly identified women with children, the popular studies of phrenology and sexology in the 1870s and 1880s reframed that “infantilization” into a new scientific package, replete with exacting measurements of skulls and bodily organs. The dissection and measurement of Oden’s body after her beheading, which noted her large sexual organs, provided solid evidence of the link between physical abnormality and female hypersexuality, thus validating the normativity of the new science and, as Marran also argues, showcasing for Robun the possibility that a popular literature could feed and be fed by that science.

With the flourishing of various strains of Darwinism and eventually Freudian psychology in the ensuing decades, female criminals were brought forth to test and establish a host of new theories about human normalcy. A psychological analysis of Abe Sada conducted in 1937 for the Tokyo Municipal Police Department determined that she had, in Marran’s summation, “regressed to the infantile stages of pre-Oedipalized sexuality” (p. 127). Female libido was linked to primitive instinct, savagery, even to insects, creating what Marran calls a “scientifically sanctioned cultural paranoia that both pathologizes female sexuality and naturalizes that pathology” (p. 135). Nowhere in this matrix was there room for criminality to have been considered as a rational response to political or economic circumstance: even the first-person confessionals produced by female ex-convicts were subsumed into narratives of redemption and rehabilitation, reconceiving their initial crimes as acts of unreason.

The book provides an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters are arranged chronologically and by theme, often returning to previously introduced material, but...