The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction (review)

Julia Bullock makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on the 1960s cultures and experiences of the Showa One-Digit Generation (hito-keta sedai, Showa gannen to Showa 9, 1926-34), a cohort of citizens whose childhood and adolescence were shaped by waves of imperialism, militarism, and total war, and subsequently defeat and occupation. As young adults in the 1940s and 1950s, the One-Digit Generation stepped forward to welcome the promises of occupation-era reforms; in the 1960s, this generation fueled the engine of the era of high economic growth.

This rush toward material prosperity and growth in the 1960s forms the context for the literary works the author explores. In The Other Women's Lib, Bullock convincingly articulates the social and psychological costs of the gendered discourses that were part and parcel of the articulation of progress and prosperity in the 1960s, namely, a "gendered division of labor that rhetorically confined women to the private sphere as housewives and mothers, vis-à-vis their husbands' public role of salaryman" (p. 14). The author's focus on "rhetoric" is key: she illuminates the power of dominant discourses of gender, even as social practice inevitably exhibited a range of conformity and resistance. It is through literary realms, she demonstrates, that writers were able to explore the high personal costs of figuring this gendered hierarchy as "the cause of national and individual prosperity" (p. 8). Bullock thus carefully distinguishes between social practice and material reality, on the one hand, and "imaginative recreations of a process of gender role negotiation," on the other.

On one level, The Other Women's Lib is a study of short fiction and novellas by three canonical novelists—Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko. The author structures her readings of those works around prominent tropes: the gendered gaze and power, feminist misogyny, and "odd bodies" that challenge dominant discourses of gender. Bullock's close readings are always incisive and a pleasure to read, and the explications of Kurahashi Yumiko's "Hebi" (Snake) and "Warui natsu" (Bad summer) and Takahashi Takako's "Jōsha sakugo" (Getting on the wrong train) are especially compelling. The two introductory chapters provide a thorough introduction to the social history and intellectual contexts of these literary texts.

One of the many strengths of the book is Bullock's careful explication of theories of feminism, gender, and sexuality and her explanation of the relevance of dominant and emerging discourses to particular moments in history. Bullock guides the reader carefully through the social contexts of the production and reception of literary works by this elite group of writers. Central to her study are the workings of the "formal and informal disciplinary mechanisms" (p. 8) in society that give rise to gendered ideologies and demands for social conformity. Affected also by government manipulation of abortion and birth control during the 1950s and 1960s, women were at a distinct disadvantage in the areas of educational opportunity and the labor market. Bullock notes that the discourses that associated women with private realms and discouraged or even prevented women from controlling their own reproductive rights and commanding decently paying jobs were not "traditional in the sense of natural and ahistorical" (p. 28). Rather, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the high-growth state and industry revived pre 1945 rhetoric of "good wife, wise mother" because that configuration was deemed to benefit national goals in the new, and utterly different, global context. These values of domesticity and gendered conformity may have been imposed from above but were also actively embraced by a large portion of the population, according to Bullock.

Readers have long struggled with the meanings of violence and sexual perversion in Kōno's, Takahashi's, and Kurahashi's writings. Building on studies by Atsuko Sakaki, Davinder Bhowmik, Yonaha Keiko, and others, Bullock sheds considerable light on the reasons these authors focus...