Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan (review)

Understanding the genesis of this book helps readers appreciate the sly humor and spirit with which the volume was put together: the editors—literature scholar Jan Bardsley and linguistic anthropologist Laura Miller—were pondering a follow-up to their highly successful first book, Bad Girls of Japan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). What better impetus for an obverse "good girls of Japan" than the many manuals of etiquette that have lined the figurative Japanese bookshelves for centuries? Just as they did for their first volume, Bardsley and Miller approach these iconic guides to social behavior as insights into gendered structures of power. Furthermore, they do so with a firm belief that serious scholarship—of which this book is certainly an example—need not preclude the very human element of fun, as made clear by the book's title and choice of cover art (Japan's icon of cute, Hello Kitty, and her companion Dear Daniel squabbling over a piece of sashimi, chopsticks crossed). Clearly, mischief is as important to the editors as manners.

The book ranges historically from the Heian period to the present, providing a rich sweep of the ways in which gendered behavior, thought, appearance, and relationships have been guided and policed, both publicly and privately, through notions of correctness. As the editors note in their introduction, the concept of kata (patterned form) looms large as part of the mantle of authority that gives conduct guides their coercive sway. One gets the sense that the experts who dispense such advice are carefully scrutinizing and tending the very fabric of Japanese social life and even Japanese being as such. This is not to say that all is well in the process of tending, and here is where the "mischief" comes in. Indeed, rules are made to be broken, although how and when people break them, as well as how those breaks may be interpreted, are subject to historical, cultural, class, and gendered conditions, as detailed in the array of chapters presented in the volume under review. Thus, Manners and Mischief reveals more than a Foucauldian view of Japan as a panopticon of etiquette guides (i.e., manners), but also the lived experience of people under such scrutiny (at times, mischief).

Arranged in roughly chronological order, the book's eleven chapters give a sense of social life in Japan as a performance before an audience of peers, critics, teachers, learners—and scholars. Performativity is examined on both the literal stage and in everyday life, as Maki Isaka details in her analysis of conduct guides for onnagata (kabuki actors who perform female roles). Isaka carefully explains ways in which the Japanese public expect roles of ideal femininity on stage to extend into actors' off-stage lives. Kelly Foreman's chapter on geisha analyzes the strict rules that govern what these working women do, particularly as the facilitating backdrop to men's off-hours working lives. This involves understanding how to pour drinks elegantly, what music to perform to match the occasion, and how to enhance conversation that may seal the business deal. At times the reader might be surprised at the places to which rules may go. Linda Chance's chapter on guides to the reading of The Tale of Genji, for example, extends etiquette to reading itself, and what to do with what one reads.

Etiquette forms part of the encounter between nations, each displaying its own version of best behavior. In some cases, that behavior is borrowed as well as performative, as was the case in Meiji Japan with elite dinner parties and social dancing that revolved around that iconic bastion of high society, the government guesthouse called Rokumeikan. Sally Hastings's chapter on such gatherings includes a discussion of gendered clashes involving meetings between upper class wives, geisha entertainers, and concubines. Her discussion reemphasizes the role of manners in negotiating the perilous terrain of a historic period during...