Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body by Noriko J. Horiguchi (review)

The women of imperial Japan have been thought to conform to two general categories: victim or rebel. Powerless to protest the nationalist agenda, the former passively acquiesced to secondary but supportive roles as procreative mothers or productive workers. The latter resisted the imperialistic mission—primarily in order to free themselves from the delimiting demands of the patriarchal family system. Many of these women, frequently artists but also activists, chose to live outside of marriage and the social framework of the state. As Noriko Horiguchi explains in her innovative study Women Adrift, while these categories certainly applied to some extent, they are too pat to possibly contain the complex and often discomforting incongruities at work in women’s lives. Instead, they fix the female condition in place and fail to account for the volatility and dynamism that typically occurs in the course of an individual life. Women in imperial Japan were not all locked into circumscribed spaces; many moved, traveled, and changed. Horiguchi investigates this mobility, charting the way women carried with them—or embodied—the nationalist imperative. She demonstrates that even women who had ardently resisted the state while in their homeland were actively complicit in redrawing national boundaries and expanding the Japanese empire when they traveled abroad.

Horiguchi takes up three significant women writers, Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), Tamura Toshiko (1884–1942), and Hayashi Fumiko (1904–1951), reading them and their literary characters through discourses of nationalism, migration, and, most importantly, body studies. She selects these three writers because each “as authors, and their literary characters as well, actively participated in the discourse that both resisted and reproduced the empire by depicting women’s bodies that move through, occupy, and re-create political spaces in the contest between the Japanese and Western imperial powers” (p. 156). What Horiguchi finds is that though these women resisted the state while at home (in the naichi), once abroad or otherwise in the outer regions of the empire (the gaichi), they actively supported the nationalist agenda. Thus, these women embodied the positions of both victim and victimizer. It is this point of pivot—this “drift” between positions—that Horiguchi finds fascinating. And it is in charting this shifting territory that her study is most exciting and challenging.

Horiguchi opens with an examination of the way the metaphor of the human body was activated to justify and explain the expanding Japanese state. She explores the evolution of the concepts of kokutai (the national body) and yūkitai kokka ron (the organ theory of the nation-state). Meiji-era statesmen, influenced by German descriptions of the state as a “body,” engaged in a variety of debates over ways of viewing the Japanese nation. Whereas in initial discussions the body was used metaphorically to describe the nation as an organic entity with the emperor at the head and his subjects as the various body parts, later discussions tended toward a more literal understanding of Japan as an actual organic entity—a single body composed of both subject and emperor with a shared bloodline and shared biological imperative. Early notions of the kokutai saw the Japanese body as enriched by a comingling with foreign blood. Mixing with the foreign (particularly the Westerner) was seen as an important means of enhancing vigor. And the need for “fresh blood” justified incursions onto the Asian continent. But with time attitudes coalesced around the myth of a single, pure, and unbroken bloodline. Regardless of the kind of blood circulating through it, the body required muscle (military might), nutrients (industrial strengths and material wealth), liberation from oppressors (that is, from Western powers), and the freedom to stretch and grow (colonialization).

State discourses concerning women focused on their procreative function. If the nation was a body, then women represented the womb, bearing the children of the emperor and working to expand the empire by populating both the naichi and the gaichi. In her second chapter Horiguchi offers...