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A Wandering Minstrel of a Woman
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11859 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1987 |
3,572 Words |
| Author
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Amy Vladeck Heinrich
Amy Vladeck Heinrich has published Fragments of Rainbows: The
Life and Poetry of Saito Mokichi, 1882-1953, and is currently
working on a new book, Double Weave: The Fabric of Japanese
Women's Writing. |
TO LIVE AND TO WRITE
Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913-1938
Edited by Yukiko Tanaka, trans. by Elizabeth Hanson, Hiroko Morita Malatesta
Seattle: The Seal Press, 1987
225 pp., $16.95
A woman stands in a long line to apply for a job she is sure she will not get. "Women are tossed about like flags in a breeze," she thinks as she waits. She considers the group of women massed around her, and goes on to say, "Unemployment is an assault, your life becomes confused like that of an unchaste woman."
This equating of a woman's working life with her moral life and, later in the story, the professional life of a writer with her personal life is a common theme in many of the stories in To Live and To Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913-1938, a collection edited by Yukiko Tanaka (she also translated eight of the ten selections.) Tanaka previously coedited a volume of stories with Elizabeth Hanson, This Kind of Women: Ten Stories by Japanese Women Writers, 1960-1976 (Stanford University Press, 1982). In the present collection, she has responded to a reader's remark that the women in the stories seemed to be on the whole merely passive victims of society. In an earlier period of more intellectual and social ferment, Tanaka maintains that there was a more active attempt on the part of women to foment change. The period covered by the collection saw conflicting movements toward increased democratic participation in government on the one hand, and militaristic expansion abroad and repression at home on the other. For example, 1925
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