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Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing (review)

2007; Sophia University; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mni.2007.0017

1880-1390

Judit Árokay,

Translation Studies and Practices

Reviewed by: Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing Judit Árokay Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing. Edited by Rebecca Copeland. University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. 360 pages. Hardcover $60.00; softcover $27.00. In recent years, Western scholars of Japan, no longer content with translating seminal primary texts of the culture, have published translations of works of criticism by Japanese authors like Karatani Kōjin (Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, translated by Brett de Bary; Duke University Press, 1993), Kamei Hideo (Transformations of Sensibility, translated by Michael Bourdaghs; University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2002) or Maeda Ai (Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, edited by James A. Fujii and Rey Chow; Duke University Press, 2004). Women Critiqued represents a further important step toward making Japanese criticism accessible to Western readers. The collected essays translated here stand out in two important regards: they are organized around a central theme, that of women and literature, and they avoid overemphasis on specific critics currently in vogue, offering instead a wide selection of important texts reaching back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The volume provides readers access in English to a number of texts by well-known Japanese writers and critics that have been central to much literary criticism on women's writing in recent decades. The texts help us to understand the evaluative system under which authors, especially women, have worked. How did Japanese readers read Japanese women writers, and how did critical discourse influence the reception of these writers? How did critical discourse confine women's writing? Eighteen essays, a dialogue, and a roundtable discussion (zadankai) have been selected for translation; seven of the pieces are by male and thirteen by female authors. The critics represented include Kobayashi Hideo, Akiyama Shun, and Okuno Takeo, while among the writers translated are Yosano Akiko, Mishima Yukio, Setouchi Harumi, and Tsushima Yūko. The essays are arranged in six thematic chapters covering a wide range of aspects and genres "identified with women's literary endeavors in the twentieth century" (p. 2). The chapters are arranged more or less chronologically; we start off with late-Meiji authors and literary critics like Kunikida Doppo and Yosano Akiko and end up with contemporary writers and critics like Tsushima Yūko, [End Page 127] Ueno Chizuko, and Tomioka Taeko. The order of the chapters obviously does not reflect a progression in ideology. The recurrence of similar arguments throughout the century is striking, especially the expression of essentialist views on women's writing and woman as an unproblematic category. The essays present a wide range of statements along these lines. In 1908, for instance, Oguri Fūyō, Yanagawa Shun'yō, Tokuda Shūkō, Ikuta Chōkō, and Mayama Seika wrote in a collective essay, "if women too are human beings, then they have every right to do what human beings do. There is no reason they should be prevented from writing prose fiction" (p. 33). Almost seventy years later, on the other hand, Okuno Takeo raised the question whether fiction is "inherently the realm of women" (p. 66). Each of the six chapters has an introduction, with ample and well-researched footnotes, written by scholars specializing in women's literature. A glossary helps to identify the close to two hundred names mentioned in the essays. The bibliography gives the English and Japanese sources cited in the book, and recommendations for further reading include recent English-language research on writing by women in Japan and a list of special issues on women's writing that have appeared in Japanese journals. It is a pity, however, that no hint is provided of the research being done in German, French, Italian, or other languages, unfortunately contributing to the separation between "national japanologies." Chapter 1, "The Feminine Critique: 'Womanliness' and the Woman Writer," presents five essays published between 1898 and 1937 by Kunikida Doppo, Miwata Masako, Oguri Fūyō et al., Yosano Akiko, and Kobayashi Hideo. The introduction to the chapter is by the volume's editor, Rebecca L. Copeland. In the Meiji period, critics held that women's literary contribution, like that of their male counterparts, should be didactic and...