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 witnessed the establishment of universal male suffrage, expanding popular participation in the political process, and the passage of the Peace Preservation Act, which legalized harsh means for controlling and punishing political opposition.
In this collection, the editor was consciously trying to "introduce the Western reader to Japanese women who were strong, independent individuals, determined to shape their futures." Several of the characters in the selections as well as the writers themselves, were in fact imprisoned for their political activism and philosophies. Nonetheless, many of the heroines of the stories still seem to be tossed about like flags in the breeze. The most apparent social condition treated in these works is economic distress - the period covered included the boom following World War I and the bust of the Great Depression. And there were ill winds of chronic poverty and unemployment.
The job-seeking scene is from the novel A Vagabond's Song by Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), translated by Elizabeth Hanson and excerpted for this anthology. The narrator, who describes herself as "a wandering minstrel of a woman," is trying desperately to establish herself as a writer and to support herself and her mother in trying times. The novel is structured like a diary, interspersed with the narrator's poems. Published in the middle of the period covered by the anthology, Song portrays a writer's attempt to integrate her life with her art. It treats many of the other recurring themes of the collection as well: Central among these is the portrayal of the narrator's ambition and determination to become a writer. She ponders possible pen names while soaking at the public bath; she reluctantly leaves off reading Tolstoy to go to work waitressing in a
...
Read Full Article
|
