Yakudoshi: A Critical Age for Japanese Women and Japan

Abstract

Although these books vary in the complexity of their presentation, each is useful for the scholar examining contemporary Japanese women, literature, politics, and economics. Patricia Morley's The Mountain is Moving: fapanese Women's Lives is the most engaging and useful for the nonspecialist. Morley's perceptions will be used to provide insights into the other books in the course of this review essay. Maria Rosa Henson's Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military is a straightforward, painful account, simply told. Myra H. Strober and Agnes Miling Kaneko Chan compare the family and work configurations of male and female university graduates ten years after commencement in The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan. Finally, Nina Cornyetz's materialist-feminist, psychoanalytic approach in Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers, the most complex of the four books, analyzes a Japanese literary trope, the dangerous woman, in the writings of Izumi Kyoka, Fumiko Enchi, and Kenji Nakagami whose works span the Meiji and Showa eras. Patricia Morley, Professor Emerita in Concordia University's English department, Montreal, Canada, was a founding member of the Simone de