Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, April, 2006, 340 pp. More than a mere debunking of cultural assumptions about Japan, gender, and modernity, Vicarious Language is a scrupulous study of how these assumptions penetrate contemporary social life in Japan and beyond as a productive site of subject formation. Inoue's historical-cumethnographic investigation searches for semiotic foundation of of Japanese women's language, a socially powerful truth (1). Why does this appear transparent to social actors who invest it with cultural values? Her aim is to render this transparency visible. Or rather audible. Inoue starts her discussion by arguing that the modern Japanese woman came into being as a culturally meaningful category in and through her imputed presence (39). This is an intriguing move. While existing on modern sociocultural forms tend to privilege visuality-gaze, spectacle, history, etc., lnoue here opens up a critical perspective for study of modern that gives silence, loquacity, overhearing, echoing, and other semiotic qualities of acoustic presence due analytic attention (41). Reverberating in and out of this book, then, are overtones, to use one of Bakhtin's metaphors for language in society, that constitute this language. It is clear that this book avoids simply repeating a modern liberatory desire of revealing hidden histories of underrepresented. The overtones are all too present rather than hidden, working their way into habitus of a listener, even when she doesn't hear them. Inoue's task is thus to ethnographically locate women's language with respect to historical sedimentation of these overtones immersed in cultural consciousness and to undo discourse of women's language to articulate moments of its failure. Two vectors of demonstration may be identified here: how women's language as a new register, a new norm of language-in-society and a new way of regimenting social life, can be generated at various historical conjunctures in Japan's and capitalist modernity; and how such a semiotic creature comes to mobilize sign users toward varying interests in its subsequent sociopolitical life. Inoue's retelling (and undoing) of this story of enregisterment introduces a complexity that has been taken for granted in previous research, a complexity that it has been necessary for any research to leave unexamined in order to maintain its episteme. She discovers that story hardly represents a coherent project, that it is filled with unintended consequences and misrecognized objects. We learn that it was urban male intellectuals in Meiji era whose serendipitous act of overhearing created category of schoolgirl sampled (so to speak) from soundscape of Meiji city (Ch. 1). But no Meiji writer was fully aware that schoolgirls' vulgar speech, associated with this new type of social beings at that particular historical moment, would transform into quintessential Japanese female voice transcending all historical moments. Neither was there any one type of agency or institution that anticipated that women's this imperfect echoing of a modern, national language (Ch. 2), would survive into late twentieth century as an object of very public discussion in context of Equal Employment Opportunity legislature. And linguists, pollsters, and journalists today are not necessarily, or not always, aware of historical condition of fetishization of gender and speech, even while they help reproduce this condition each and every time they try to discern formal and functional features of women's language (Ch. 4). If, however, state, market, or elite could never primarily but only vicariously be liable for maturing of women's language into ethos of modern Japanese femaleness, then what allowed for such misrecognition that is nevertheless effective in keeping discourse of women's language intact? …