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'"Desperate Housewives" in Modern Japanese Fiction -- Three Novels by

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Desperate Housewives in
Modern Japanese Fiction
Three Novels by Sawako Ariyoshi

By

Wendy Jones Nakanishi

Professor of English Literature
Shikoku Gakuin University

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About the Author

Abstract
While Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-1984) is widely recognized as one of
modern Japan's most influential and important writers, little research
has been devoted to her accomplishments. This article focuses on
three of her novels which have been translated into English,
adopting the approach of a socio-literary analysis. Ariyoshi's work
vividly illustrates Japan's historic and contemporary gender
discrimination. Her emphasis on putting women's issues at the
forefront of her stories has arguably influenced Japan's
contemporary crime writers, who differ from their western
contemporaries in focusing on the private lives of their female
protagonists.

Key Words: Japanese literature, Sawako Ariyoshi, gender

discrimination

Introduction
Sawako Ariyoshi is characterized by Mark Weston, in a 1999
publication entitled Giants of Japan, as 'the writer who gave voice
to silent women' [1]. It has often been remarked that although
women such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon held a pre-
eminent position in classical Japanese literature in their
masterpieces The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, the strong
female voice they represented was silenced from the mid-fourteenth
century up until the modern age, apart from a brief resurgence in the
Meiji Era spearheaded by the popular Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896)
[2]. Various explanations have been advanced for this. Some have
blamed the influence of Neo-Confucian precepts on Japanese
society while others have argued that transformations in Japan's
legal system dating from medieval times led to the subordination of
women [3]. But the second World War altered Japanese society
irrevocably, leading to a boom in women writers in 1960s and
1970s Japan, when authors like Ariyoshi began to 'explore through
fiction the various discourses and power relationships of postwar
Japan' [4]. Search Now:

Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-1984) was born in Wakayama prefecture

and brought up in an area south of Osaka noted for its old, venerable
traditions. This environment fuelled an interest in the traditional arts
and theater and were reflected in some of Ariyoshi's earliest stories.
In her lifetime, she was best known as a journalist unafraid to tackle
controversial subjects. She wrote about atomic bomb survivors,
environmental pollution, and discrimination and prejudice, both as
experienced in America, where Ariyoshi had studied for one year, Search Now:
and in Japan. But her works do not simply represent sociological
manifestos masquerading as fiction. In his Reader's Guide to
Japanese Literature (1999), J. Thomas Rimer concedes the general
opinion of Ariyoshi as 'one of the finest of postwar Japanese women
writers' but argues that that description is inadequate because it fails
to 'define or suggest the range of her prodigious talents' [5].

Regrettably, little of Ariyoshi's literary output, consisting of over

one hundred short stories, novels, plays, musicals, and a music
script, has been translated into English. Translated works include a
number of short stories published in the Japan Quarterly, a four-act
play, and The Kabuki Dancer, first published in Japanese in 1972,
under the title of Izumo no Okuni, and in English, in 1983. It is a
fictionalized biography of Okuni, the seventeenth-century priestess-
dancer at the Grand Shrine in Izumo whom Ariyoshi credits as the
founder of Kabuki theater.

This article will concentrate on Ariyoshi's role as popular novelist

and the influence she exerted on successive generations of Japanese
women writers by focusing on women's issues. Three of her novels,
arguably Ariyoshi's most famous, will be described in detail. Ki no
kawa appeared in Japanese in 1959 and in English translation, as
The River Ki, in 1981. Hanaoka Seishu no tsuma was published in
Japanese in 1966, in English as The Doctor's Wife in 1978, and in
French in 1981, becoming a bestseller in France. Kokotsu no hito
was published in Japanese in 1972 and in English, as The Twilight
Years, in 1984, the year of Ariyoshi's death.

For all her many achievements as a journalist, as a novelist, as a

writer who could pinpoint sociological issues, it may be that
Ariyoshi is most important as a representative of and spokesperson
for Japanese womanhood. It would be tempting to label her a
feminist, but it would be more apt to describe her as a humanist
sympathetic to men as well as women in being bound by Japan's
traditional social rules and constraints. The four years Ariyoshi
spent as a young girl in Indonesia made her more objectively aware
of the unique character of Japanese society when she returned to
Tokyo. She particularly disliked the subordinate role of women.

Ariyoshi, like most Japanese novelists, provides the thread of

continuity and the focus of interest in her stories in the form of the
consciousness of a protagonist whose subjective responses to
environment and events constitute the drama of the narrative. As
Ariyoshi's typical protagonist is a woman, her environment is her
home. Ariyoshi's heroines rarely stray beyond the boundaries of
their domestic landscape. The events in their lives are the social
customs and obligations – marriage, child-rearing, the tending of
aged parents – which have traditionally occupied much of the
average Japanese woman's life and continue to do so.

Ariyoshi paints a bleak portrait of that life in the three novels under
discussion here, and one whose parameters remain disturbingly
unchanged from the eighteenth-century Japanese women depicted in
The Doctor's Wife to those inhabiting the modern-day setting of The
Twilight Years.

The first section of the article will detail at length the plots of the
three novels. This article being written in English and aimed at an
English-speaking audience, references to the novels will be to their
English translations.

There are two reasons why the plots should be fully related. The
first is that Ariyoshi was a born storyteller. She fleshes out her
characters with convincing detail and makes her readers care about
what happens to them. Whether her stories are set in Japan's distant
or recent past, they breathe veracity and life and appear to represent
factual biographies rather than fictional tales. Allowing Ariyoshi to
describe the vicissitudes of her remarkable heroines seems a
befitting courtesy to extend to a writer acknowledged as one who
gave voice to her 'silent' countrywomen.

The second reason is that Ariyoshi was a writer prescient in

forecasting future trends in Japanese society and well-versed in
analyzing and depicting issues with roots in its past. In particular,
she draws a vivid portrait of the challenges facing Japan's women
which stem from the country's culture and traditions. The turns and
twists of Ariyoshi's stories outline these challenges more vividly
than any abstract analysis could.

The second section of the article will present relevant historical and
sociological research on women in Japanese society and relate this
to the three novels under discussion. The third section discusses
Ariyoshi's legacy. Her policy of putting women's issues at the
forefront of her novels has yielded surprising results. Ariyoshi has
arguably influenced Japan's contemporary women crime writers,
who differ from their western counterparts in focusing on the
private lives of their female protagonists.

The Stories
Although The River Ki was written before The Doctor's Wife, the
latter novel will be described first as it depicts a period of Japanese
history pre-dating the former work. The historical Kae, wife of the
legendary Hanaoka Seishu (1760-1835), the first Japanese to
develop and to use anesthesia in a surgical operation, was born in
1761. Hana, the fictional heroine of The River Ki, was born in 1876.
The Doctor's Wife is a dramatized biography of Hanaoka Seishu's
wife and mother.

The relationship between these two women is the prominent feature

of the story from the start, with the doctor remaining a shadowy,
almost incidental figure. As a girl Kae is fascinated by and drawn to
the beautiful Otsugi, a woman whose breeding and looks set her
apart from the family into which she has married. The attraction is
mutual. Although Kae is the daughter of a rich man and has much
better marriage prospects, Otsugi seeks Kae as a bride for her son.
Otsugi is a commanding, impressive personality and, through sheer
force of will, she secures Kae's father's permission for this unlikely
match.

Kae's father and Otsugi agree to the nuptials and arrange the
wedding, and she is never given a chance to meet Umpei, her
prospective bridegroom. In fact, as he is pursuing his medical
studies in Kyoto, Umpei is not even present at the ceremony which
unites them. Kae spends her wedding night in her mother-in-law's
room, an arrangement Kae can consider a semi-permanent one as
Umpei is not expected to return to his home in Wakayama for
another two and a half years.

In her eagerness to become a true Hanaoka, Kae immediately adapts

herself to their habits and quickly learns that her new family lives
for one purpose: to further Umpei in his medical career. Okatsu and
Koriku, Umpei's sisters, for example, spend any spare time at the
loom to earn money to send him to medical school, and Kae soon
learns to weave cloth herself, to be able, too, to contribute
financially to Umpei's studies.

Kae finds this atmosphere of self-sacrifice a congenial one. It does

not disturb her to realize that Umpei's sisters, in lacking a dowry and
in devoting their lives to their brother, are unlikely ever to be able to
marry. Kae does not even mind that Umpei never writes her a single
letter, nor does he ever thank his family for the money they send
him. Kae's childhood dream of intimacy with the formidable Otsugi
has been realized, and that is sufficient satisfaction for her.

Ironically, Kae's happiness is only disturbed by Umpei, who makes

his first appearance in the story one third of the way through the
novel. He makes her feel an outsider in the household which she has
striven so hard to become a part of, and she feels shy with this man
who is officially her husband but actually a stranger.

Above all, Kae is shattered by the discovery that Otsugi will

unhesitatingly sacrifice their friendship for the deeper intimacy she
shares with her son. Otsugi seems 'cold and distant' to Kae upon
Umpei's return home [6]. She fails to mention to him that Kae, like
his sisters, has woven cloth to send money to him, and she slights
Kae by simply ignoring her when they are in Umpei's presence.
Symbolically, Otsugi separates the couple on their first night in the
same house, insisting that Kae sleep with her. Kae senses a sexual
rivalry between them. Listening to Otsugi laughing with Umpei that
evening, she feels that the 'sounds were lascivious,' and Otsugi, on
the other hand, wants her son to sleep alone for as long as possible
(p. 58).

Ariyoshi clearly spells out the unfortunate turn of events: 'So it

came to pass that the beautiful intimacy between the two – the bride
and the mother-in-law who had sought her – terminated upon the
arrival of the loved one they had to share' (p. 58).

From this point, the novel consists of a battle for Umpei's love, a
struggle all the more intense and terrible for the fact that it is one
which is never acknowledged. Kae and Otsugi can never openly
admit to their feelings of hostility and competitiveness. Each uses
politeness as a double-edged sword, seeking any opportunity to
undermine the other's position in the household. Kae's pregnancy
affords her an advantage over her mother-in-law, but, as she bitterly
reflects, it is only a temporary biological 'superiority' and one which
reduces her to a purely physical being: 'Were her teeth, tongue, and
stomach nothing but pestle and mortar, merely the instruments to
feed the Hanaoka heir?' (p. 77). When Kae's first child turns out to
be a girl, the battle begins afresh with Kae's belief that, until she can
bear a son, she will remain inferior to Otsugi; she senses all the
'superiority and pride of a woman who had borne a male child' in
Otsugi's congratulations (p. 89).

Throughout the novel Umpei is apparently oblivious to the struggle

for his affections waged by his wife and mother. This is partly
attributable to egotism fostered by his family, which means that
Umpei is a man incapable of ever looking beyond his own selfish
interests. But, as his sister wryly observes, expediency may also
underlie Umpei's insensitivity to the long-standing rivalry between
Kae and Otsugi: 'I think this sort of tension among females...is...to
the advantage...of...every male' (p. 163).

The advantage that Umpei reaps is that his wife and mother offer
the ultimate self-sacrifice – her very life – for the sake of his
medical research. Both volunteer as subjects for Umpei's first
experiments on the use of anesthetics on people rather than on
animals, vying for the dangerous role of human guinea pigs in full
knowledge that theirs is now a fight to the death, that Umpei's
untested potions may prove fatal poison for them.

It is only after Kae is blinded as a result of his experiments that

Umpei becomes primarily a husband rather than a doctor in his
relationship to her. Kae happily submits to losing her sight because
it signals her ultimate victory over Otsugi: 'In constant torment, [her
husband's] heart was now always with her, even when his mother
died like a decayed leaf falling to the ground' (p. 149).

Kae's sister-in-law Koriku offers the obituary on what she describes

as the 'horrible relationship' between Kae and Otsugi in observing
that Kae can feel compassion for her mother-in-law after her death
only because Kae has won the battle between them (p. 162). Koriku
maintains, however, that the hostility between Kae and Otsugi was
not a special case but, rather, an inherent feature of the family
system in Japan and that, despite dying of cancer, in physical agony,
as a spinster, she accounts herself a lucky woman because she never
married and therefore had never needed to endure the torment a
mother-in-law might inflict upon her (p. 164).

In the one hundred years which intervene between the settings of

The Doctor's Wife and The River Ki, the situation for Japanese
women has scarcely changed. The River Ki opens with a scenario
strikingly similar to that of The Doctor's Wife. Young Hana has
been promised to a man she has only once, briefly, met – a marriage
arranged by her formidable grandmother, Toyono who, in strength
of character, resembles Otsugi. Hana knows that after the wedding
she must completely forsake her own family and assimilate into her
husband's; it was perfectly clear to her that her foremost duty was to
adopt the customs and ways of the Matanis. Thus although Hana,
like Kae, is better-educated, more worldly, from a wealthier, more
socially-prestigious family than the one she has married into, she
renounces her former life to become fully a part of her new
household, a movement symbolically represented in her
relinquishing the playing of the koto for the assumption of kitchen
chores.

In The River Ki Ariyoshi establishes a strong link between women

and the natural world. Hana has learnt from her grandmother to feel
a special kinship with the river Ki and, indeed, Toyono favored
Keisaku Matani over a more prosperous suitor on the grounds that,
in travelling to the Matanis' home, Hana would, in accordance with
nature, be travelling downstream, with the natural flow of the river.
The penalty exacted against those who choose to 'go against nature'
is high; shortly after her marriage Hana learns that a girl who
travelled up the river for her wedding was drowned ten days later
when the Ki flooded [7].

As a woman and thus a creature of nature, Hana relies on emotion

rather than on thought, on intuition rather than on reason. She places
a great reliance on these 'womanly gifts.' Although her wedding
night marks the first time in Hana's life that she has ever been left
alone with a man, she is not frightened, for her first glance at
Keisaku, imbued with the power of womanly empathy, had assured
her that 'he was indeed a man in whom she could place her trust' (p.
25 ).

Ariyoshi likens woman not only to the river Ki – passively flowing

but powerful – a force whose potential for harm as well as for good
must be reckoned with by man – but also to the ivy plant: 'From
ancient times, the ivy which grew around its own central stem
symbolized positive feminine characteristics' (pp. 85-6 ). Ivy is at
once decorative and strong. It requires a prop on which to climb,
and which it adorns. Hana's 'prop' is Keisaku, and their relationship
reflects the curiously ambivalent but symbiotic relationship between
ivy and that which supports its growth.

On the one hand Hana, as noted above, as a woman, is automatically

relegated to second-class citizenship in Japanese society. Ariyoshi
draws an interesting parallel between Hana's position of dependency
and inferiority in the Matani household and that occupied by
Kosaku, Keisaku's younger brother. With the elder son guaranteed
the privileges and responsibilities belonging to the head of the
family, a younger son must make his own way. It is a Japanese
tradition which Kosaku bitterly resents but is unable to alter.
Kosaku's birth order, like Hana's sex, represents the incalculable,
implacable force of nature translated into Japanese social customs
which Ariyoshi's characters cannot bring themselves to question but,
rather, accept with all the grace they can muster.

On the other hand, although Hana considers it her wifely duty to be

completely obedient to her husband, she quickly assumes a tacit
dominance over him. Nature assists her in this. After the birth of
their first child – a son, the all-important heir – Hana is able to
control Keisaku: 'Elegant and obedient, Hana was as beautiful as
ever. And yet a look or a word was enough to keep her husband in
check' (p. 47).

Hana and Keisaku are depicted as a typical old-fashioned Japanese

couple. Keisaku never tells his wife anything of his business affairs,
nor does she ever expect him to confide in her. Soon after their
marriage Keisaku begins to frequent the geisha quarters; while Hana
is fully conscious of his marital infidelity, the subject is never
broached between them. There is something unmistakably maternal
as well as submissive in Hana's relations with Keisaku: she accepts
him as her master but often treats him with the indulgence of a
mother.

Ironically, it is because he is a somewhat 'feminine' character that

Hana is increasingly drawn to her brother-in-law, Kosaku. Kosaku
not only resembles women in his social inferiority as a second son
but also in more intangible ways. Physically weak, Kosaku is drawn
to the world of thought and emotion rather than that of business and
action. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, gossiping with
women, playing with children and, much to Hana's surprise, is even
au fait with the latest fashions in women's chignons. Kosaku's
abruptness with Hana hints at an attempt to conceal love for her. To
her dismay, Hana finds his warmth and sympathy attractive. This is
especially apparent on the birth of her second child. As it is a girl,
Keisaku cannot conceal his disappointment and will not even try to
think of a name for his daughter. Kosaku, however, approves of
Hana's choice of the name 'Fumio' and quickly demonstrates his
skill at such 'women's' tasks as feeding and diapering the baby.

Despite her own fondness for an 'unmanly' man, Hana is determined

that her children, Seiichiro and Fumio, shall conform to the
traditional sexual stereotypes. She worries because Seiichiro is
delicate and lacks vitality. Fumio ironically possesses the very
qualities her brother lacks. While Seiichiro is undeniably highly
intelligent, gaining entry to the prestigious First High School in
Tokyo, he somehow disappoints his parents, who often gaze at their
mischievous, high-spirited daughter and wish Fumio 'were a boy' (p.
96).

It is Hana rather than Keisaku who checks at every step Fumio's

struggle for a life independent of the pattern set for the model
Japanese woman. This leads to constant friction between mother
and daughter, for poor Fumio is more like a boy than a girl. She is
bored by the traditional interests of the Japanese woman, which
include attention to personal appearance, a desire for material
possessions, and a preoccupation with domestic chores. Rather,
Fumio has an inquisitive, critical outlook on life and a logical mind
which delights in such 'ungirlish' activities as solving math
problems.

Fumio's body as well as her mind rebels against the limitations

imposed on Japanese womanhood. Robust and athletic, she chafes
against the decree that she should be dainty and modest. Fumio
strides briskly to school and, on the sly, she learns to ride her
cousin's bicycle.

The simmering tension between Hana and Fumio bubbles into

violence on two occasions. Hana, a highly-accomplished koto-
player, is determined that her daughter, too, should master that
gentle art. On sensing Fumio's apathy to her instruction, one day
Hana slashes her daughter across the hand, leaving life-long scars.
Shortly after, in a fury, Hana locks Fumio in the Matani storehouse
when she learns that her daughter has offended her notions of
womanly decorum not only by learning to ride a bicycle but by
demonstrating her skill in the neighbouring village.

Ariyoshi likens these domestic upheavals to nature. On being locked

in the storehouse, Fumio amusedly wonders whether her mother's
rage stems ultimately from frustration at being thwarted in
dominating her daughter: 'Was [Hana] that resentful of the Narutaki
River which refused to flow into the Ki?' (p. 123). Fumio learnt this
imagery of the tributary stream and the main river it refuses to join
from Kosaku, who once confided to his niece that he believed that
they were 'alike' because of their refusal to live up to Hana's
expectations. On that occasion Kosaku had compared Hana to the
river Ki whose 'blue waters, flowing leisurely, appear tranquil and
gentle, but the river itself swallows up all the weak rivers flowing in
the same direction' (p. 111).

Despite her desire to control Fumio, Hana finally accedes to her

daughter's ambition to attend a university in Tokyo. In her belief,
derived from ancient Japanese custom, that everything should
revolve around the eldest son, Hana allows Seiichiro as much
money as he requests and never questions him about his student-life
in Tokyo, but she is hesitant similarly to send Fumio funds and
often wishes she had never allowed her rebellious daughter to leave
home.

Hana's scheme to dispose of Fumio in an arranged marriage is,

however, thwarted when her daughter falls in love. Appropriately,
Eiji, Fumio's chosen husband, is also interested in the 'modern' and
particularly in all things foreign. Their wedding is in the western-
style, but Hana expresses her own wishes for the couple in
symbolically choosing for the bride's crest her favorite patterns;
Hana was indicating her 'hope that her proud and independent
daughter would cling to her husband like ivy' (p. 147).

The thread of river imagery which runs throughout this novel

appears again shortly after Fumio's marriage when, symbolically,
this modern Japanese woman rejects the native beauty of her
mother's favorite river: 'The beauty of the Ki cannot be compared
with the many colors of the sea' (p. 161). En-route to her husband's
job posting in Shanghai, Fumio cannot resist thus taunting her
religiously Japanese mother with her preference for the foreign.

But, again, tragedy befalls those of Ariyoshi's characters who reject

nature, often equated by this novelist to Japaneseness. Just as the
rebellious Kosaku lost his daughter to the Ki, so Fumio loses her
second son. This bereavement inspires in Fumio an interest in her
cultural heritage. Fumio decides that she wants her next child to be
born in Japan and, overcoming a lifetime's rejection of what she
once condemned as Japanese superstition, Fumio fashions a breast-
charm for the baby she is expecting.

River imagery dominates the remainder of this book and often

serves as a kind of litmus test of its characters. Hana is beautiful and
powerful because she recognizes and acknowledges the beauty and
power of nature, because she can see the river Ki as a beloved
parent. Keisaku, despite his 'manly' insensitivity to the lovely Ki,
fully realizes that his considerable political and financial successes
have been largely due to his possessing a wife so attuned with
nature: 'Half of his life had been spent sailing down a smooth river
with an elegant wife at his side who had always conducted herself
with dignity' (p. 162).

Fumio and Kosaku, on the other hand, must be chastised by the

death of their children into a proper appreciation of nature and
Japaneseness. Denied an obedient daughter in Fumio, Hana is
rewarded for her steadfast observance of proper values in life by
being entrusted with Fumio's daughter, Hanako, in whom she hopes
to instill a love of her nationality. Interestingly, Hanako believes
that she is linked to her grandmother by atavism: the abiding natural
element of tradition ties them together despite all the superficial
differences separating old and modern Japan. On first being shown
the river Ki by her grandmother, Hanako remarks on the loveliness
of its color. This sensitivity to nature augurs well for Hanako in
Ariyoshi's fictional world and, at the novel's end, as Hanako gazes
appreciatively at the river below her we know that she is an
appropriate inheritor of the spirit of Japan embodied in Hana.

Again, Ariyoshi's primary importance lies not only in the acute

sensitivity she displayed in her fictional depictions of Japanese
women but also in her skill in forecasting future trends which would
shape their lives. In The Twilight Years, published nearly thirty-five
years ago and seen by many as her most important work, Ariyoshi
anticipated that the course of Japanese demographics, following a
pattern similar to but more rapidly-accelerated than in any other
modern industrialized nation, would result in a serious social
problem some sixty years later. In The Twilight Years Ariyoshi
offers a portrait of the fictional Tachibana family, in which the
middle-aged protagonist Akiko suddenly finds herself saddled with
the onerous burden of caring for a senile father-in-law. Because of
discord between Akiko and Shigezo, her father-in-law, the aged
parents actually inhabit a small cottage constructed especially for
them in the garden but, to all intents and purposes, they are living
with their son, Nobutoshi, his wife Akiko, and their grandson,
Satoshi.

In one respect, the Tachibana household that Ariyoshi portrays is

not typical. In Japan, as in most modern industrialized nations,
women's life expectancy exceeds men's, but this novel opens with
the sudden death of the elderly Mrs. Tachibana and the family's
subsequent discovery that she had shielded from them the
knowledge of the elderly Mr. Tachibana's advanced senility.

Ironically, Mrs. Tachibana had both concealed and contributed to

Shigezo's condition by acting the part of the 'perfect' Japanese wife.
That is, she had looked after her husband with the 'utmost care' and
had been so 'protective of him that he had continued to be wilful
well into old age' [8]. In the novel's opening scene, before Akiko
realizes that has father-in-law has lost his mind, she meets him on
returning home from work. She is carrying two heavy bags of
shopping which her tall, seemingly fit father-in-law does not offer to
assist her with, and Akiko reflects with considerable bitterness that
he is truly a 'Meiji' man in treating women as servants. Similarly,
Akiko characterized her mother-in-law, who had never contradicted
her quarrelsome, troublesome husband, as truly a 'Meiji' woman.

Kyoko, Akiko's sister-in-law, believes that a modern Japanese

woman 'would divorce a man like [her father] after three days of
such treatment' (p. 35). Akiko's own situation, however, belies such
optimism. As a working wife and mother Akiko seems far removed
from the old Mrs. Tachibana, whose life was devoted to caring for a
fastidious, demanding, temperamental husband. But, as Ariyoshi
makes clear, Akiko is nearly as great a slave to tradition and custom
as her mother-in-law had been. The only difference is that Akiko
must carry a full-time job in addition to being responsible for all the
household duties: laundry, cleaning, shopping, and cooking.

In her relations to Nobutoshi, too, Akiko observes the old-fashioned

decorum of the husband-wife relationship. Despite her husband's
gross insensitivity to the hardship and suffering imposed on her by
the unwritten rule decreeing that the wife of an eldest son shall look
after her in-laws until their death, Akiko finds it extremely difficult
to complain about let alone to refuse the onerous task of caring for
the senile Shigezo. The habit of taking his wife for granted runs
deep in selfish Nobutoshi. He is similarly unable to acknowledge
the financial assistance rendered the Tachibana household by
Akiko's salary.

Akiko only begins to question her traditional pattern of self-sacrifice

and self-effacement when her burdens grow unbearably heavy.
Upon her mother-in-law's death, the task of caring for the
increasingly helpless Shigezo naturally devolves entirely upon
Akiko. Before the onset of his father's senility, Nobutoshi had seen
very little of him, despite their occupying the same living quarters.
Nobutoshi either stayed in bed on his days off or played golf, and
this pattern of opting out of family life and its cares and
responsibilities does not change with the death of his mother.

Midway through the novel Nobutoshi smugly congratulates himself

on the state of affairs in the Tachibana household: seeing how well
his senile father was being looked after, he felt that the family had
worried unnecessarily. In context, this reflection is bitterly ironic.
Nobutoshi can indulge in such complacency only because it is his
wife rather than himself who has assumed all the duties of caring for
his father. It is Akiko who, every night, must sleep beside the aged
Shigezo to assuage his nocturnal fears and to shepherd him out to
the garden to urinate; who must bathe Shigezo, clean his dentures
and, eventually, even diaper him; who must prepare his meals and
launder his clothes; who must accompany him to and from a day-
care center for the elderly; and who must search for him when the
senile old man absent-mindedly wanders away from home.

It is somehow touchingly appropriate that it is Akiko, too, who,

despite her having single-handedly borne the heavy burden of caring
for her senile father-in-law, most sincerely mourns him on his death.
The Context: Women in Japan
Although misogyny has represented a prominent strand in the
tapestry of world literature since time immemorial, with the Biblical
Eve blamed for mankind's expulsion from the Garden of Eden,
Sophocles complaining of woman's inconstancy, Shakespeare, of
her frailty, and Tennyson describing her as a 'lesser man,' it may be,
as Virginia Woolf argued in 1929 in A Room of One's Own, that this
disparaging view of the female sex largely arises from the fact that
the pen drawing such damaging portraits has, historically, been
wielded by men. This imbalance provides all the greater urgency for
attention to be paid to the contributions of women authors.

This is particularly true in such countries as Japan, where a woman

might well bewail her fate, born in a country which automatically
consigns her to social inferiority. The genetic lottery of conception
represents a momentous circumstance for the fetus in Japan, one
which will determine, in large part, the fate of the human being the
fetus ultimately will become. In Japan, as in much of the world, and
particularly in what are known as developing world countries, there
is a strict division between the sexes in terms of domestic duties and
opportunities related to education and to career prospects. Such
divisions are slowly being eroded in developed or highly-
industrialized nations, but Japan remains a society where, for the
thousands of years of its history, a woman has traditionally been
defined by her relations to others – who are often her male relatives.
Rather than possessing an independent, individual identity, a
Japanese woman traditionally has been described, recognized and
treated primarily as someone's daughter, wife or mother. Ariyoshi
recognized and played ironically upon this paradox in The Doctor's
Wife. Judging from the novel's title, its protagonist Kae appears to
possess little identity other than that conferred upon her by
marriage.

In feudal Japan it was customary scarcely to consult a young woman

as to her own wishes in the matter of a husband. Marriages were
usually arranged for families by a go-between. The prospects for a
woman marrying an eldest son were particularly bleak [9]. The
bride was expected to enter her new home as a vulnerable woman
who had given up all claims to her own family's protection and care.
She was required to serve her mother-in-law with unquestioning
obedience. She was supposed to bear an heir whose upbringing and
education might well be taken over by others. She was not allowed
to complain if her husband was cold or selfish or unkind or
unfaithful or even if he took a mistress into his own household as a
concubine. She needed to remain in the background – unobtrusive,
acquiescent, tacitly observing all the customs of her new family –
until her own son's marriage enabled her finally to acquire power
over her own household and, specifically, over her new daughter-in-
law.

Ariyoshi depicts this traditional pattern faithfully in The Doctor's

Wife and The River Ki. As we have seen, neither Kae nor Hana is
consulted as to her preference in a marital partner nor are they
permitted to meet their future husbands before the wedding.
Although Kae and Hana enjoy unusually close relationships with
their families, marriage takes them far from their birth homes, and
they scarcely have a chance to meet their relatives again. Too,
another feature of Japan's feudal life – the notoriously poor
relationship between a Japanese woman and her mother-in-law,
forced to inhabit the same household – finds vivid portrayal in The
Doctor's Wife, which is ostensibly a tale of heroism and sacrifice
but whose story of the ingenious doctor and his important discovery
is permanently relegated to the background, with the novel actually
representing a sordid drama of the fierce rivalry between the
doctor's wife and his mother as each strives to be 'first' in his life.

Still, Kae and Hana do not have to put up with quite so much as the
heroine of Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years, originally published
in Japanese as Onnazaka in 1957 and translated into English in
1971, which is also set in feudal Japan. Tomo Shirakawa, the wife
of a prominent political figure, is required to act as panderer for a
husband who is a serial philanderer. He dispatches her and her small
daughter to Tokyo to find him a suitable mistress. Suga, the naive
young woman Tomo chooses, is taken into the household,
ostensibly as a maid, and forced to submit to her employer's sexual
advances, who secures her complaisance and silence by eventually
adopting her as a daughter. She is only the first of a number of
young women who become Mr. Shirakawa's
maids/mistresses/daughters until he commits the final outrage of
seducing his son's wife.

Enchi's acute realism in depicting the torments of her heroine recalls

Ariyoshi's similarly frank treatment of her characters. Tomo
Shirakawa is consumed by a variety of emotions inspired by her
husband's cruelty. An attractive woman with normal sexual urges
and needs, she is jealous of Mr. Shirakawa's lovers who deprive her
of his attentions. At the same time, she is ravaged by guilt. She feels
especially responsible for the fate of the charming young girl Suga
who, as her husband's mistress, becomes a dull and bitter middle-
aged woman, bereft of hope or happiness. Mr. Shirakawa's
outrageous treatment of his legally-wedded wife also leads Tomo to
lose confidence and self-respect. She never complains or in any way
undermines or harms her monstrous partner. Her revenge is her
circumspect, upright code of behavior which is intended to act as a
silent reproach.

Many modern Japanese women enjoy scarcely greater privileges

than such feudal 'sisters' as Kae, Hana and Tomo. The traditional
role of self-sacrifice is all the more necessary, yet onerous,
nowadays because modern-day Japan has been characterized by
sociologists as a 'father-absent' society [10]. A recent study
concluded that the average Japanese employee worked 2,044 hours
per year, 200 more than the average American or British and 500
more than the average German or French employee [11]. Given the
inflexible exigencies of the Japanese workplace, requiring long
hours, dedication to the company, and providing little in the way of
holidays or provision for maternal leave, the Japanese full-time
employee is usually male, with Japanese middle-class motherhood,
on the other hand, characterized as '"being nailed in the house," cut
off from social contacts, and occupied with the drudgery of
household routine' [12].

Because the husband/father is conspicuous in the modern Japanese

household by his absence, the mother occupies a primary role and
enjoys an almost iconic status in Japanese society where she
traditionally has been idealized as a self-effacing, angelic soul
'devoted to her children, [who] always shows them affection, and is
willing to sacrifice her own plans and desires on their behalf' [13].
Masami Ohinata likens this idealization of the mother figure who
represents the bedrock of Japanese society to a kind of 'religious
faith' [14].

This idealization of the Japanese mother signally fails to translate

into her being granted the social status and privileges of a Japanese
man. Despite the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity
Law in April 1986, and its revision in 1997, women still routinely
suffer from sexual discrimination in Japanese society in general and
the Japanese workplace in particular, earning lower wages and
expected to resign from full-time employment upon marriage or
upon expecting their first child. Until very recently, Japanese
women were forced to choose between opting for marriage and
parenthood or for a career. With mothers rather than fathers viewed
as the lynchpin of the family, it was viewed as an impermissible
self-indulgence for a woman to try to 'have it all,' the rationale being
that a person juggling two such huge areas of responsibility would
devote insufficient energy and concentration to either.

A Japanese woman such as Akiko in Ariyoshi's The Twilight Years

– a modern working wife and mother – enjoys only a superficial,
even an illusory, improvement in circumstances as compared to
preceding generations of Japanese women. When Akiko's senile
father-in-law is rejected by community adult-care services, the
responsibility for his care automatically devolves upon her,
increasing a domestic and employment workload which she already
finds nearly unbearable.

As for the employment workload, there has been a dramatic increase

in working women in Japan, rising from 18.3 million in 1960 to
27.4 million in 2004 [15]. An older working woman like Akiko
typifies the demographics of this trend. While the rate of
employment for Japanese women with children under the age of
seven has decreased from 35.9 per cent in 1990 to 33.3 per cent in
2000, the shortfall has been taken up by the employment of older
women, with a shift in the unskilled labor pool from young women
to middle-aged housewives [16].

But Japanese women traditionally have been excluded from Japan's

'Lifetime Employment System' with its job security and enviable
package of benefits, forced, instead, to labor as 'atypical' workers.
The proportion of 'all female employees who are non-regular by
classification' has increased from 'under 10 per cent in 1965 to over
45 per cent of the female labour force in 2001,' with the 'non-regular
track for female labour...entrenched as an employment system for
Japanese women' [17], What this translates into for a working
woman such as Akiko is being classified as a part-time laborer
while working what is essentially a full-time job and being paid
much less than male colleagues who may be doing the same work.
In 1975 in Japan the 'regular cash earnings of female employees
were only 58.9 when assuming that those of male employees were
100' and in 2004, female employees' cash earnings had risen only to
67.6 [18].

As for the domestic workload, in a survey conducted in 1995 by the

Japanese Prime Minister's office, 90% of the respondents identified
'cleaning, washing, cooking, and cleaning up after meals [as]
women's responsibilities' [19]. Similarly, over 80% perceived
shopping and the management of household finances as the wife's
duties, and 70% described childcare as a 'female activity' [20].

As noted above, in The Twilight Years Ariyoshi anticipated that

Japan's rapidly aging society would result in an explosion of
problems related to care for the elderly, and that this circumstance
would represent a women's issue because, with their world record
for longevity at 81.81 years, Japanese women represent sixty per
cent of Japan's elderly and act as a very large percentage of the
caregivers. It is predicted that by the year 2025 'one out of every
two women will be involved in caring for senile or bedridden
seniors' in Japan [21]. Akiko can only resolve the crisis into which
she is suddenly plunged on her mother-in-law's death by resigning
from her job to devote herself full-time to her father-in-law's care.
Given current global economic insecurities now affecting even
Japan, once seen as unassailably stable, with the recession
'officially' visiting Japan in 1990, quitting a job may be a luxury
many Japanese housewives would find unaffordable.

Judging from Ariyoshi's novels, Japan's modern women suffer from

the same discrimination as its feudal women had and its men
continue to profit from this situation. The male characters in her
novels often assume an expedient form of 'blindness'. Just as Kae's
feudal-age husband Umpei had benefited from the rivalry between
his wife and his mother which he only pretended not to notice, so
the modern-day Nobutoshi takes advantage of the traditional male
preserve of insensitivity in never acknowledging Akiko's
selflessness in taking care of his father. As for The River Ki,
Keisaku ignored his wife's pain at his marital infidelities, secure in
the knowledge that she would never confront him nor question his
right to maintain a string of mistresses.

Japanese men come out badly in Ariyoshi's work. She is ambiguous

on the causes of the male selfishness and childishness that she
portrays with such devastating clarity. It sometimes appears as if the
saintly character demanded of the traditional Japanese wife is partly
to blame. In The River Ki, on hearing of her father's numerous extra-
marital affairs and of his penchant for geishas and mistresses, Fumio
holds her mother responsible. She tells her uncle, who concurs, that
it is Hana's saintly forbearance which has led to Keisaku's self-
indulgent ways (p. 112).
Ariyoshi presents a curious paradox at the heart of relations between
Japanese men and women, from its past up to the present. They are
both complicit in the sexual discrimination in Japanese society.
Women like Kae, Hana and Enchi's Tomo unquestioningly enact the
role of the model Japanese wife handed on by custom: a woman
who is gentle and submissive, delighting in sacrificing all for her
family. These heroines participate in what have been termed teishu
kampaku relationships, once the norm in Japan. The husband
assumes the role of petty tyrant in being unquestioningly allowed to
exercise authoritarian power over a meek, passive wife [22].

In an essay entitled '"Male Chauvinism" as a Manifestation of Love

in Marriage,' Sonya Salamon connects this teishu kampaku aspect of
the traditional Japanese marriage to amae, defined as a structural
feature of Japanese society [23]. Salamon describes amaeru as a
concept which has no counterpart in the West, as an 'active verb
which designates the seeking or causing of oneself to be loved,
nurtured, and indulged by others,' and which sees its most perfect
expression in Japanese culture in the relationship between a mother
and her child but one that is easily re-created between a husband
and wife [24]. Salamon argues that many Japanese men revert to an
infantile role within the confines of marriage, behaving as the wife's
son rather than as her husband, and permitted this childishness by
the wife [25].

Ariyoshi's work reflects this state of affairs. With the traditional

Japanese man at once the lord and master and the pampered child of
the household, in the early years of her marriage Hana likens her
husband to their infant son 'who threw a tantrum when he did not
get his way' (p. 50). Similarly, a curious mixture of the romantic and
the maternal characterizes Kae's relationship with Umpei in The
Doctor's Wife and Akiko's with Nobutoshi in The Twilight Years.

One of the most striking features of Ariyoshi's novels is the sheer

vitality and resourcefulness of her female characters. Kae, Hana and
Akiko abide by a subtle code of ethics. Because they feel that they
possess greater mental strength and courage than the men in their
lives, they pretend to be weak. They do not balk at playing the part
of Japan's traditional woman - one who is obedient like a daughter,
as sexually available as a mistress, and as protective of her man's
interests as a doting mother. They perform the dominant role in the
stories presented in Ariyoshi's novels while the male characters are
vaguely presented and incidental to the plot. The boy-men are
spoiled, guarded, encouraged and guided by their wife-mothers,
who outwardly don the role of inferiors.

Paradoxically, Japan's women, traditional and modern, have

appeared to embrace the proverbial chains that bind them. Although
they have been crippled by Japan's traditions, they represent the
country's customs' most local guardians. In The River Ki, it is Hana
rather than her husband who checks their daughter's struggle for an
independent life. In The Waiting Years, Tomo is willing to endure
any humiliation and pain as long as she can maintain her appearance
of personal rectitude as a Japanese wife and mother and retain the
illusion of family harmony. Japanese women continue to act as the
'keepers of the flame,' carefully preserving the old rituals and beliefs
and passing them on from generation to generation. In Ariyoshi's
novels, it is inevitably the women who are familiar with, who
organize and act as the main participants in such fundamental
affirmations of social life as weddings, memorial services, and
funerals.

It would be tempting to describe Ariyoshi as a proto-feminist

determined to lay bare in her works the resistance of Japan's women
to an oppressively patriarchal social system. But Ariyoshi paints too
broad a fictional canvas to allow for such simplification or easy
generalization. Her generous impulses are directed towards her male
as well as her female characters. While her women are strong and
cannot usefully be classed simply as 'victims,' her men seem to
suffer from Japan's social constraints and expectations, too. Kosaku
in The River Ki finds his life as an unconventional Japanese male
uncomfortably circumscribed. In The Doctor's Wife and in The
Twilight Years we see, in Umpei and Nobutoshi, two childish men
who will never 'grow up,' who will never be encouraged to become
mature, fully-realized individuals. But there is hope for Japan's men.
In The Twilight Years Ariyoshi presents, in Akiko's son Satoshi, an
agreeable projection of a new generation of Japanese men who find
no compromise of their manly dignity in being affectionate,
humorous and tender, who are helpful in the household and
emotionally supportive of women.

Ariyoshi's Legacy
Judging from these three novels in their English translations,
Weston or Rimer or any of Ariyoshi's many other fans would find it
hard to claim that her novels and stories aspire to or achieve a level
higher than middle-brow fiction. Her writings have not survived
primarily because of inherent literary merit, nor are they chiefly
valued for that reason. As we have seen, The River Ki is dominated
by river imagery, with moral approval conferred on characters
possessing the sensitivity to appreciate natural beauty. Compared to
The Doctor's Wife and The Twilight Years, written and published
subsequently, The River Ki is a self-consciously literary work with
its heavy reliance on symbolism.

In this writer's opinion, Ariyoshi came to discard literary

pretensions, apart from occasional employment of irony, because of
her determination to be free to express in the most vivid, compelling
and compendious way what she perceived as the plight of Japanese
women. She may have felt impatient of any potentially limiting
ambitions to write self-consciously literary works. The Twilight
Years, in particular, exudes a sense of urgency, even of breathless
haste, as though Ariyoshi felt it her mission in that work to convey a
true or accurate portrait of the desperate situation faced by the
typical Japanese woman she embodied in the character of Akiko,
forced to bear a heavy burden of familial and social expectations
while attempting to find individual fulfillment in life.

Ariyoshi's sense of purpose may have been reinforced by her

awareness that Japanese women have been silenced both by the
cultural customs outlined above, which dictate a woman's
submission and obedience whatever the circumstances in which she
finds herself, and by the Japanese tradition which honors stoical,
wordless endurance of suffering.

Again, the dilemma facing Japanese women is not a new one. In

Onna-men, published in Japanese in 1958 and in English in 1983, as
Masks, Fumiko Enchi includes allusions to Noh plays and to the
classic The Tale of Genji in her story of a middle-aged woman,
Mieko Togano, who manipulates her daughter-in-law, Yasuko, in
her relationships with the two men in love with her. This aptly-
named work focuses on the masks - the variety of prescribed roles
dating from antiquity – which Japanese women have been forced by
social expectation to assume, and characterizes Japanese women as
'puppets' expected to dance to the tune of the feudal code of
womanly virtue.

A male character in Masks named Ibuki finds Yasuko an

unfathomable mystery. Yasuko is beautiful and intelligent but
apparently content to assume a role of passive submissiveness in her
relationship with her mother-in-law. Mieko, too, is inscrutable. She
is a stickler for correctness in her behavior, with her obsessive
conventionality leading Ibuki to assume her character must be a
superficial one. Yet, after he happens to read an essay Mieko had
written in her youth about the Lady Rokujo in The Tale of Genji,
Ibuki is forced to revise his estimate. In Ibuki's words, 'this seeming
shallowness of character, or weak-willed stupidity, could not be
reconciled with the beauty and the richness of the verses she wrote'
[26].

Ibuki comes to see Mieko and Yasuko as prototypes of female

characters in The Tale of Genji. Like the Lady Rokujo, they are
compelled to subsume their passion, intelligence, and individuality
beneath the roles Japanese society traditionally has demanded its
women to assume. Ibuki ascribes Mieko's and Yasuko's air of
tranquility to their donning, as in a Noh play, a mask, with all their
'deepest energies turned inward,' hidden from public view [27].

Ariyoshi's legacy, in putting women's issues to the forefront of her

fictional works, continues to exert an influence on subsequent
Japanese writers. A case in point is presented by Natsuo Kirino. For
those 'untravelled' individuals who supply gaps in their knowledge
of other countries by recourse to cultural stereotypes, the portrait of
Japan and its inhabitants presented in Kirino's recent best-selling
crime novel, Out, published in Japanese in 1997 and in English
translation in 2004, may come as a brutal awakening. In its
depiction of four 'desperate housewives' employed on the
'graveyard-shift' at a boxed-lunch factory in a dreary suburb of
Tokyo, Out presents a land and people far removed from popular
imaginings of geisha and cherry blossoms, of the pristine beauty of
Mt. Fuji presiding over orderly terraces of rice fields. Out's female
characters are not cherished blossoms of Japanese womanhood but
four individuals trapped in dysfunctional relationships with children
and partners, burdened by unbearably heavy chores and
responsibilities, who unite to assist each other when one of them, a
young housewife, impulsively murders her gambling, philandering
husband. The mutual assistance extends to the housewife's friends
consenting to dismember the corpse and to attempt to dispose of it
in rubbish bags, but their secret is discovered by a local yakuza loan
shark and by a ruthless nightclub owner, with disastrous results for
nearly all involved.

For all their crimes and misdemeanors, these four housewives are
presented by Kirino as victims rather than vicious criminals.
Kirino's sympathy is extended to her depictions of women pushed to
the edge of reason by the selfish, greedy, aggressive male characters
who populate her picture of contemporary Japan.

In Bodies of Evidence, published in 2004, a study of women,

society, and detective fiction in 1990s Japan, Amanda C. Seaman
argues that such authors as Kirino are riding the crest of the wave of
popularity accorded crime novels which transcend the who-dunnit
formula to offer an examination of pressing social issues in Japan.
Seaman ascribes what she describes as the recent boom in women
mystery writers like Kirino to their willingness to embrace, in their
works, the topic of woman's role in their native land: 'consumerism
and the crisis of identity, discrimination and workplace harassment,
sexual harassment and sexual violence, and the role of motherhood
in contemporary Japan' [28].

In this respect, Kirino and other such current bestselling female

authors of detective fiction in Japan as Miyabe Miyuki, Nonami
Asa, Shibata Yoshiki, and Matsuo Yumi can be seen as Ariyoshi's
benefactors in putting women's issues at the forefront of their
works. But they are not the only ones to benefit from her writings.
Although Ariyoshi passed away over twenty years ago, her works
continue to resonate with significance for contemporary
Japanologists. Sociologists and feminists focusing on the topic of
women in Japanese still routinely quote from such novels as The
Doctor's Wife and The Twilight Years in discussing issues presented
by traditional family life in Japan, including, in the first work,
rivalry between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law and, in the
second, the Japanese woman's responsibility for the care of aging,
ill, or senile in-laws or parents [29].

Japan's current 'Hanako syndrome,' characterized by a rapid increase

in young Japanese women who are single, have careers, continue to
live with their parents, and whose salaries are spent on self-
indulgences, was unforeseen by Ariyoshi [30]. Or perhaps she
tacitly disapproved of such a possibility. As we have seen, those
characters in her novels who refuse to accept their traditional roles –
such as Hana's daughter Fumio in The River Ki – are obliquely
punished, penalized or ostracized. Whether this signifies the author's
own implicit condemnation or her belief that unconventional
Japanese women necessarily lead lives of hardship and conflict is
unclear.

Despite the attempt by Japan's 'Hanakos' to forge a new life for

themselves, fundamental attitudes about women in Japan remain
little changed. In a recent study on Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951),
often described as Japan's most important woman writer of the
twentieth century, Joan Ericson describes the hostility and
condescension she encountered at an academic conference she had
attended in Tokyo in 1985 when she raised the issue of gender as
related to Japanese literature [31]. In her book, published in 1997,
she quotes at length a Japanese male academic's appraisal of a
popular woman writer, Kurahashi Yumiko:

When I read the works of Kurahashi, I am filled with admiration for

her intellect. The ranks of women writers (josei sakka) who, for the
most part rely on emotion, are not devoid of intellect. However, I
cannot help but think there is something different about Kurahashi's
intelligence or, more colloquially, her smarts, which sets her apart
from other women...Kurahashi's brain is more masculine, or
androgynous. You could even say that it has uniquely evolved, even
more than the average man's [32].

Ericson believes that many Japanese men and dismayingly, even

many educated Japanese women, are convinced that women
naturally are more emotional and intuitive, with the Japanese
woman writer's success being dependent on her ability to arouse
passion in her reader. She implies that Japanese women are
complicit in their own subservience in Japanese society, where the
term 'woman writer' remains a derogatory one and a stigma
continues to be attached to 'women's studies'. Praise for women is
reserved for those who are perceived to act either in an androgynous
or, better yet, a masculine fashion. In 1991, accordingly, Ariyoshi
won particular praise as representing a writer capable of exhibiting
characteristics the Japanese are reluctant to associate with a woman;
she was described as 'brilliant, non-emotional, and intellectual' [33].

In Out, the prospects for Japanese women remain depressingly

bleak. One of its four housewives is a widow living with an elderly
mother-in-law who requires diapering and feeding and another is
trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage with a sullen, taciturn
husband and a son whose bad luck has resulted in his being expelled
from the Japanese school system. A third lives with a partner who is
physically frightened of her and relies on her financially, while the
action of the novel stems from the fourth, the mother of two small
boys, who, on learning that her husband has gambled away all their
hard-earned savings, kills him in a passion of rage.

In Seaman's study of the recent boom in crime novels written by

Japanese women authors, she comments on the commonplace that
detective fiction, whatever its location, whoever its author,
represents a timeless genre; it is like a sonnet - an endless variation
on 'an inflexible form' [34]. She stresses, however, that Japanese
women writers differ from their western counterparts in one
important respect, which is in their depiction of the private lives of
their female protagonists. Whereas European and American women
novelists such as Marcia Mueller, Sara Paretsky, Liza Coday and
Sue Grafton feel free to develop independent female private eyes in
the hard-boiled tradition, the Japanese woman novelist is
constrained to emphasize her heroine's cultural context in Japan,
which is one of 'economic vulnerability, the threat of male violence,
and isolation' [35].

Notes
1. Mark Weston, Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan's Greatest
Men and Women (London: Kodansha International, 1999), p. 281.

2. In Lost Leaves: Women of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press, 2000), Rebecca L. Copeland examines the life and
career not only of Higuchi Ichiyo but of three of her peers – Miyake
Kaho, Wakamatsu Shizuko, and Shimizu Shikin – whom, she
argues, also represent important women writers of the period.

3. Joan E. Ericson, 'The Origins of the Concept of "Women's

Literature",' The Woman's Hand: Gender and Theory In Japanese
Women's Writing, edited by Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A.
Walker (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 79. Ericson
inclines towards the latter theory.

4. Sharalyn Orbaugh, 'The Body in Contemporary Japanese

Women's Fiction,' The Woman's Hand, op. cit., p. 127.

5. J. Thomas Rimer, A Reader's Guide To Japanese Literature

(Tokyo: Kondansha, 1988), p. 185. Rimer disliked the notion of
describing Ariyoshi as a 'woman writer,' preferring to remark that it
was 'Better surely to say that she is one of Japan's most evocative
and elegant modern novelists and that she is also a woman.'

6. Sawako Ariyoshi, The Doctor's Wife (Tokyo: Kondansha Press),

first published in Japanese as Hanaoka Seishu no tsuma in 1966,
translated into English by Wakako Hironaka and Ann Siller
Kostant, 1978, p. 49. Quotations from this book are hereafter cited
within the text.

7. Sawako Ariyoshi, The River Ki (Tokyo: Kodansha Press), first

published in Japanese, as Ki no kawa, in 1959, translated into
English by Mildred Tahara, 1981, pp. 14-5, p. 46. Quotations from
this book are hereafter cited within the text.

8. Sawako Ariyoshi, The Twilight Years (Tokyo: Kodansha), first

published in Japanese, as Kokotusu no hito, in 1972, translated into
English by Mildred Tahara, 1983, p. 8. Quotations from this book
are hereafter cited within the text.

9. See English Discussion Society, Japanese Women Now (Tokyo:

Women's Bookstore Shoukadoh, 1992), p. 14. According to the
editor: 'Japan is a democratic society now, but before 1947 under
the former constitution, through which the eldest son inherited the
family property together with the responsibility to respect his
ancestors, was almighty. It was his privilege and, at the same time,
duty to take care of all his family members with special respect to
his parents. And his wife, the yome had to be devoted to taking care
of the family members, especially of her husband's parents.'

10. Sonya Salamon, '"Male Chauvinism" as a Manifestation of Love

in Marriage,' included in Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected
Readings, revised edition (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1986), pp. 130-141.

11. Fujimura-Fanselow, Kumiko, and Atsuko Kameda, 'The

Changing Portrait of Japanese Men: A Dialogue Conducted
Between Charles Douglas Lummis and Satomi Nakajima,' Japanese
Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present, and
Future, edited by Kumiko Fujimura-Faneslow and Atsuko Kameda
(New York: The Feminist Press, 1995), p. 229.

12. Ibid.

13. Salamon, op. cit., p. 134.

14. Ohinata, Masami, 'The Mystique of Motherhood: A Key to

Understanding Social Change and Family Problems in Japan,'
Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present,
and Future, edited by Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko
Kameda (New York: The Feminist Press), p. 205.

15. Helen Macnaughtan, 'From "Post-war" to "Post-bubble":

Contemporary Issues for Japanese Working Women,' Perspectives
on Work, Employment and Society in Japan, edited by Peter
Matanle and Wim Lunsing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 33.

16. Ayumi Sasagawa, 'Is It Worth Doing? Educated Housewives'

Attitudes Towards Work,' Perspectives on Work, Employment and
Society in Japan, op. cit., pp. 187-91. Paradoxically, however, as
Sasagawa points out, 'While a number of housewives were used as a
cheap labour force to support the Japanese economy, the ideal
image of the married woman in the 1960 and 1970s was the full-
time housewife'.

17. Macnaughtan, op. cit., p. 38.

18. Masahiro Abe, 'Does Asymmetric Information Influence the

Wage Differential between Men and Women?' Japan Labor Review,
Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 23.

19. Merry Isaacs White, Modern Families in an Era of Upheaval

(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), p. 91.

20. Ibid.

21. Patricia Morley, The Mountain is Moving: Japanese Women's

Lives (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990, p. 92, p. 103. According to
Vera Mackie in Feminism in Modern Japan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 190, in an 'ideal' Japanese
family, 'the aged would be cared for in an extended family where
three generations shared the same residence,' but 'this ideal was a
long way from the reality of the latter decades of the twentieth
century, where most families lived in houses or apartments barely
large enough to house a nuclear family'. Mackie pointed out that 'As
long as women were mainly engaged in part-time labour, they
would be able to look after such relatives, a burden not easily shared
by men who worked the longest hours of any developed country'.
But the problem grew so extreme that a system of national insurance
for care of the elderly was instituted in the 'Nursing Care Insurance
Law' passed in 1997, to be implemented in 2000.

22. Sonya Salamon, '"Male Chauvinism" as a Manifestation of Love

in Marriage,' op. cit, p. 137.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., pp. 130-141.

25. Ibid., p. 136.

26. Fumiko Enchi, Masks (New York: Random House), first

published by Tokyo's Kodansha Press in Japanese as Onna-men in
1958, translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter, 1983, p.
91.

27. Ibid., p. 26.

28. Amanda C. Seaman, Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and

Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2004), p. 2.

29. See, for example, White, op. cit., who uses The Twilight Years
to illustrate the plight of Japanese women required to care for ailing
in-laws (pp. 9, 95, 100, 155). In her Japan: The Childless Society?
(London: Routledge, 1997), Muriel Jolivet describes The Doctor's
Wife as reflecting the 'universal conflicts' resulting from the
traditional rivalry between Japanese wives and their mothers-in-law.
See. p. 17.

30. Jolivet, op. cit., pp. 141-2.

31. Joan Ericson, Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern

Japanese Women's Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1997), p. x.

32. Ibid., p. 32.

33. Ibid., p. 105.

34. Seaman, op. cit., p. 145.

35. Ibid., p. 13, pp. 145-6.

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About the author

Wendy Jones Nakanishi, an American by birth, spent seven years
in Britain, earning her MA in 18th-century English Studies at
Lancaster University and her PhD at Edinburgh University, with a
doctoral thesis on Alexander Pope's correspondence. She has been a
resident in Japan since the spring of 1984, working first for five
years as a 'Guest Professor' at Tokushima Bunri University's Shido
campus and, since then, as a full-time tenured member of staff in the
Department of Language and Culture at Shikoku Gakuin University.
She has published widely in her academic field, mainly on the topic
of letters, diaries and journals, but recently has also been writing on
the topic of her experiences as a foreigner living in Japan, the wife
of a farmer and the mother of three sons.

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Copyright: Wendy Jones Nakanishi

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