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354 Journal of Japanese Studies
Reviewed by
GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN
University of Arizona
rural doctor's wife, the "important" (Meiji) official's wife (in The
WaitingYears, Onna saka, 1957), and the ex-wife of the early twen-
tieth century author.
A pervasive theme is jealousy and rivalryamong women. Fierce
competition sets women of differentages, classes and status against
each other. Consequently, the family is the setting for many of the
battles describedin the books. Subtle power plays between mother-
in-law and daughter-in-law,overt "pulling of rank" by household
mistresses in dealings with servants, tyrannicaldominationby older
sisters over younger sisters-these Japanese versions of hair-pulling
and eye-scratchingstand out more than do demonstrationsof female
solidarity.The women's self-awarenessmoreovermakes them seem
all the more manipulative.In A Certain Woman,the young divorcee
Yiko, using feminine guiles of fashionable dress and coy man-
nerisms, temporarilysucceeds in stealingthe attentionof fellow ship
passengers from an older, more respectable woman, who has been
treatingYoko with condescension. Having elevated her own stand-
ing amongthe passengers, Y6ko now feels she can speak to the older
woman as an equal. "Like a snake-charmerwatching the contor-
tions of a dying snake, Yoko observed with a mocking smile the
older woman's struggles" (p. 116).
At the root of such unabashedrivalrylies the rank-consciousness
inherited from the feudal period. Female antagonism in part is re-
lated to norms of social hierarchy. Daughters-in-law,house ser-
vants, younger sisters, and inn maids-women in inferiorpositions
within the hierarchicalsocial order-are deftly put in their place by
women in socially superiorpositions. For all her rebelliousness and
scandalous modernways, Yoko likes to act high class and insists on
being treated as such; she subscribes to the traditional superior-
inferiordelineationof rankin Japanese society. If women could not
receive such deferentialtreatmentfrom most men in their lives, they
could demand it from other women.
Competition among women is not merely due to rank-
consciousness; it reflects their helpless position in a family system
that made them dependenton their husbandsand in-laws. Women in
the novels thus compete with other women for men's support. Their
conflicts stem from their desperate need to hold on to their men,
without whom they could not survive. Because in all three books
this need is expressed in emotional as well as economic terms, it is
all the more poignant.
Although the Japanese family system, which perpetuatedfeudal
rank-consciousnessand male domination,is exposed as the villainin
356 Journal of Japanese Studies
these novels, what the female characters complain about, when they
allow themselves the luxury of complaint, is not the family as an
institution, nor social hierarchy, nor service to men as a feminine
ideal, but simply the failure of others to appreciate or deserve their
devotedness. Through the faithful, uncomplaining Tomo in The
Waiting Years, author Enchi Fumiko comes close to a radical
critique of the Japanese family, but she backs away.
Tomo felt a sudden, futile despair. ... Everything that she had
suffered for, worked for, and won within the restrictedsphere of a
life whose key she had for decades past entrustedto her wayward
husbandYukitomo lay within the confines of that unfeeling, hard,
and unassailablefortress summedup by the one word "family'....
Was it possible, then, that everythingshe had lived for was vain and
profitless?No: she shook her head in firmrejectionof the idea...
(p. 190).
emerges in Enchi Fumiko's The Waiting Years. The full force of the
woman's antagonism in this novel is directed at her husband, a
provincial official of ex-samurai lineage who has achieved a modicum
of wealth and fame in the service of the new Meiji government.
Tomo is elegant and controlled throughout years of struggling to
maintain her role as mistress of her husband's household. If she
cannot retain her husband's affection, she can at least try to win his
gratitude, and by continuing to make herself indispensable to him,
even as he seduces not only one household servant after another but
also his daughter-in-law, she remains at the center of female power
within the household. A further strategy to preserve her authority is
to ally with her female rivals rather than weakening them. Tomo's
self-sacrificing too, however, is eventually reduced to grotesque
proportions, as when she helps arrange the boudoir for her hus-
band's liaison with the young girl she has, at his request, chosen for
him.
Tomo's response to her predicament, like the response of the
doctor's wife, is to elevate her suffering to a virtue. This is in keep-
ing with the common view that Meiji women (and their Victorian
counterparts) were expected to suffer silently and beautifully. The
Japanese woman's "masochistic morality," as George DeVos has
dubbed it, evidently continues to have a place in contemporary liter-
ature, television drama, and popular lore, where the reward for such
fortitude frequently comes with death. The imminent death of the
mother-in-law is often the occasion for her to show gratitude toward
her daughter-in-law and for the latter to feel vindicated and proud of
her endurance. In Tomo's case, the reward, if one can call it such,
comes through revenge, expressed on her own deathbed and ac-
complished by being so extraordinarily noble, so exaggerated in her
selflessness that she exposes her husband's callousness and, in a
final unique act whose revelation here would destroy the reader's
suspense, she virtually shatters his ego.
It is interesting that contemporary Japanese female authors like
Enchi and Ariyoshi, in trying to put themselves into the minds of
women of a past generation, reproduce stereotypes of the ideal
woman in existence at the time. Perpetuating the apotheosis of fe-
male misery without providing either alternate role models or histor-
ical or sociological insights into the cause of this misery, their novels
unintentionally affirm the traditional definition of the Japanese
woman's role even at a time of great change in Japanese women's
lives.
Writing in the early twentieth century, but about a woman of a
Review Section 359
Reviewed by
JAMES W. WHITE
University of North Carolina
These two books share two majorvirtues-they deal with subjects
only rarely treated in English to date, and they do so with consider-
able skill. This is not to say that they are without flaws-Glickman is
somewhat repetitious and overdoes things methodologically, while
Allinson fails sometimes to give full credit to, or take full advantage
of, methods of analysis available to him. Overall, however, both