SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover)
In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, Japan equally attracts with its underground culture. Since its 19th-century erotic woodcuts stormed France, Japan repels and beguiles the world with hostess bars, male bras, used underwear for sale and other twists of the water-trade.
For a well-researched, feminine perusal of Japan's underground history, pick up Amy Stanley's "Selling Women." Stanley provides background and context for Japan's underground sex trade, traveling back to early Tokugawa Japan. Stanley, a history professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, clearly pieces together the cultural and economic forces behind the marginalization of Japanese women into a product, tracing the forces that both imprisoned and liberated women from societal expectations.