As Ruth Ozeki writes in her foreword to this very interesting collection of new writing: "Japanese society is undergoing radical change. The traditional family . . . is breaking down. Marriage and birthrates are declining, while the divorce rate is escalating."
This means, among other things, fewer stay-at-home wives and mothers, more career opportunities, and many more women opting to marry later, or not at all.
Consequently the image that women have of themselves is correspondingly changing. The docile and submissive model, which was standard until fairly recently, has been in many ways liberated to reflect a person more authentic, and more free.
Much of this is reflected in recent fiction and something like a portrait of the contemporary woman is to be found in a selection such as this. As Ozeki continues, in this book "most of the authors are prizewinning popular Japanese novelists who have never before been published in English, and their stories paint a picture of contemporary Japanese women's lives that is fresh, new, and possibly even shocking to readers in the West."
Shocking, some of these stories will indeed be to those who believe that the modest and conservative woman of earlier fiction is still the major model. She is now rare, if not extinct. In Tamaki Daigo's "Milk," a contemporary teenager shows us another world, one where adult men date middle-school girls and where "sex is as fickle as the changing weather." In Yuzuki Muroi's "Piss," we are taken much further -- a Shibuya-girl prostitute on her 20th birthday.
In Rio Shimamoto's "Inside," a teenager, otherwise much different, struggles with the same kind of problem. Her parents' marriage dissolves at the same time that her boyfriend grows importunate.
Shungiku Uchida's "My Son's Lips's" reveals a woman with identity problems, and "The Unfertilized Egg" by Junko Hasegawa is about a woman contemplating a broken affair and pondering fertilization.
Amy Yamada's "Fiesta" is an allegory where all the emotions are given personalities. Chiya Fujino's "Her Room" shows us a divorced woman pursued by friendship. Nobuko Takagi's "The Shadow of the Orchid" is about the onset of menopause and the suspicion of infidelity in a world where fidelity means little.
The stories are arranged chronologically (from virginity to menopause, as it were) and most of the authors (Amy Yamada is an exception) are being translated for the first time. All the stories are in the first person, and mostly in the present tense. They were only recently published in Japanese (the oldest is from seven years ago); a consequence is a fresh slice of Japanese women's idea of themselves.
How very different this is from the good wife/wise mother of earlier fiction. The narrator of "Inside" looks at differences between generations. "People in their twenties are still the same height as people in their forties, but their legs are ten centimeters longer than before."
Change is also seen in the frankness of the writing, its freedom from cant, and its disdain of sexual politics. "To yearn for the love of the same person for your whole life," observes the narrator in "Milk," "it's like a woman from the olden days. It's classic. It has a kind of snap to it, like when you bite into a hot dog sausage."
So free is the writing that this collection is far ahead of community standards. "Piss" will be able to shock some, and in this family newspaper I still cannot tell you the title of Shungiku Uchida's 1993 best-selling novel.
The fruitful difference of this new image is beautifully captured by the translators. They all faced the same problem: how to make a first-person narrative personal enough to compel belief. And they have all solved it -- a difficult problem of person and tone.
They also deserve to have their names listed: Cathy Lane, Avery Fischer Udagawa, Louise Heal, and Philip Price with especial appreciation going to Hisako Ifshin and Leza Lowitz for their tour-de-force translation of "Piss."
This is a major collection and one that informs as much as it delights and appalls.
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