cover image To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913-1938

To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913-1938

. Seal Press (CA), $12.95 (225pp) ISBN 978-0-931188-43-5

This powerful collection of stories by nine Japanese feminists explores with fresh vision the condition of women in the turbulent preWorld War II years. Trapped between traditional Japanese ideals of femininity and the demands of the autonomous artist, burning with ambition yet burdened by poverty, these women indeed wrote to live and lived to write, and the struggle for creative fulfillment runs through their prose. Divorce, sexual desire, hunger, Marxist politics and women's conflicting roles also provide themes for these unusually strong tales. Okamoto Kanoko, a flamboyant esthete, writes about a self-absorbed female artist whose inner strength overwhelms her inferior male friend. Hayashi Fumiko, a poor pedlar's daughter with poetic flair, relates with vivid detachment a woman's battle to rise above destitution. (May)