Brief biographies of five Japanese women who challenged national
mores and cultural expectations in the years before WWII. Novelist
Birnbaum (An Eastern Tradition, 1980) is an American fluent in
Japanese (she also translated one of her subjects' novels, Uno
Chiyo's Confessions of Love) and familiar with Japanese ways. Two
of these studies were undertaken as assignments for the New Yorker.
Astounded by the complex, self-contradictory lives of these women,
Birnbaum found herself "left with only the humble feeling that the
truth about another person is as hard to grasp as a single autumn
leaf rushing down a swollen river." Her subjects are artistic and
intense: actress Matsui Sumako, who brought Ibsen's Nora and
Wilde's Salome to the Japanese stage but hanged herself after her
married lover's suicide; painter Takamura Chieko, whose husband
immortalized her in poetry after she was institutionalized for
mental illness; poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, high-born and beautiful,
who divorced her wealthy husband via a public pronouncement in a
newspaper and went to live with a younger, poorer lover; the
popular novelist Uno, who had a multiplicity of husbands and lovers
and wrote all about them; and contemporary film actress Takamine
Hideko, who began her career as a child star in the 1920s and
continued in popular Japanese films until the late 1970s. All of
these subjects represented Japan's first thrust at freedom for
women, although none saw themselves as feminists. Birnbaum captures
their individualism, which she sets in the restrained and
disciplined context of Japanese society at the time. Curiously
involving miniatures of five brave women who confronted, but did
not always overcome, rigid social barriers. (Kirkus Reviews)
The stunning biographical portraits in "Modern Girls, Shining
Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, " some adapted from essays that first
appeared in "The New Yorker, " explore the lives of five women who
did their best to stand up and cause more trouble than was
considered proper in Japanese society. Their lives stretch across a
century and a half of explosive cultural and political
transformations in Japan. These five artists-two actresses, two
writers, and a painter-were noted for their talents, their beauty,
and their love affairs rather than for any association with
politics. But through the fearlessness of their art and their
private lives, they influenced the attitudes of their times and
challenged the status quo.
Phyllis Birnbaum presents her subjects from various
perspectives, allowing them to shine forth in all of their
contradictory brilliance: generous and petulant, daring and timid,
prudent and foolish. There is Matsui Sumako, the actress who
introduced Ibsen's Nora and Wilde's Salome to Japanese audiences
but is best remembered for her ambition, obstreperous temperament
and turbulent love life. We also meet Takamura Chieko, a promising
but ultimately disappointed modernist painter whose descent into
mental illness was immortalized in poetry by a husband who may well
have been the source of her troubles. In a startling act of
rebellion, the sensitive, aristocratic poet Yanagiwara Byakuren
left her crude and powerful husband, eloped with her revolutionary
lover, and published her request for a divorce in the newspapers.
Uno Chiyo was a popular novelist who preferred to be remembered for
the romantic wars she fought. Willful, shrewd, and ambitious, Uno
struggled for sexual liberation and literary merit. Birnbaum
concludes by exploring the life and career of Takamine Hideko, a
Japanese film star who portrayed wholesome working-class heroines
in hundreds of films, working with such directors as Naruse,
Kinoshita, Ozu, and Kurosawa. Angry about a childhood spent working
to provide for greedy relatives, Takamine nevertheless made peace
with her troubled past and was rewarded for years of hard work with
a brilliant career.
Drawing on fictional accounts, interviews, memoirs, newspaper
reports, and the creative works of her subjects, Birnbaum has
created vivid, seamless narrative portraits of these five
remarkable women.
General
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