Joan Ericson's magnificent survey of writing by Japanese women significantly advances the current debate over the literary category of ""women's literature"" in modern Japan and demonstrates its significance in the life and work of twentieth-century Japan's most important woman writer, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). Until the early 1980s, the literary category of ""women's literature"" (joryu bungaku) segregated most writing by modern Japanese women from the literary canon. ""Women's literature"" was viewed as a sentimental and impressionistic literary style that was popular but was critically disparaged. A close scrutiny of Hayashi Fumiko's work--in particular the two pieces masterfully translated here, the immensely popular novel Horoki (Diary of a Vagabond) and Suisen (Narcissus)--shows the inadequacies of categorizing her writing as ""women's literature."" Its originality and power are rooted in the clarity and immediacy with which Hayashi is able to convey the humanity of those occupying the underside of Japanese society, especially women.

Ericson reviews the role of gender in classical and early modern Japanese literary traditions, examining the preeminent position of women writers in the classical canon and the virtual eclipse of women's voices prior to their reemergence in the modern era. Her assessment of recent feminist debates that shifted the terminology used to categorize writing by women leads her to an original interpretation of the origins and significance of the concept of women's literature. Utilizing sources in both Japanese and Western languages, Ericson interprets the crystallization in the 1920s of the category "women's literature" by considering both literary aesthetics by gender shifted with the growth of women's journals, the increasing sophistication of female readers, and the greater disposable income of working women and housewives. Her approach adds to the recent Japanese feminist discovery of male patrons editing the work of women writers to conform to expectations of femininity by relating gendered institutional practices in the publishing industry to the rise of mass female readership and the increasingly polarized environment in politics and the arts. A close scrutiny of Hayashi Fumiko's work - in particular the two pieces masterfully translated here, the immensely popular novel Horoki (Diary of a Vagabond) and Suisen (Narcissus) - shows the inadequacies of categorizing her writings as "women's literature".

Passing, Posing, Persuasion interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of "passing" or "posing." Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity. The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors—in multiple senses of the word—from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries.