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Anne Sokolsky ed., "Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, and welcome back to another episode on New Books in Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm Jingyi Li from Occidental College. Our guest today is Dr. Anne Sokolsky, a professor of Japanese literature at Denison College. Her work especially focuses on women writers in Japan. Her new edited volume, Bold Breaks Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce, was recently published through University of Hawaii Press last year. This volume collected works written by female authors from the Heian to the Heisei period, examine the changing attitude of women writers toward marriage and family relationships, particularly divorce, and each essay is accompanied by a translation of the original Japanese work. Welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today.
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C
Oh, thank you for having me.
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B
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself first, your journey as a scholar and your current work?
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C
Yes. So currently I'm, as you mentioned, I'm a visiting faculty member at Denison University, where I've been teaching since 2021. I teach courses for their international studies, Women and Gender Studies and East Asian Studies. Prior to Denison University, I was a full professor and chair of the Comparative Literature Department at Ohio Wesleyan University, where I was a tenured faculty member for 15 years. At Denison, I teach a series of courses on East Asian women that are the result of some of my scholarships. So this semester I'll be teaching a course titled Bad Girls of Japan. I also teach a course, Taiwan Women's Voices, which stems from my research on colonial Japanese literature coming out of Taiwan. And then my sort of general East Asian women's course is Money Talks East Asian Women, Economics and Literature. So in terms of how I became a professor, it's actually a long story, so I'll try and keep it short. It was rather this route. I was a psychology major in college, so I think I took a few literature classes, but not many. I really had the intention of going into neuroscience research, but because I didn't get accepted into the graduate programs I wanted to get into, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, My life took a completely different journey. So then I ended up joining Peace Corps. I was very much interested in living overseas, and I really liked the sort of mission of Peace Corps. And at the time, I had been studying French in high school and college. So I wanted to go to a country, a Peace Corps country, where I would speak French. So I ended up in Morocco. And so Morocco is in North Africa. It's a Muslim country. And I ended up teaching English in a high school there. I tell my students it's probably one of the most fascinating periods of my life. It was definitely one of those transformational experiences for me. I can't say enough about my Peace Corps experience. So there are three things I learned from that experience that have kind of shaped the kind of courses I teach and the kind of research I do today. So one was I realized I like learning languages. I just have to be in the country to learn them, not in the classroom. And I found out that I'm actually good at learning languages, But I have to be in the country, not in the classroom to do so. The second thing I learned was really an awareness of the precarious situation of women Depending on where they've been born. So I was raised in New York City, came of age in the 1970s. I was raised in a very intellectual family environment. I had a father who was thrilled to have daughters and. And always encouraged us to get the highest education possible. But in Morocco, women my age, I was in my early 20s. I was meeting women my age who were illiterate. I was meeting women who were viewed as a burden to their family, not as an asset. And so I came home from that experience almost shaken by how had I been born somewhere else to a different kind of family, My life could have been very different. So I had never thought about women's issues. Before I went to Bronx Science for high school, there was nothing ever that told me I was a second class citizen because of my gender until I lived in Morocco and my life drastically changed. So that's sort of the reason I became very interested in women's studies. Then after Morocco, I worked in publishing for a year. So didn't really like corporate work at all. It doesn't suit my personality. So I, through a friend, was able to learn about the JET program. So then for the first time ever, I went to Japan, to Asia, and really loved that experience. And there's always been in the back of my mind growing up a desire to go to Asia, especially China, because my grandfather had been a journalist in China. And I know the listeners won't be able to see, but you can see I have these scrolls behind me that date to my childhood and they're from my grandfather. I grew up in a home with a lot of Chinese art and actually Japanese art. And these were all souvenirs that were brought back from my grandfather's time in China. So there was always in my family life an interest in East Asia. And so always in the back of my mind I thought at some point I need to get to Asia. So the JET program gave me that chance. I really loved living in Japan. I realized that what I was observing in Japan oftentimes was different from what was being written about Japan at this point. It's the 1980s, so I came to realize that to really understand a country and all its complexity, one, you need to live in the country for a while, and two, you really need to speak the language. And so eventually, after working in Japan for a while, I got into Berkeley's PhD program in Japanese Language and Literature. And so the rest of, as I tell my students, is history. And here I am a professor of Japanese literature, even though I was a neuroscience major in college.
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B
It's quite amazing. I think a lot of your reflections of the experience really was reflected in the book, in how the chapters were selected, how the female authors were selected, and how just this subject of divorce in general reflect your thoughts throughout this journey. And since you mentioned your work in the publishing industry, I was wondering if you would also like to take this chance to mention about your work as an editor of the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature for listeners who, well, if our listeners are from Japanese Studies, you probably already know this. But for anyone who doesn't know, the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature is possibly, I think, arguably the most prestigious and important journal for Anyone who studies Japanese linguistics, language and literature. And I, as a student and a scholar, benefited a lot from this journal. So first, I want to say thank you if I can't even represent my colleagues and friends from this field. And can you just tell us a little bit about your work as the editor after having devoted so many years to this journal?
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C
Oh, yes, I'm happy to. So I took over as the literature editor for the Journal of Japanese Language and Literature after Rebecca Copeland had been the editor. And I was very honored when Rebecca asked me to take over. And I've really enjoyed it. As a professor, I've always taught at small liberal arts colleges. At Ohio Wesleyan, I was the only East Asian literature person on the campus. And at the time, that's when I became editor. And so to be editor was a way for me to stay very connected to the field and sort of find out what's going on with scholarship, who is writing what. So it was actually very advantageous for me to be editor. It was a way for me to connect with colleagues in my field when I was intellectually very isolated at a small campus. Denison University is different. I actually have many colleagues in the field of East Asian Studies at Denison University, so the experience there is a bit different. But I still very much enjoy being editor because I would say for the most part, the authors whom we publish are junior colleagues. Graduate students are junior colleagues, but that's not always the case. We do publish articles of well established authors and scholars as well. But for the junior colleagues, I very much view it as a mentoring role. Anything I can do to help someone get published, especially if they're coming up for tenure, it's so important. So I very much cherish that role. I'm not at a research institution with graduate students, so in a lot of ways, the authors whom I work with who are either graduate students or junior colleagues, I kind of view in that mentoring way. But it also really helps me stay in touch with the field. It's an amazing way to. As I said, when you're finding reviewers, you have to figure out who's writing about what because we do double blind peer review. So, yeah, it's been a really rewarding job for me in that way, professionally and intellectually. And then the other thing I just wanted to add for people listening, because so much of my scholarship has been translation, I feel translation is a very important aspect of our skill sets. We're sort of the bridge between Japanese culture and English speaking. I want to say American, but the English speaking world. As Editor, I do publish translations and essays often tied with the translation. So if anyone is interested in something like that, you know, please reach out to me.
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B
Thank you. And thank you again for all you did, you all you have done and will be continue doing for our field. Now, let's talk about the book. When I first got this book, I was very intrigued by the choice of the subject, divorce. We have seen several studies on women in Japanese literature, but the subject of divorce is quite a unique one, let alone the scope of this volume, which covers from pre modern to modern Japan. Can you tell us about how the idea from this volume was born? And although our listeners cannot see this, but could you also share with us your choice of the book cover, which is an X in a calligraphy style?
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C
Yes, yes, it's so. Yes. Choosing a book cover is very interesting. It's a very interesting process because it's really important, right? You want it to be eye catching and also somehow capture the spirit of what's inside between the covers. For people who don't know, X in Japanese is batsu. And in Japan there's a thing called a koseki, the family registry. It's a very official document. It's held in the government offices of, I think the municipal government offices of where people reside. So when you get married, the marriage has to be recorded in the koseki, the family registry. And when there's a divorce, an X is placed, a batsu is placed in the koseki, and the the name of the person, usually the wife, is removed from the husband's family registry. And in the past in Japan, a family registry, even though it's a government document, had a lot of social nuance. So it was never good. If anyone was doing research on a family's background, for example, in an arranged marriage, research would be done on the family backgrounds. And if it was seen that there were X's in the family registry, that was bad, right? Also, children's legitimacy. So there's a way to mark an illegitimate child versus a legitimate child in the family registry. So anyhow, the X, the batsu, represents that X that appears in a family registry for divorce, which in the past has had a very negative nuance for the entire family's reputation. It was done in sort of this calligraphy style. And it was. The designer was trying to kind of. I think it comes across very boldly, you know, to tie with the title of the book. Because even though it's of batsu, which has in the past a negative nuance, the sort of connecting thread of all the stories in the book are that these are stories of bold moves of the women in the stories. And then the common thread of the writers, especially the three modern writers, is that they were all women who lived ahead of the. Of their time. They were women who did not follow sort of this conservative, good wife, wise mother ideology. So even though it's an X, it's sort of a bold X. Yes. So then you had asked about the origins, like how this book even came about. So that's another long story, which I'll try and condense. There were sort of three moving pieces. So probably the real initiator of this was I had gotten my first book published on Tamara Toshiko. She was the subject of my dissertation and then the subject of my first book. But in my first first book, the title is not just A New Woman. The Political Awakenings in Tamara de Toshiko's fiction from 1936 to 1938. I'm actually looking at eight stories that she wrote in the latter part of her life. And the latter part of her life, her writing career was not as well celebrated. She was better known for the works she produced from 1911 to 1918, when she was part of this new Woman movement, Early Japanese feminism. And then she leaves Japan and lives in North America for about a decade, and then comes back to Japan in 1936. And Japan's a very different country by then. She left in 1918 during the Taisho period, and she returns in 1936 with the rise of Japanese militarism. And so in my dissertation, I had written about her entire life and had analyzed, had discussed significant works from each period of her life. In my book was actually the translations of these 1936-38 stories. And then my introduction to that first book was really a condensed version of my dissertation, which was over, like 200 pages. So what was left out was this first story that she wrote, this first published story that she wrote in 1903 that appears in this current book, Bolt Breaks. And I was looking. I was going to submit it to a journal and was getting a response. We don't publish translations anymore. So that's one of the reasons I published translations for Journal of Japanese Language and Literature. So then I reached out to Rebecca Copeland and was sort of trying to brainstorm with her about what I should do. And I think she was the one who suggested we put together a panel on this topic, because I knew Rebecca had written about Uno Chiyo, who's also another iconic woman of divorce. And so Then I reached out to another colleague, Eleanor Hogan, who writes about Tsushima Yuko, another iconic woman Japanese woman writer of divorce. And then we invited Achiara Dechivere to be part of the panel because I knew her work on pre modern Japanese literature. And then Rebecca's graduate student Laurel Taylor joined us as well. And so we presented at the association for Asian Studies in 2019 and the room was packed. And so afterwards we, we discussed what to do next. Clearly there was interest in the topic. So now what should we do? And as an editor I said, well, my journal publishes special editions where there's a series of essays. But Rebecca was the one who said we should aim bigger, like let's do a book. So that's how the book came about, really. I was looking for a venue by which to publish this translation that I had done ages ago on this story. I have in this book Dew Drenched. So the story is Tsuyuake Korumo in English translation, Dew Drenched Robe. So yeah, the book is a result of me trying to find a way to publish that story. So that, that's the pragmatic thread. And then the other thing that kind of shapes the book and the way I selected the contributors was I was noticing in my classes students would talk about marriage housewife in very ahistorical terms, as if there's always been a nuclear family, as if the only way people marry is walking down an aisle, a man and a woman making the decision or whatever. Things have changed a lot now about concepts of marriage, but I was just noticing sort of an ahistorical understanding of marriage. And so that factors very much in the introduction and sort of the selection process. And that's why I wanted at least one work from pre modern Japanese literature, because I wanted to be able to talk about Heian period concepts of unions, Edo period concepts of unions, that a high divorce rate is not some linear progression as if the past was everyone was married and staying married. And a high divorce rate is a sign of social decline or social progress, depending on your point of view, that there have been ups and downs, peaks and dips, and the peaks and the dips are results of different social historical situations.
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B
I guess we can start with this social historical situation since you mentioned earlier that that this concept of divorce in Japan is not currently or has been for a while associated with words like mistake or bazi, mistake or penalty or negative nuances like that. Was it historically like this? Since the volume started with Ham period Japan, Maybe we can start from there. How was marriage and Divorce perceived.
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C
In.
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B
In the beginning of Japanese literature, how was the man woman involved in, I guess, the first divorce in Japanese literature? And from that kind of portrayal, what do we know about the social conception of marriage, divorce, or just relationships in general at that time?
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C
Kale is. So I might actually start answering your question with the words for divorce, because that's kind of how I begin my whole introduction to the book, because I find that even interesting, right? So in the introduction I talk about, if you go online to any kind of dictionary type in English, divorce in Japanese, many words come up. And so the first definition right now that'll come up is rikkon, which reflects the legal definition of divorce since the Meiji period. And the Meiji period, for anyone who doesn't know, is 1868 to 1912. And that means the separation or dissolution of a marriage or legal divorce. The only story in our book collection where the word rikon appears is in Eleanor Hogan's chapter on Tsushima Yuko. And Tsushima Yuko's story is from the 1970s. Then the second definition is ribetsu, which indicates a separation rather than a legal dissolution. The next definition is rien, the separation of family ties. So this ri means to separate. And the story in my collection that uses the word rien is Tamara Toshiko's story Tsuyoake goromo or do drenched robes. Other definitions that other Japanese words that come up are enkidi, the cutting of family ties, fufu, wakare, the parting of a couple. So in Rebecca Copland's chapter where she translates Unochio's story, Parting Pleasure, the Japanese title is Wakaremo tanoshi, right? So the verb to separate, wakaru, is in Unochio's title. And in that story, there's no discussion of. Of divorce per se. The closest is the dissolving of a relationship. And the word used is kaisho. And so now this goes back in time and then to Charo's De Verri's chapter, which is a medieval retelling of a Heian period story of the Asakai affair. That's from this work called Sagoro Monogatari or the Tale of Sagoromo. There's no word for divorce, right? So the closest is this idea of shuqke, which literally means the leaving from the home, which in Heim period time meant the leaving of the material world. So in that story, the divorce occurs because a young woman who doesn't want to be forced into an arranged marriage chooses to become a nun and leave the material world. And then finally, I actually end my chapter talking about how now, in Japanese, in katakana, which is the Alphabet for foreign words imported into the Japanese language, there is now debosu. So the katakana pronunciation of the English word divorce. But by no means, and normally a word that appears in katakana implies that it's this foreign idea imported into the Japanese language. But I end my introduction saying there's nothing imported about divorce in Japanese culture. That divorce has been prevalent. The idea of divorce or separation has been prevalent in Japan since the first work of Japanese literature. So that sort of gets to the second part of your question, I think, which is, when was the first divorce? When did that first divorce appear in Japanese literature? And so that gets me to. The kojiki and the story of Izanami and Izanagi, right? And so. For anyone who doesn't know, I should probably step back and explain the kojiki. So the Kojiki, which gets translated as an account of ancient matters, was compiled in 712 by Ono Yasumaro at the request of Empress Genmei. And the Kojiki and the Nihongi are considered the first extant works of Japanese literature. And the main purpose of the kojuki was to establish a basis for Japan's political power structure that connected the current ruling class of the time to the divine world of Japanese Shinto deities as a way to sort of create a culture of Japan that was separate and distinct from Chinese culture, which had been a major influence in Japanese culture. So it's really Japan's first work of literature that says, here is our Japanese culture, and our ruling families are descended from these deities and. And provides legitimacy for the single dynasty rule that has been in Japan since its beginnings and something very distinct from Chinese history of dynasties. And so the Izanami and Izanagi story is considered the first marriage in Japan and the first divorce in Japanese literature. And so Izanami is the man. I'm sorry, Izanami is the woman, and Izanagi is the man. And sometimes they're described as a brother and sister, sometimes a husband and wife. Oftentimes brother, husband, sister, wife coupling, right? And between the two of them, they create 14 islands and 35 deities. And the divorce occurs after Izanami, the wife or the sister, has given birth to the fire God, and her body's all scorched, and she dies from this birth. She's been giving tons of births, and so she ends up in the world of Yomi, a world of death and darkness. And Izanagi is very upset and he follows her into this dark world from the land of the living. And he says, I miss you and I want you to come back with me into the land of the living. And she says, let me consult with the spirits first, the deities first of the yomi of this dark world, to see if they will allow me to leave. And then she says to him, please do not look at me. And of course, he doesn't live up to that promise. He turns around and he looks at her and what he sees is not a beautiful woman, but an unsightly vision, unsightly woman covered in maggots. You know she's dying, right? And he's repulsed by this and flees from her. And she's furious at him because now he's shamed her and he's also not kept his promise. And there's this big chase scene where she's chasing after him and he gets out of yomi. And as he leaves, he puts this boulder in the entryway so that she cannot escape and follow him into the living world. And in the Kojiki, there are many different translations of the kojiki. In earlier versions, Kojiki Japanese is very, very ancient. So the literal translation of the kanji that were used is like hand over a thing, door. So it's been translated in different ways as they broke their trough or they exchange leave takings. The most recent translation by Gustav Heldt in 2014, he actually uses the word divorce. And he writes as they stood there with the boulder between them, they declared themselves divorced. So then Natsuo Kirino, a famous Japanese woman writer born in 1951. In 2008, she did a retelling of the Izanami Izanagi myth. So in Japanese, the title is Joshinki, or in English translation, the Goddess Chronicle, which Rebecca Copeland translated in 2013. And in this retelling, Natsuo Kirino gives voice to Izanami the woman and writes her backstory and her life in the world of yomi. And in not so Kirino's retelling, she actually uses the Japanese word rien, separation of family ties. And in her retelling, it is not a mutual decision of divorce. She very much makes it a one sided decision coming from the man Izanagi. So in Rebecca Copeland's translation, the scene is, my beloved wife, Izanami, you are now the goddess of the realm of the dead and we must go our separate ways. I, meaning Izanagi the man, I hereby declare our divorce. So Natsu Kirino, in her retelling really brings pathos to Izanami's point of view of rejection, betrayal, and that the separation is very much one sided. So I'm gonna be teaching this, this work, this whole segment that I've just gone over in my Bad Girls of Japan class. And I think it's really interesting, sort of the myth, the origin story of this first marriage, first divorce, and how somehow it was this mutual decision. And then Natsuo Kirino writing in 2008, really showing a very pained separation of the two. So that's the myth side of it all. Yes. So. Heian period attitudes about marriage and divorce were very, very different. And I think of the Tale of Genji as sort of the iconic work of unions coming and going. And with the Haym period, when I teach something like the Tale of Genji, I really try and avoid using the word marriage because I don't want my students to conflate it with what we think of today. So the Heian period was very much the era of political marriages. Or let me step back with the Heian period. What you're dealing with is the ultimate goal is the harmony of society. There's no such thing as individual human rights. That's not going to come into any kind of Japanese vocabulary until the Meiji period. So everything is about the harmony of the social group and people are just players in this bigger social harmony. And for the aristocratic class, which is really what we know about in literature, the first marriage is the political marriage. That's the important marriage, that's the one between families for political expediency. And then all other unions are emotional for personal desire and they come and go. So in the Tale of Genji, the famous thing is if the man shows up to the woman's house and the men were always going to the women. It was uksori local, right. The men go to the woman's home. So the man goes to the woman's home for three nights. That's a union. When he stops showing up, that's the dissolution. And one of the most famous works of a woman who's a secondary wife, not the primary political wife, is a Kagero Nikki, the Kagero diary where she is enraged when the man stops visiting her. And I would have used, I mean, when I was thinking of the structure of the book, I would have used that. But it's a long work and it's already available in English translation. Yes. In the Heian period, things were very, very fluid. There was sort of what you do for the sake of the Group and then your personal stuff is on the side. But the primary goal is the group if you're an aristocratic class. Right. Because that's where assets could be lost or status, things like that.
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B
So from the Han period to well after that, the legal system, social structure, dominating ideology, all shifted quite a lot throughout time. And in your own chapter, you focused on Tamuro Toshiko, whom you titled the Queen of Divorce. She lived through two of the most important transitional periods in Japanese history. One was during the Meiji Restoration and the other was through the two wards or between the two wards. So from her writing, how do you interpret her understanding of woman's roles in relationships, family and society? And what does she do that you would title her? The Queen of Divorce? Yeah.
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C
So where do I begin there? Yes. So maybe first I'll give a little historical background to fast forward to Tamara Toshiko. So for people listening, Tamara Toshiko was born in 1884 and died in 1945. And yes, the Meiji period, which is the beginning of Japan's sort of modern period, Japan becoming a Nation begins in 1868. So by her time things had changed. In terms of legal documents that shaped Japanese understanding of the family system and family law. Prior to the Meiji period, the legal documents dominated was the Taiho code of 701. And that was a Chinese Confucian influenced legal document that remained the foundation of Japanese family law until the Meiji era civil code of 1898. That was a very Confucian influenced document. That sort of gets to what I was saying earlier about the differences. The ultimate goal is social harmony, major goal of Confucianism. And you do everything for the sake of the social harmony of the group. So now the Meiji era in which Tamara Toshiko was born, you get this new document, the Meiji civil code of 1898. And what is really significant about, about that is that for the first time ever, it centralizes the process of marriage and therefore divorce. So prior to the Meiji era, you know, in the medieval period and Edo period, everything was clan based. Right. Japan as a nation didn't exist. Everything was clan based. You belonged to a clan. And. And as a result, there were regional differences in how different clans handled unions, marriages and divorce. And I get into that in a lot of detail in my introduction. But by the Meiji period, with this Meiji civil Code, everything is becoming centralized. There is now a constitution that says the Emperor is sort of the father of the nation and all the people of this nation are subjects to the Emperor. Their identity is no longer to a Clan it is to this emperor who's sort of this father figure of this new thing called Japan the nation. And this is the rise of this bureaucracy. And so as part of the rise of this bureaucracy is this family system, these ia seido which made the family sort of the subunit of Japanese society. And you have the head of the family who is legally responsible for all members in the family. And typically the head of the family was a man, the father. So that sort of is the the world in which Tamara Toshiko is born. The other thing that's very important during this time is the creation of the ideology of the good wife, wise mother, the Ryosei kenbo ideology. So that a woman was to be educated, but educated enough that she could raise her children well, to be good future citizens of this new thing called Japan the nation. One thing that comes up in this period in the ea seido, and this is where you start getting the koseki, the family registry, which I talked about earlier, is that marriages are going to be recorded in this koseki. You do get this idea of judicial divorce. So this is Article 813 in the Meiji Civil Code. And so I write in my introduction that during this time the Meiji Civil Code took the varying divorce practices out of the hands of local clan traditions and tried to create an impartial system of adjudication that went beyond clans and family members. So then sort of talking about Tamara Toshiko and her life. So she had a kind of interesting family life. Her original name, her family name is Sato. So Sato Toshiko and her father married into her family. So there's a thing in Japanese called mubuko yoshi, the adoption of a son, son in law. And this occurs in families that have a business or assets and there are only daughters in the family. So to preserve generational wealth, staying in the maternal family, the son in law is adopted into the family and takes on the wife's family name. And a great novel that is all about this is the Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki Junichiro. So, so that was actually her parents marriage. The father married into her family, they had a rice labeling business. But the parents soon divorced. And so Tamura was actually raised in a single mom home. The mom was not your typical ryo sai kembo type of woman. She was very colorful. From what I've read. She loved the theater and hung out with a lot of kooky actors and was not, from what I've read, not a very maternal figure. And that plays out in Tamura's writing. She doesn't have nice mothers in her writing. And the mother in the story I translated is a very, very strong willed woman and is not a very maternal woman, I would say. The other thing about Tamara is she was raised in Tokyo's Shitamachi, so the lower end of Tokyo, like the working class area of Tokyo. So in a lot of ways as a writer she was kind of always on the margins, know her childhood, her class. She ended up in 1901 going to Nihonjoshi Daigaku, which had just been established in Japan Women's University. But she wasn't there very long. She dropped out by 1902 because she found this good wife, wise mother ideology of the university very stifling. It was almost like a woman's finishing school, though it was a university. And there's also some conjecture there might have been some money problems. And so that's when she enters Kodorohan's writing circle and that's where she meets her future husband, Tamara Shogyo. And so the story I translate, Su Yu ake Koromo or Do Drenched Robe was written in 1903. And Tamara Toshiko used the pen name Roman. So the ro is taken from Kodaro Hahn's name. She was not yet married, even though it's a story about marriage and divorce. So I can only assume that the story is really based probably on her parents relationship and experience. But she ended up leaving Kodarohan's writing circle because she found his emphasis on writing in this very classical Japanese way stifling. And her later works from her sort of golden period from 1911 to 1918 were very different. So she wrote very openly about female sexual desire, writes in great detail about the female body. The men in her story are often very effete. One story that I translated years ago, actually a play, Dore meaning slave, is sort of a reversal of Ipsens A Doll's House. So in Tamat Toshko's play Dore, the woman throws the man out of the house and the man's in the entryway begging to be let in. So she was very. She herself was the breadwinner in the marriage and then leaves Tamara Shogyo and leaves Japan in 1918 because she's having an affair with this socialist journalist, Suzuki Etsu. And so when she leaves Japan she's actually theoretically an adulteress, which was a crime at the time. But I was rereading some notes I have on her biography and her marriage to Tamara Shogyo is Apparently not officially recorded in the Koseki. So if it wasn't officially recorded, then they officially couldn't be divorced. So there are a lot of gray areas with Tamara Toshiko's own personal life, which sort of puts her ahead of her time in all ways. She's associated with Seto, which gets translated as Blue Stockings, which was considered Japan's first feminist magazine led by Hiratsuka Raicho. Hiratsuka Raicho used her dowry money to create the journal. And the purpose was to create a literary magazine by and for women so that women didn't have to. Women writers didn't have to be beholden to male mentors to get their works published. Because often to be beholden meant, you know, sexual favors if it was a man who was not a father or brother, or that the woman had to come from a family where there was a well established father or brother who was a writer. So Hiratsuka Raicho's Seto was an attempt to give women writers a chance to have their voices heard without being tied to male patronage. And. And Tamara was. One of her stories was published in the first issue of Seto. But Tamara herself was not really a fully active member of Seto. And actually there was tension between Tamara and Hiratsuka Raicho. Hiratsuka Raicho was very wealthy and kind of viewed Tamara as coming from the Tamachi, the lower end of Tokyo. And in one essay that Hiratsuka Raicho writes about Tamara Toshiko, she says she's not really a modern new woman. She's just like a poser. I could say more about Tamara Tochko. I'll probably leave it at that. So she was very much, I think, hard to pigeonhole, and was definitely, if I can summarize, reacting, at least in the early 1900s, at the peak of her writing career, to this idea of the good wife, wise mother ideology. It was so prevalent at that time, if not even to some degree today.
- [54:27]
B
And for my last question, I was wondering, so each chapter in this volume is accompanied by a translation of the original Japanese work, which, by the way, makes the book a great resource for non Japanese readers or college students. As the editor, when you were editing through these translations, did you observe any consistent themes or shared threads that could tie through the 1,000 years that this volume covers?
- [54:57]
C
Yes. So, yes, here I really have to give credit and a shout out, out to Kathy Ragsdale, who was the editor whom I hired when we were revising the book for the second read before it got accepted for publication. I was so immersed in the details that I think at times I couldn't see. What is it? The forest for the trees? And it was Cathy who. She read through what we had written, and her response to me after her first read was, what I'm seeing is this theme of bold, like, bold breaks. And so she summarized it, she said, in Chara de Echeverri's chapter, the woman leaps from a boat to avoid a marriage she does not want. So that's the Heian period story. My story that now has us in the Meiji period is this mother, this demanding mother, demanding that her daughter divorce her husband because his philandering behavior is embarrassing the family name. And ironically, the daughter is very much an icon of this good wife, wise mother ideology. She doesn't want to divorce him because she loves him. Right. So it gets in, that chapter gets in, that story gets into all these ideas of individualism, family obligation, new ideas about love in the Meiji period. And then Rebecca's chapter focuses on a woman who has been with this man. And they've been performing this modern experiment in free love, which by the 1920s, 30s, was this new idea in Japanese culture, this idea of that is this Christian influence concept of love, different from what Charo de Chiveri talks about in the Heian period, which is koli, which charo translates as longing. Koli also can get translated as love, but in the Heian period, it's sort of this longing emotion of longing. And then Eleanor's chapter focuses. It's a story from the 1970s, focuses on a woman, woman who's divorced and raising her daughter alone after the couple divorce. And that chapter is engaging with actually issues that are even going on today in Japan, which is the issue of child custody. Right. And then Laurel's essay is the coda. So it was sort of a response to my introduction. She focuses on Heisei women writers and poets who aren't divorcing because they're not even marrying. Right. So the current generation in Japan, there's sort of a birth rate crisis. Women are not having children. It's sort of a quiet rebellion against the conservative Japanese family system. Right. And so people aren't even getting married because of financial issues. The economy is stagnant, and so there can be no divorce if people aren't even having unions in first place. Right. So it was Cathy who really saw sort of this theme of boldness through all of them. Yeah. And I just wanted to do a. I was looking at my notes. Japan enacted a law, and it'll go into effect April 1, 2026. So this year of joint custody, and Japan is the only Japan is the only G7 nation that I think does not have this thing of joint custody. So this is going to be a very new law put in place prior to that. And sort of what Eleanor's chapter is dealing with is that one parent would get custody of the children, not both. And in the old days, it was the husband's family that got custody of the children. It wasn't until the late 60s that women started getting custody of children. But then it gets complicated with child support and things like that. April 1, 2026, this law of joint custody will be going into effect for the first time ever in Japan.
- [59:47]
B
Very bold for the lawmakers, I guess. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about your new book today.
- [59:57]
C
Thank you very much. It was my pleasure.
- [60:00]
B
And thank you to our listeners for staying with us. That was Professor Ann Sokolsky with her new book, Boat Breaks, Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce, currently available in hardback At Ease ebook. This is Jingyi Li. Stay tuned for our next episode.