Presenting a fresh examination of women writers and prewar ideology, this book breaks new ground in its investigation of love as a critical aspect of Japanese culture during the early to mid-twentieth century. As a literary and cultural history of love and female identity, Becoming Modern Women focuses on same-sex love, love marriage, and maternal love-new terms at that time; in doing so, it shows how the idea of "woman," within the context of a vibrant print culture, was constructed through the modern experience of love. Author Michiko Suzuki's work complements current scholarship on female identities such as "Modern Girl" and "New Woman," and interprets women's fiction in conjunction with nonfiction from a range of media-early feminist writing, sexology books, newspapers, bestselling love treatises, native ethnology, and historiography. While illuminating the ways in which women used and challenged ideas about love, Suzuki explores the historical and ideological shifts of the period, underscoring the broader connections between gender, modernity, and nationhood.
"This book offers a new way of approaching Japanese women's writing of the inter-war period, yielding strikingly fresh perspectives that make an important contribution to both the fields of gender studies and Japanese literature."
Bates College
"Michiko Suzuki's remarkable new study, Becoming Modern Women, challenges established interpretations of work by three of Japan's most famous modern women writers…Suzuki not only draws critical attention to the work of women whose celebrated lives have often outshone their work but presents a provocative model for new directions in feminist scholarship on Japanese literature."
Journal of Japanese Studies
"Suzuki has pulled together a tremendous amount of information and documented it precisely and clearly…This study is a solid work, and the bibliography and footnotes alone make it worth one's attention."
