Women Adrift

Womens bodies contributed to the expansion of the Japanese empire. With this bold opening, Noriko J. Horiguchi sets out in Women Adrift to show how womens actions and representations of womens bodies redrew the border and expanded, rather than transcended, the empire of Japan. Discussions of empire building in Japan routinely employ the idea of kokutaithe national bodyas a way of conceptualizing Japan as a nation-state. Women Adrift demonstrates how women impacted this notion, and how womens actions affected perceptions of the national body. Horiguchi broadens the debate over Japanese womens agency by focusing on works that move between naichi, the inner territory of the empire of Japan, and gaichi, the outer territory; specifically, she analyzes the boundary-crossing writings of three prominent female authors: Yosano Akiko (18781942), Tamura Toshiko (18841945), and Hayashi Fumiko (19041951). In these examplesand in Naruse Mikios postwar film adaptations of Hayashis workHoriguchi reveals how these writers asserted their own agency by transgressing the borders of nation and gender. At the same time, we see how their work, conducted under various colonial conditions, ended up reinforcing Japanese nationalism, racialism, and imperial expansion. In her reappraisal of the paradoxical positions of these women writers, Horiguchi complicates narratives of Japanese empire and of womens role in its expansion.