Six books (and one film) on life in one of the rich world’s most sexist countries
an annual measure of the role and influence of women in the workforce in 29 countries, only South Korea scored lower than Japan. The World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, which also factors in political representation, ranked Japan 116th out of 146 countries. That would have been little surprise to Japanese women, who are used to living in a strict patriarchal society.
This multi-layered novel, published in 1958, is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Its plot centres on Yasuko, a beautiful woman who is longed for by two men. But Yasuko’s fate is determined mainly by her jealous mother-in-law, Mieko. Enchi Fumiko vividly illustrates the cunning, or perhaps demonic, qualities of her female characters. But she also hints that she may be doing so ironically, playing on the reader’s willingness to fall for the idea of a dangerous woman.
Naruse Mikio, a director, is not widely known in the West. But he deserves to be. Throughout his four-decade career, which peaked in the 1950s, Naruse made films that focused with striking empathy on women from all walks of life. Tsukasa Yoko, an actress who appeared in several of his films, once said: “He understood perfectly the psychology of women.
Sir Kazuo’s first novel, “A Pale View of Hills”, borrows names and themes from “Sound of the Mountain”, playfully weaving them into his own narrative. Etsuko, a Japanese woman living alone in England, is haunted by the recent suicide of her daughter, and by the sense that she was a bad mother. Etsuko finds herself recalling a summer in Nagasaki, her hometown, in the 1950s, and the friendship she built there with Sachiko, a war widow.
The novel is mesmerising for what it does not show, rather than for what it shows. It does not explain why Etsuko, a more reserved and conservative woman than Sachiko, left Japan. But it is clear that Etsuko’s reminiscences about Sachiko and her troubled daughter, Mariko, are ciphers for her feelings as an immigrant in the West and her grief for her child. Sir Kazuo admits that his impressions of Japan are drawn from the time before his family emigrated to Britain.
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