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As a young widow, Kushida had difficulty making a living. She dedicated her life to improving Japanese women's lives, helping make them more equal in Japan's male-oriented society. She co-founded the Federation of Japanese Women's Organizations, currently an umbrella of 19 associations with 900,000 members, and was the organization's president since 1958. She also was a well-known peace activist and, in the 1940s, was the first secretary general the Women's Democratic Club. Kushida died February 5 at age 101. From This is True for 4 February 2001 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Natsuo Kirino List Price: $13.95 Amazon Price: $10.32 Editorial Review: Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out. This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot’s ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.  By: Kobo Abe List Price: $13.95 Amazon Price: $11.16 Editorial Review: This beautiful novel by one of Japan's most important writers is also one of the most strangely terrifying and memorable books you'll ever read. The Woman in the Dunes is the story of an amateur entomologist who wanders alone into a remote seaside village in pursuit of a rare beetle he wants to add to his collection. But the townspeople take him prisoner. They lower him into the sand-pit home of a young widow, a pariah in the poor community, who the villagers have condemned to a life of shoveling back the ever-encroaching dunes that threaten to bury the town. An amazing book.One of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century, The Women in the Dunes combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where, Sisyphus-like, they are pressed into shoveling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.  By: Mary A. Ruggieri List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $19.71 Editorial Review: An American girl left college to join the Women's Army Corps during WWII, and volunteered for postwar duty in Japan. Sixty years later she shares that historic period of her life, 1946 to 1948, through her personal letters, journals and photographs from a country just beginning its recovery from war. This is an engaging account of an American WAC, at work and at play, coping with the U.S. Army, marveling at Japan's people, cultures and customs, lamenting the destruction and despair of war, and falling deeply in love with the soldier she would later marry. From Japan With Love is a personal and historical treasure, a story of East meets West, rich with details and striking, evocative images.  By: Christopher Hart List Price: $19.95 Amazon Price: $13.37 Editorial Review: Rebel leaders. Feisty, headstron teenagers. Sophisticated spies. Magical elf queens. Fighter pilots. Awe-inspiring goddesses. Anyone who wants to draw manga (Japanese comics-style art) must be able to draw these powerful women of fantasy—and everyone wants to draw manga. With Christopher Hart's clear, step-by-step drawings and dynamice, easy-to-follow text, Manga Mnaia Bishoujo shows aspiring artists exactly how to handle anatomy and muscles, hands and nails, seductive outfits, extreme hairstyles, body language, and facial expressions—everything to make manga women will strike fear in the hearts of the enemy…and inspire love in the heart of the hero.  By: Arthur Golden List Price: $28.95 Amazon Price: $19.11 Editorial Review: According to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume--it means "artisan" or "artist." To capture the geisha experience in the art of fiction, Golden trained as long and hard as any geisha who must master the arts of music, dance, clever conversation, crafty battle with rival beauties, and cunning seduction of wealthy patrons. After earning degrees in Japanese art and history from Harvard and Columbia--and an M.A. in English--he met a man in Tokyo who was the illegitimate offspring of a renowned businessman and a geisha. This meeting inspired Golden to spend 10 years researching every detail of geisha culture, chiefly relying on the geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who spent years charming the very rich and famous. The result is a novel with the broad social canvas (and love of coincidence) of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's intense attention to the nuances of erotic maneuvering. Readers experience the entire life of a geisha, from her origins as an orphaned fishing-village girl in 1929 to her triumphant auction of her mizuage (virginity) for a record price as a teenager to her reminiscent old age as the distinguished mistress of the powerful patron of her dreams. We discover that a geisha is more analogous to a Western "trophy wife" than to a prostitute--and, as in Austen, flat-out prostitution and early death is a woman's alternative to the repressive, arcane system of courtship. In simple, elegant prose, Golden puts us right in the tearoom with the geisha; we are there as she gracefully fights for her life in a social situation where careers are made or destroyed by a witticism, a too-revealing (or not revealing enough) glimpse of flesh under the kimono, or a vicious rumor spread by a rival "as cruel as a spider." Golden's web is finely woven, but his book has a serious flaw: the geisha's true romance rings hollow--the love of her life is a symbol, not a character. Her villainous geisha nemesis is sharply drawn, but she would be more so if we got a deeper peek into the cause of her motiveless malignity--the plight all geisha share. Still, Golden has won the triple crown of fiction: he has created a plausible female protagonist in a vivid, now-vanished world, and he gloriously captures Japanese culture by expressing his thoughts in authentic Eastern metaphors. An alluring tour de force: a brilliant debut novel told with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism as the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. |
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