Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
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Beauty in Disarray
Harumi Setouchi was born in Tokushima prefecture in 1922. She graduated from the Women's Christian College, and began writing in 1952. In 1973, she became a Buddhist nun, taking the name of Jakucho, but she has continued with her writing career. She has received numerous awards for her books and has been declared a Person of Cultural Merit in Kyoto.
Sanford Goldstein, Professor Emeritus of Purdue University, USA, and Professor Emeritus of Keiwa College in Japan, has a Ph.D from the University of Winconsin. He has spent most of his working life at Purdue University, but has also held positions at Niigata University and Nagasaki University. After his retirement from Purdue in 1992, he spent 11 years at Keiwa College. He is currently a visiting researcher at Keiwa Liberal Arts Research Institute. Professor Goldstein is a gifted tanka poet and founding editor of Five Lines Down, the influential American tanka magazine, and has had two recent anthologies dedicated to him. He has translated several classics of modern Japanese literature.
After his retirement from Niigata University, Japan, where he was attached to the English department, Kazuji Ninomiya taught English at the Nippon Dental University in Niigata. He continues to live in Niigata.
Beauty in Disarray
Harumi Setouchi
Translated by
Sanford Goldstein and Kazuji Ninomiya
TUTTLE PUBLISHING
Boston • Rutland, Vermont • Tokyo
"Beauty exists only in disharmony Harmony is deceptive."
-SAKAF OSUGI
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 1993 Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0150-0 (ebook)
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04 06 08 09 07 05
1 3 5 6 4 2
Printed in Singapore
Contents
| Introduction 7 | |
| Beauty in Disarray | |
| Chapter One | 17 |
| Chapter Two | 63 |
| Chapter Three | 111 |
| Chapter Four | 183 |
| Chapter Five | 271 |
| Chapter Six | 311 |
Notes:
Western word order, i.e., given name followed by surname, is used throughout the book.
Macrons, signifying long vowels in romanized Japanese, are used with italicized words within the text.
The kanji and kana on the title page are read Bi wa ranchō ni ari, the Japanese tide of the book.
Introduction
IT MAY surprise Westerners to realize Japan had its own well-known women's liberation movement in the late nineteenth century, that first feminist movement extending almost to the end of the Taisho era in 1926. Appearing in 1901 was Akiko Yosano's Tangled Hair (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1987), startling readers with its narcissistic and sexually oriented poems and a heroine trapped by society's usual subjugations and restrictions:
In my bath—
Submerged like some graceful lily
At the bottom of a spring,
How beautiful
This body of twenty summers, (poem 16)
Softly I pushed open
That door
We call a mystery,
These full breasts
Held in both my hands, (poem 26)
These scraps of paper
Scribbled with poems
In which I cursed and raved,
I press down hard
On a black butterfly! (poem 53)
Twenty, jealous,
Wilting this summer
In the village heat,
I listen to my husband
Taunt me with Kyoto pleasures! (poem 121)
To punish
Men for their endless sins,
God gave me
This fair skin,
This long black hair! (poem 152)
On September 22 and 23, 1911, when a Japanese translation of Ibsen's A Doll's House was performed in Tokyo at the experimental theatre of the Art Association, Japanese audiences were stunned by the superb performance of Sumako Matsui as she played a Nora who could walk away from her responsibilities as wife and mother. Harumi Setouchi, the author of Beauty in Disarray, quotes the critic Seiseien Ihara:
Sumako