Christine L. Marran,
Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture.
University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0816647279
US$22.50 (pb)
264pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

This book adopts a Cultural Studies approach to Japanese studies It examines the representation of the female criminal in Japan over the last 130 years – from early Meiji to the present; and embraces a wide variety of media – trial records, newspaper reportage, serialized fiction, popular fiction, autobiographical memoirs, confessional literature, the academic essay, medical and psychoanalytic texts, the short story, theatre and film. It documents major shifts in her representation and relates these shifts to dominant political agendas and intellectual trends of the time in question.

The first three chapters – more than half of the book – focuses on the Meiji period, documenting the rise of sensational journalistic, literary, scientific, medical, legal, intellectual and popular interest in the phenomenon of the ‘poison woman’ in the early part of the era; and the performance and publication of confessional autobiographical memoirs by reformed and/or contrite female ex-cons in the later part of the era. The last two chapters are largely devoted to Abe Sada – the most notorious of the later ‘poison women’ – whose insatiable sexual desire and whose asphyxiation and castration of her lover have inspired a plethora of texts up to the present day.

In Chapter 4, Marran documents Sada’s court confession and the medical and psychoanalytic studies her 1936 case generated; she locates these in a climate of interest in the new “sciences” of sexology, psychology and criminology. A professor of medicine consulted by the court pronounced Sada a nymphomaniac with tendencies towards sadism and fetishism but not necrophilia. A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Abe Sada (1937), written by prominent sexologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, found her immature, primitive and regressive; she had regressed to a pre-Oedipal stage of sexuality and had not accepted her castration; she was uncivilized because unrepressed and unable to sublimate.

In Chapter 5, Marran documents and explains the enormous shift that occurred in Occupation Japan, when the ‘poison woman’, instead of being demonized, becomes heroinised. Sada, in particular, turns into a heroine; she is, in Marran’s words, “an eroticized icon of emancipation” (136) for Japanese male writers and intellectuals reacting against the repressions and suppressions of the patriarchal imperial state which was held responsible for the war, the defeat and the Occupation. After a discussion of early postwar literature, and its preoccupation with the body, Marran moves on to a discussion of two films of the mid-70s: Tanaka Noburo’s The True Story of Abe Sada (Japan 1975) and Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses (Japan/France 1976). She sees both films as endorsing the male lover’s masochistic sexual indulgence, as a political statement of opposition to the repressive military state; but she questions the equation of male masochism with rejection of patriarchy and identification with woman (an argument propounded by Deleuze) by introducing us to another radical text of the era, an avant-garde play by Sato Makoto called Abe Sada’s Dogs, which presents a quite different view of masochism. In Sato’s play, male masochism is not the other to dominant patriarchal structures but the very source of them. It supports, not subverts, the phallic order. It is the devoted imperial soldier, not the depraved lover, who is the supreme masochist…

As the above brief summary suggests, this book engages in polemics and is studded with references to theory. But it is also densely documented with translations of archival Japanese texts, displaying assiduous research. As a film scholar with an interest in Oshima movies, I was particularly interested in the exposition and discussion of the many texts inspired by the Abe Sada case, allowing me to situate Oshima’s film, In the Realm of the Senses, in the much wider realm of Japanese Sadaphilia and Sadaphobia. Marran does not seem to be familiar with Mizoguchi’s film My Love is Burning (Japan 1949), his Occupation-era adaptation of the autobiography of pioneer feminist and political dissident Hideko Kageyama/Fukuda, but she includes a probing analysis of the literary text on which it is based, in her chapter on late Meiji autobiographical memoirs by ex-cons. I found that Marran helped me to understand the reasons for the author’s disturbing inconsistencies and contradictory stance – awkwardly positioned between self-assertion and humility, feminist pride and feminine self-abasement, political radical and conservative commentator – by the way in which she exposed the conditions under which women were allowed to speak in late Meiji Japan.

Freda Freiberg,
Australia.

Created on: Sunday, 9 December 2007