This is a materialist-feminist, psychoanalytic analysis of a modern Japanese literary trope—the dangerous woman, linked to archaisms and magical realms and found throughout the Japanese canon—in the works of three 20th-century writers: Izumi Kyoka (1873–1939), Enchi Fumiko (1905–86), and Nakagami Kenji (1946–92).

"Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in slightly different form in "So bad she's good: the masochist's heroine in Japan, Abe Sada," in Bad girls of Japan, edited by Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 141-67"--T.p. verso.

Evil is not only an abstract concept to be analyzed intellectually, but a concrete reality that we all experience and wrestle with on an ongoing basis. To truly understand evil we must always approach it from both angles: the intellective and the phenomenological. This same assertion resounds through each of the papers in this volume, in which an interdisciplinary and international group (including nurses, psychologists, philosophers, professors of literature, history, computer studies, and all sorts of social science) presented papers on cannibalism, the Holocaust, terrorism, physical and emotional abuse, virtual and actual violence, and depravity in a variety of media, from film to literature to animé to the Internet. Conference participants discussed villains and victims, dictators and anti-heroes, from 921 AD to the present, and considered the future of evil from a number of theoretical perspectives. Personal encounters with evil were described and analyzed, from interviews with political leaders to the problems of locating and destroying land mines in previous war zones. The theme of responsibility and thinking for the future is very much at the heart of these papers: how to approach evil as a question to be explored, critiqued, interrogated, reflected upon, owned. The authors urge an attitude of openness to new interpretations, new perspectives, new understanding. This may not be a comfortable process; it may in fact be quite disturbing. But ultimately, it may be the only way forward towards a truly ethical response. The papers in this collection provide a wealth of food for thought on this most important question.

Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is a wide-ranging account of how women writers have made sense (and nonsense) of pregnancy in postwar Japan. While earlier authors such as Yosano Akiko had addressed the pain and emotional complexities of childbearing in their poetry and prose, the topic quickly moved into the literary shadows when motherhood became enshrined as a duty to state and sovereign in the 1930s and ’40s. This reproductive imperative endured after World War II, spurred by a need to create a new generation of citizens and consumers for a new, peacetime nation. It was only in the 1960s, in the context of a flowering of feminist thought and activism, that more critical and nuanced appraisals of pregnancy and motherhood began to appear. In her fascinating study, Amanda C. Seaman analyzes the literary manifestations of this new critical approach, in the process introducing readers to a body of work notable for the wide range of genres employed by its authors (including horror and fantasy, short stories, novels, memoir, and manga), the many political, personal, and social concerns informing it, and the diverse creative approaches contained therein. This “pregnancy literature,” Seaman argues, serves as an important yet rarely considered forum for exploring and debating not only the particular experiences of the pregnant mother-to-be, but the broader concerns of Japanese women about their bodies, their families, their life choices, and the meaning of motherhood for individuals and for Japanese society. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Japanese literature and women’s history, as well as those concerned with gender studies, feminism, and popular culture in Japan and beyond.

In 1936, Abe Sada committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan--the murder and emasculation of her lover. This detailed account of Sada's personal history, the events leading up to the crime, and its aftermath steps beyond the simplistic view of Abe Sada as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor.

This book discusses perceptions of ‘femininity’ in contemporary South Korea and the extent to which fictional representations in South Korean women’s fiction of the 1990s challenges the enduring association of the feminine with domesticity, docility and passivity.