To Live and to Write

In To Live and to Write, that marvelous compendium of short stories written by Japanese women in the early part of the twentieth century, the editor Mariko Lippit describes the poverty experienced by two of the writers, Hirabayashi Taiko and Enchi Fumiko, very early in their writing careers. They were roommates as young women, and they owned only one dress between them; they used it only when one of them went on a job interview or spoke to an editor. This simple example of their poverty speaks volumes--not only of their hardships, but of the spirit of sisterhood that two Japanese women, both struggling with outsized dreams in a man's world, could forge.

Their stories, especially those of Hirabayashi Taiko, revolve around the struggles of the poor and the working class; they write directly and simply, without sentimentality, about lives that must have been very much like their own.

Why do I find these stories so compelling? It has something to do with the fact that my mother was from Japan, of course--and was even, almost, of that generation, having been born in 1926. But there's more to it than that. These women of the 1920s and 1930s--their writing, the best of it, burns with a passionate clarity and an urgency that I rarely see in the writing of young people, men or women, in our own times.

This was the era of the watakushishosetsu (the I-novel) in Japan; many writers borrowed heavily from their own lives for their stories, or even lifted entire episodes from their lives and wrote about them. It might seem, to many of us in the West, that is was a degraded form of storytelling. But in my view, it never really matters much where the stories come from as long as the central characters are vivid and the stories themselves make a difference to us. And somehow, the women in these writers' stories, eking out a living on the margins of Japanese society without much encouragement from anyone--their lives do make a difference, to anyone who can imagine that level of social and psychological isolation. And the writers in this anthology make it rather easy to imagine.