Sawako Ariyoshi – Modernism and Medicine for the Soul
Perhaps Japan’s greatest unsung modernist authors, Sawako Ariyoshi (有å‰ä½å’Œå – 20 January 1931- 30 August 1984) was born in Wakayama City in the central part of Japan near Osaka. A graduate of Tokyo Women’s Christian College, Sawako Ariyoshi also spent part of her childhood in Java.
A prolific and popular novelist, she dramatized significant issues in her fiction such as the suffering of the elderly, the effects of pollution on the environment, and the effects of social and political change on Japanese domestic life and values, in both a social and historical context, especially on the lives of women. Her novel The Twilight Years, depicts the life of a working woman who is caring for her elderly, dying father-in-law in a very moving way.
Among Ariyoshi’s other novels that I would recommend is The River Ki, an insightful portrait of the lives of three rural women, a mother, daughter and granddaughter.
Her novel The Doctor’s Wife, a historical novel dramatising the roles of nineteenth-century Japanese women as it chronicles the experience of a pioneer doctor with breast cancer surgery, has identified her as one of the finest postwar Japanese women writers. The Doctor’s Wife (1966) is considered as her best novel.
Starting in 1949, Ariyoshi studied literature and theatre at the Tokyo Women’s Christian College until she graduated in 1952. In 1959, she spent a year at the Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She then worked with a publishing company and also wrote for journals, joined a dance troupe, wrote short stories, and scripts for various media. She traveled extensively, getting material for her books which were serialized novels that depict domestic life, mostly dealing with social issues. Recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1959, Ariyoshi had received some Japanese literary awards and was at the height of her career when she died quietly in her sleep in the year of 1984.
Works by Sawako Ariyshi available in English:
The Doctor’s Wife
by Sawako Ariyoshi and Wakako Hironaka (Paperback – Feb 6, 2004)
The role of the Japanese woman in modern society still retains many of the characteristics that it had in the late eighteenth century, when this novel takes place. In those days, the life of a woman, whether married or single, was one of unending drudgery and toil. Reward or recognition came
only indirectly, through the success of the male members of the family.Thus, this novel is really two stories: on the one hand, the successful medical career of Hanaoka Seishu, the first doctor in the world to perform surgery for breast cancer under a general anesthetic; on the other hand, the lives of his wife and his mother, who supported him with stoic resignation,
even to the extent of finally volunteering to be used as guinea pigs in his experiments.Kae, the wife, joins the household of the local doctor as the bride of his son, Hanaoka Seishu, who is still away pursuing his medical studies in Kyoto. Her mother-in-law, Otsugi, is both beautiful and extremely proud of the tradition of the doctor’s family. Though their relationship is one of
affection at first, it declines into tension and eventually into bitter competitiveness and hatred, fostered by the claustrophobic social customs of the time. The two women – the wife who struggles to adapt to a new household and gain the affection of her unfamiliar husband, and the over possessive
mother-in-law dedicated to the fulfillment of her son’s ambitions – vie with one another to serve one man. Kae suffers the most, for the new anesthetic that the doctor tries on her has devastating results.Readers of The Doctor’s Wife will find a tender and compassionate tale about a woman of great strength and courage, as well as an impelling account of Japanese society and the role of women in it.
Pick up a copy of The Doctor’s Wife
The River Ki
by Sawako Ariyoshi and Mildred Tahara (Paperback – Jul 1982)
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith
Akiko’s superwoman-life takes an unexpected turn when her father-in-law, Shigezo, becomes senile. Because of Shigezo’s rude and disrespectful treatment of Akiko over the years, she and her husband had a house built out back for her in-laws, physically close but emotionally distant.
Now Akiko’s mother-in-law is dead, and Shigezo is slipping further out of touch with reality, becoming childlike and dependent on Akiko, staying in her home and complicating her already full life. How can she work her full-time job, including half days on Saturday, clean house, cook meals, and provide a home for her husband and teen-age son – as well as care for an aging, difficult man? She can’t, and it causes her to wonder: “Was her husband about to tell her that she could not go to work and leave his father unattended? Would he also say that it was high time she stayed at home where she belonged?” Her struggles are compounded as she tries to reconcile her harsh feelings for Shigezo.
The Twilight Years is Akiko’s life in the kitchen, the bathroom, at work, and with herself, a woman caught between traditions, expectations, and personal realities. The issues Akiko deals with are not uncommon, the solutions are not easy. But from her struggles, Akiko emerges a stronger, more defined woman.
Pick up a copy of The Twilight Years
Kabuki Dancer
by Sawako Ariyoshi and James R. Brandon (Paperback – May 2001)
To be kabuki in Japan once meant to be outrageous, daring, flaunting convention. It was in sixteenth-century Japan, as Shakespeare was writing his masterworks half a world away, that the spirit of Kabuki theater was born out of a single woman’s passions and dedication to her art. In Kabuki Dancer, the popular Japanese novelist Sawako Ariyoshi (The Doctor’s Wife, The River Ki, The Twilight Years) retells the story of Okuni, the legendary temple dancer who first performed among jugglers and freak shows on a stage along the riverbank in the heart of the imperial city of Kyoto. Blending the rhythms and movements of religious festivals with the words of popular love songs, she and her troupe became sensations. Their affairs and rivalries, infatuations and jealousies, were transformed into the very fabric of their performance, as it began its evolution into the classic drama of today. Against a backdrop of civil war, dynastic conflict, and social turmoil, Okuni and her companions and lovers, together with their audience of artisans, merchants, and aristocrats, struggled to survive the birth pangs of a glorious–yet sometimes deadly–new age. Based on fact, transmuted into powerful and moving artistic expression, Kabuki Dancer is at once a turbulent love story, a recreation of an exotic and colorful historical period, and an almost mythic representation of the miraculous moment in which an immortal art form appears.
Pick up a copy of Kabuki Dancer
Biography – Ariyoshi, Sawako (1931-1984): An article from: Contemporary Authors
by Gale Reference Team (Digital – Dec 16, 2007)
You may also be interested in this brief introduction to Sawako Ariyoshi. I haven’t read it myself – any feedback would be appreciated!
Pick up a copy of Biography – Ariyoshi, Sawako (1931-1984): An article from: Contemporary Authors
(Text based on the wikipedia entry for Sawako Ariyoshi. Used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)
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