ABSTRACT

A woman who takes charge of preparing her child for entrance to a prestigious university, managing as well everything connected with household decisions, needs all the skills of a business manager. In a society which defines the primary roles of a woman as wife and mother and her dominant work site as a home front from which the husband-father is absent most of the time, a Japanese mother’s total devotion to her children is almost inevitable. Premodern Japan had regarded women either as sexual commodities or as “borrowed wombs,” in either case as persona non grata. The dichotomization was crude and clear-cut: “those with wombs and those with sexual organs.” The complaint lodged by the early Japanese feminists was that, despite these profound changes, women were never clearly recognized as individuals. The novel ends with Sae running away from home, and the paranoid Nobue becoming verbally abusive and physically violent.