ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the experience of modern women, Tomioka Taeko, with penetrating sincerity and honesty, but her philosophic profundity in understanding modern life, her intellectual capacity to view her experiences in a historical and social context, and her mastery of the art of fiction render the traditional category of 'female-school literature' totally inadequate to characterize her works. 'Facing the Hills They Stand', Tomioka's first fictional work, recounts the lives of two generations of a family that settled by an Osaka river; it distinguished her instantly as a superb storyteller. Her attempt to search for the core of human existence, narrated crisply and with ingenious use of dialogue, reveals life's incomprehensible situations in which the only sure things are birth, appetite, and death. The method of expression she adopts in this story, sometimes referred to as Bunraku-style narration, has been hailed as a highly successful method of presenting the drama of common people.
