From New Woman Writer to Socialist

From New Woman Writer to Socialist: The Life and Selected Writings of Tamura Toshiko From 1936 to 1938 by Anne Sokolsky offers a detailed biography of Tamura Toshiko’s life and translations of selected writings from the latter part of Tamura’s career. Considered one of Japan’s early modern feminists and hailed as a New Woman writer, Tamura is best known for her bold depictions of female sexuality and her condemnation of Japan’s patriarchal marriage system. Less well-known are the works Tamura produced when she returned to Japan in 1936 after spending two decades in North America. Through these selected translations, Sokolsky presents Tamura’s more politicized writing voice and shows how the objective of Tamura’s writing expanded beyond the sphere of women’s issues in Japan to more global concerns.

Anne Sokolsky, Ph.D. (2003), University of California, Berkeley, is Associate Professor of East Asian Literatures at Ohio Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on Japanese women writers and colonial Taiwanese literature. Her most recent translations appear in The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, eds. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-ju Fan (Columbia University Press, 2014).