We learn through more flashbacks that Mitsu has barely managed to stave off a descent into prostitution, but cannot escape the brutish existence to which she is condemned when "left behind" by Yoshioka.  Refusing to participate in a scheme to blackmail this man who seduced and abandoned her, Mitsu quarrels with her roguish companions and is inadvertently pushed out of a tenement window to her death.  In the original story by Endô Shûsaku, Mitsu is sent to a Catholic-run leprosarium in Gotemba when it is thought she may have the sickness.  She elects to remain there even though she does not have the disease, in order to care for the wretched ones who do.  Although she never embraces the Catholic faith, she lives the life of a saint until she is accidentally killed by a truck while crossing the street. 

Director Urayama adapts the novel significantly by ignoring this whole dimension of leprosy and the Catholic faith in favor of portraying another set of afflictions which were attacking the soul of Japan - capitalism, materialism and greed.[3]  Therefore, it was not only the pure, innocent face of the young woman from the country that moved the narrator; it was also the very nature of the relationship between her and the ambitions of the tormented young man, Yoshioka.  Somewhere between her naïveté and his "dark side," a truth is revealed to Kishino about her "own disrupted self." Kishino resumes her account of what this film meant to her:

            It was like this.  The essential nature of this young woman who inevitably had to be abandoned by the hero who concentrated all his efforts on moving up the corporate ladder was a gentleness (yasashisa), symbolized in the film by her plain, unadorned face.  It was a gentleness that identified her as clearly belonging to the ranks of the oppressed.  It was clear to me from my own experience that postwar Japan, as it entered upon this period of rapid economic growth, was similarly a structure, an edifice, from which such gentleness had been excised.  I, who had placed work above all else just as all the men did, was among those who threw something away.  Inevitably, my femininity (yasashisa) was the part of me that I had cast aside. (12-13)

The narrator had already explained how the sense of agency she experienced as a woman breaking into hallowed ground, formerly reserved for males only, had energized her.  But then there is disillusionment at the personal, the socio-political, and even the international level.  Japan, which might have confronted its own past as an oppressor, and joined hands with third world countries, has not.  Instead, it has allied politically with the U.S. and aligned itself against socialist countries. Now, even the cells of her own body were staging a rebellion against her.  We saw above how Kishino wondered if her cancer couldn’t be construed as her body exacting revenge for being cast aside, abandoned, much as Mitsu had been.  Here, she elaborates on how the women’s movement caused her to become aware that she had abandoned an important part of herself:

            Just a little after I left my position as a reporter, the so-called second wave of women's liberation, the 'women's lib' movement, arrived in Japan.  What I came to understand clearly from this movement was that I needed to give up the notion that equality between the sexes was just a stepping stone to the larger ideal of universal human liberation. I realized that no matter how much I may have patterned my life after men, in the end I was a woman who possessed this very 'gentleness' that was being discarded along the way.  Moreover, I was startled by the scale of what we had given up in terms of the supports for postwar democracy.  Needless to say, what we had given up during those years was more than just yasashisa. (13-14)

Yasashisa serves as a metaphor for the things that Japan was in the process of losing at this point in its history, namely genuine democracy and the ideals peace, socialism and gender equality.  Just as Kishino had to discard something that was a part of her, so Japan was forced to give up something that had been a dream for many of its citizens, a point that was reinforced in the film by a brief flashback to the huge 1960 Ampo demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Skillfully interweaving documentary footage with his own material, film director Urayama depicts the student activist Yoshioka fully participating in the demonstrations, much as Kishino herself had done. Urayama created that bond of "generational solidarity" with Kishino by inserting this footage into the heart of his film.  We see a cut to the mass demonstration with the year 1960 emblazoned on the screen. Although the flashback is a very brief one,

s barely 45 econds, it occurs shortly after Yoshioka has seen Mitsu again for the first time.  He is with Mariko and her family but the impact of seeing Mitsu has left him so shaken that he drinks heavily.  While writhing and vomiting on the bathroom floor, he flashes back to the moment in 1960 when water cannons blast the demonstrators, and his friend and roommate, Nagashima, was struck on the head by the police.  The message is

c

who has come to stand for oppressed people everywhere, but he has also turned his back on his progressive, activist politics.  He goes from someone who is politically engaged to someone who is absorbed only in his own success, and in Japan’s material advancement.

Kishino concludes the excerpt from her 1975 essay with the following thoughts about how her basic outlook, her worldview, had been altered:

            This is what I believe now.  I have repositioned (tachinaoshite) myself so that I no longer stand alongside men, but stand self-consciously on the side of oppressed women.  I believe that we must address the faults of a structure that says that since this gentleness - symbolized by Mitsu’s plain, open yet pained countenance in the film - does not function as a force to bind people to one another, we should abandon it.  I am, then, reversing my values and choosing to take up the position of women anew.  As I reexamine my own short past, I believe that women’s liberation must go beyond the advocacy of rights for middle-class women.  For me, women’s liberation must take as a point of departure the perspective of women who are oppressed, women who are expected to do the ‘shitwork’ because they are women.  We need to self-consciously make this perspective our own and proceed to connect it to that part of the postwar democratic movement that was abandoned.  If we cannot move toward this kind of universal struggle for human liberation, then for what purpose was my entire youth spent? (14)

            The structure that Kishino believes must be reexamined is one that permits women to enter the workplace only if they are willing to give up a part of themselves, that very part which is identified most closely with their femininity.  It is a structure that, as it propels Japan relentlessly along the path of rapid economic growth, has no room for gentleness or compassion.  The function of the women's liberation movement in Japan, then, is to force a reexamination of this structure, and a reassessment of the priorities on which it insists.  It must also help Japanese reconnect with the values of the postwar democratic movement.

            At this point, Kishino reveals to the reader for the first time that she has cancer:

            Of course there was no way I could have foreseen it, but two years after I wrote these words I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  As I went through the very difficult process of being hospitalized and operated upon, as I struggled to accept this unacceptable reality I kept remembering these words that I had written two years previously.  I felt strongly that my cancer was the inevitable rebellion of my own body against the lifestyle I had chosen, the lifestyle, one that had me placing work above all else just like men and casting aside the part of me that was woman.  I recall feeling that it had taken a life-threatening experience to make me realize that what had begun as a ‘motif’ to explore in an essay turned out to be something so true.  (14-15; emphasis mine)

It is always a risky business to assert historical inevitability, but Kishino is arguing here that her cancer was the price she had to pay for the life choices she made.  However, not only does she conflate the issue of gender inequality in the workplace and the life choices she made, she also locates the context for those choices squarely in the economic and political developments of her day.

II

Recovering the Feminine

           Jumping ahead to the final section of her memoir, we encounter a detailed discussion of the "discovery of a feminine consciousness."  It traces a trajectory from her reading of African-American writers like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Maya Angelou to her participation in the feminist movement of the early 1970s.  As the narrator explains it:

            The first major rally of the women’s movement was held at the Sendagaya Community Center in November 1970.  I was invited to participate on that day by Komashaku Kimi, a female colleague, a single woman about five years older than me.[4]  I recall being impressed with the freshness and energy as speaker after speaker spoke openly and honestly about their own experiences as women.

            One cold wintry evening, just after my fortieth birthday, I was having dinner with Ms. Komashaku at a restaurant.  We began to open up to each other, to tell each other our life stories and how we had each arrived at the place where we were in our lives.  As I spoke with her, suddenly I came to look at my past differently than I ever had before, a process that seemed to occur naturally.

            Until this time, I had been operating in the male-centered workplace, placing priority on work, work, work, without giving it a second thought.  To me, there was something natural and inevitable about this path and, although there was no doubt some pain along the way, I also found a great deal of satisfaction.  It never crossed my mind to question what I was doing.  However, when I reached my forties, the possibility that I might never have children began to surface in my consciousness. This hit home very hard, creating a hollow feeling, a void in my life.  If I were a man, I could have both work and children.  Now that I had reached a point of no return, I began to take stock of the magnitude of what I had sacrificed.

            This occasion, then, became an opportunity to reexamine my past in a different light - I couldn’t help being haunted by recurring feelings of regret that I had virtually erased that very part of me that is woman - captured symbolically in the reality that I would not be having children - and made myself just like men for whom competition and one’s success in the workplace is everything.

            It was around this time that in a Shinjuku theater I sat through the film "The Woman I Abandoned" twice, back-to-back, unable to stop crying.  What came through quite clearly to me was that I had closed my eyes to reality and had tried to bridge the gap between my ideals - rooted as they were in the postwar democratic movement’s commitment to gender equality - and the reality that my own efforts had only been directed towards amassing an impressive success record in the workplace. To put it yet another way, I had erased my femininity and bought completely into the logic of the patriarchal order, with priority placed on work, and had lived my life on this basis.  I had even looked at myself through men’s eyes and judged myself according to male standards.

            So, in an instant, a real picture of women as historically, socially and psychologically oppressed took shape in my mind.  Moreover, I realized that I had experienced at the very core of my being the ways in which women’s lives were oppressed.  These feelings took shape in the meetings of various women’s groups where we talked about our lives, our bodies, or even how male-female relationships were portrayed in literature as seen from the standpoint of women.  I think I can say that through these kinds of efforts, I was able to change directions in my life as I sought a way to liberate myself and live independently among women with whom I felt the bond of sisterhood. (228-232; emphasis mine)

            What began as a lament over loss and abandonment is transformed into a real picture of women as historically, socially and psychologically oppressed. Something in the film is a catalyst perhaps it is that space between the young man’s naked ambition, and the naiveté of the young woman from the countryside, her yasashisa that unleashes Kishino’s reflection on what she has sacrificed or abandoned in her own life in order to pursue her ideal of gender equality in the workplace.  Through the meetings of the women’s groups in the early 1970s, the narrator comes to understand the nature of women’s oppression as a social, political and historical phenomenon.  This process of discovery, rooted as it was in the bond of sisterhood, is synonymous with what she calls the discovery of her "feminine consciousness."  The narrator continues her retrospective:

            One more thing I became aware of about my feminine consciousness was the realization that there was a deep connection between my attraction to African-American literature and the consciousness that the life I had lived was the life of an oppressed woman. [I was] that it was possible to use my consciousness as a member of an oppressed gender as a springboard in order to connect with other oppressed minorities, and then to move in the direction of liberation from this oppression.

            Be that as it may, what I really felt at the time was that I wanted to live my life fully as a woman, at one with my body, without worrying about how I may have erased part of myself in the past.  But just at that moment, I became ill.

            In March 1977, I was operated on for breast cancer.  At that time, I felt that my illness was the inevitable consequence of the way I had lived my life up to that point.  If I may repeat myself, it was because I had virtually ignored my existence as a woman with a body - albeit in the pursuit of equality between the sexes - and had bought fully into the achievement ethos of a competitive society.  I could not help but feel strongly that my body was in revolt against my insistence on putting work before everything else.  If my life up until now had been propelling me inevitably toward my illness, then I wanted to reverse this trend and live my life in a new way.  Such a change in direction could not be based on patriarchal conceptions that had been enslaving women, but had to be connected with the recovery of a feminine consciousness capable of pointing the way to my own liberation.  (232-34; emphasis mine)

           The realization that she has acquiesced in a choice to devote herself unstintingly to work, to give up having children, and live the way men in her society do, haunts her as she confronts a sense of loss and erasure.  At the same time, Kishino is also faced with losing a part of her body to cancer, so she becomes intensely aware of how much of herself she has already thrown away or discarded.  She thought she was sacrificing these things for the ideals that she cherished, gender equality and the other postwar freedoms: political independence and social justice.  But the direction in which history is moving - and this is where her own story is linked with the story of postwar Japan - keeps her ideals tantalizingly just out of reach.  Once she encountered the women’s movement, though, important changes began to occur inside her, and to affect her consciousness as a woman.  Once she was able to see the world through the lens of feminism, all she wants to do is struggle to  - recover her feminine consciousness, -  a battle made all the more poignant by the war that she must simultaneously wage with cancer for her very life

           In the Epilogue, Kishino writes of her surgery and recovery over the next two to three years and of her search for a new order of priorities in her life.  What she came to realize about herself was that she had put far too much weight on her record of "achievements."  It was now time, she reasoned, to deny her "careerism," and to reclaim her life.       

            At any rate, I want to listen more carefully to the voice of my own body and to live a life in which value is placed on work for work's sake, not just for careerism and in which there is a connection between my work and my encounters with people.  Would this not be the only way for me - in my weakened state of health and living in this era with its narrow range of vision - to accomplish what I have set out to accomplish? (258)

III

Reflections       

            In concluding her memoir, the narrator expresses a desire to reclaim her body and her lifet"o live my life fully as a woman, at one with my body." However, she experienced alienation from her body and what it meant to be a woman as a result of the life choices she made, something reflected in the text by her repeated references to a "disrupted self".  Somehow, her experiences in the workplace are like a microcosm of the process by which postwar Japan evolved its politically conservative social and economic agenda, callously abandoning its democratic ideals along the way.  The inequities she encountered as an employee of Sankei shinbun were a version writ small of what was occurring in the society at large.

The narrator's reflections about the impact of Urayama Kirio's film on her consciousness are a fascinating and important part of her narrative.  She suggests that this film can be read as a metaphor for the denial or repression of something deeply-rooted in her own and in Japan's existence.  Like the ambitious young man, Yoshioka, she, too, has thrown herself wholeheartedly into the economic fray, trying to make her mark, to become successful, in order to convince the world that women deserve equality.  But the narrator also identifies closely with the innocent, pure emotion - the yasashisa of Mitsu whose face fills the screen with her agony and despair.  Somehow, that face comes to stand for oppressed women and, indeed, all oppressed people.

What makes the scene in the movie theater so pivotal and this is reinforced by the fact that she repeats it twice in the text, once at the beginning and again near the end is that the film, against the backdrop of her recent participation the women’s movement, has caused her to reflect on her entire relationship to the patriarchy. Joining women's groups with her friends "where we talked about our lives, our bodies, or even how male-female relationships were portrayed in literature," the narrator begins to develop a new way of conceptualizing women.  She comes to see women as systematically oppressed, not unlike the characters in the African-American novels that she loved teaching.  What does it mean, she asks, for women to work alongside men in the bastions of male power and authority?  What does it mean to be perceived "as a woman" or to take on certain responsibilities (or to be denied others) "because she is a woman?" 

As central and poignant as her description of the film is to her narrative, it is almost trumped by the revelation that Kishino has breast cancer.  As the narrator rethinks her life in response to her crisis, it becomes the occasion for her to "reposition" herself so that she "no longer stand[s] alongside men but stand[s] self-consciously on the side of oppressed women."  To be sure, the women's movement had already stimulated new ways of conceptualizing women's bodies and women's lives, and the awareness that she may never have children produced deep reflections on how being female is defined.  But so, too, did the diagnosis of her breast cancer and her ensuing mastectomy.

Placing everything in the context of the kinds of choices she confronted and made in her life lends considerable depth and power to this memoir.  The questions that she addresses are at once complex and multi-layered. But always remaining of central  importance to Kishino is this notion of "recovering the feminine" and her assertion of a new subjectivity that she discovered in the context of the women’s liberation movement.  "I have repositioned myself," she writes, "so that I no longer stand alongside men, but stand self-consciously on the side of oppressed women."  This repositioning enables her to claim a new voice, a new kind of agency and subjectivity for herself.  The world depicted in her text is neither a stable nor a very promising one, yet in her act of writing against that world, Kishino engages in a courageous act of resistance. Her memoir reminds us of the significance of Leigh Gilmore's assertion that "writing autobiography can be a political act because it asserts a right to speak rather than to be spoken for."[5]   Revealing to us the process by which autobiographical selves emerge from a complex crisscrossing of multiple discourses, and reminding us that they depend on both textual and historical forces for their enactment, Kishino tells her story of difficult choices in a voice that is at once strong and unflinching..