How women figured in the expansion of the national body of the Japanese empire

WOMEN ADRIFT: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body
By Noriko J. Horiguchi
University of Minnesota Press | 272 pages | 2011
ISBN 978-0-8166-6978-3 | paperback | ISBN 978-0-8166-6977-6 | cloth |

Women Adrift demonstrates how women’s actions and representations of women’s bodies redrew the border and expanded, rather than transcended, the empire of Japan. Discussions of empire building in Japan routinely employ the idea of kokutai–the national body–to conceptualize Japan as a nation-state. Noriko J. Horiguchi shows how women impacted this notion, affecting perceptions of the national body.

PRAISE FOR WOMEN ADRIFT:
“Women Adrift is a rigorous, sophisticated, and nuanced investigation that refuses to reduce the complexity of the issues it raises to platitudes and fixed assumptions about the nature of colonialism in general, women’s writing under the gaze of empire in particular.” –Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California

“Noriko J. Horiguchi’s study, by focusing on the material and discursive bodies of these famous women writers, not only sheds new light on the complexity and uses of kokutai ideology, but also pushes us to rethink our assessment of their bodies of works.” –Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noriko J. Horiguchi is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Tennessee.

For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/women-adrift