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Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies. By HELENE BOWEN RADDEKER. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. vi, 282 pp. $85.00.
Treacherous Women's primary objective is to show how anarchist Kanno Suga and nihilist Kaneko Fumiko used their confessional diaries, written In prison while awaiting death-by-execution, as strategies of discursive self-empowerment under, and political defiance against, the paternalistic Meiji-Taisho emperor system. The diaries are interpreted in the context of a wide range of other discursive sources: poems, fiction, and letters by the women, as well as trial transcripts, interviews, fictionalized accounts, and essays. Raddeker wisely opposes two dominant tendencies in explications on Kanno, and Kaneko: one, to read their diaries transparently as factual sources; and two, to only see them as victims. Treacherous Women shifts analytic perspective to view the diaries critically as strategies to retroactively reconstruct past events into narratives with political function, and as indelibly inscribed with their circumstances (in prison facing death), and with a specific readership in mind (their political comrades). Raddeker holds that these women's rejection of possible paternalistic leniency, evidenced in their political radicalization in the face of death, constituted agentive self-empowerment. As a corollary, she challenges the conventional...