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TAKAHASHI IAKAKO IS ONL OF THE MOST PROLIMC and artistically adventurous members of the so-called second wave ot Japanese women writers, which came to prominence in the 1960s.* Like her contemporaries Kurahashi Yumiko, Kono Taeko, and Ohba Minako. Takahashi challenged traditional notions of women's literature and female identity, and created a new model for women's writing in Japan. Born in 1932. Takahashi was one of the more educated women of her day, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in French literature from the prestigious Kyoto University. Before completing her graduate studies in 1958, she had married a fellow student and writer. Takahashi Kaztimi, and their unconventional marriage - she served as his secretary and research associate during his academic career, and remained childless - allowed her to avoid the traditional and conventional lite of a Japanese housewife. While Takahashi continued to write in the 1960s, however, it was only with her husband's untimely death that she began to publish prolifieally, beginning with the story collection Kanata no miznoto (The distant sound ot water), which appeared in 1971 and contains Takahashi's best-known work in the English-speaking world. "Congruent Figures" (Sojikei), as well as the two stories translated here.
Both "Holy Terror" and "The Boundless Void" address a recurrent theme in Takahashi's literary oeuvre, namely the inadequacy and vacuity of the traditional female lifecourse in Japan. During the economic boom of the 1960s, increases in Japan's GDP and productivity were predicated upon a sexual division ot labor in which men spent the bulk ot their time at the factory or office, while women were expected to maintain the house, manage the household, and rear and educate children. Each of Takahashi's protagonists in these stories occupies this specialized niche, and each is profoundly unhappy with the demands as well as the limitations imposed by the role of housewife. As a result, both women struggle to find meaning in their lives, a struggle made all the more difficult by the resistance or disinterest of their husbands, families, and society at large.
At the heart of both women's existential discontent is...