Poison
Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in
Modern Japanese Culture
by Christine L. Marran
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2007
256 pp., illus. 20 b/w. Trade, $67.50;
paper, $22.50
ISBN: 0-8166-4726-7; ISBN: 0-8166-4727-5.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
The stories of dokufu ("poison
women"), usually guilty of robbery
or murder involving one or more sexual
partner and/or victimized husband, emerged
in novels serialized in sensational koshinbun
(small newspapers) in Japan during the
1870s. Over the next century, the figure
of the oversexed female criminal often
appeared and captured the attention of
modern Japanese culture. "Yoarashi"
(Night Storm) Okinu kidnapped a seduced
a doctors girlfriend and gave her
to a friend as a slave. More famously,
Takahashi "Yasha" (Demon)
Oden, troublemaker since childhood, poisoned
her leprosy-suffering husband and fatally
stabbed a businessman. She was tried and
beheaded in 1879 by a respected eighth-generation
executioner. It is the authors argument
that, as Japan moved from feudalism to
oligarchic government, these dofuku
accounts articulated the politics and
position of underclass women, sexual morality,
and female suffrage. A few violent acts
by women were transformed into plenty
of ideological, social, and moral tales
that deployed notions of unconventional
female sexual desire and womanhood, to
contrast them with societal norms of docility
and domesticity.
Readers eagerly devoured zange,
confessional narratives of female and
male ex-convicts. Outraged at seeing others
profit from her life story on stage, in
the early 20th century Shimazu Omasa turned
her personal tales of sex work, robbery,
and clever escapes from the police into
a vaudeville act. Medical and psychoanalytical
literature of the 1920s and 1930s adopted
a supposedly objective scientific perspective
in their explanations of the female criminal.
For some criminologists, women were naturally
driven by their sanguine physiology to
monthly violence; at the least, shoplifting.
After execution or their natural death
in prison, the genitalia of notorious
female criminals like Takahashi Oden were
preserved in formaldehyde for further
examination. One is reminded of the fate
of those of the eighteenth century African
(Khoi) woman Saartjie "The Hottentot
Venus" Baartman, on exhibit in a
Paris Museum until 1974.
Like the ubiquitous figure of Jesse James
or Billy the Kid in Hollywood movies,
there were many retellings of the 1936
case of Abe Sada. After several drunken
days of lovemaking, Sada inadvertantly
killed her lover Ishida Kichizo during
intense sex play, carved "Sada Kichi
futari-kiri" ("Sada and Kichi,
the two of us") into his thigh, and
then chopped off his penis, and carried
it for three days until her capture. During
her trial, former lovers recounted in
detail her sexual proclivities and demands.
The story filled the newspapers of the
day, and captured the public imagination.
The 1937 book Abe Sada No Seishin Bunseki
Teki Shindan (The Psychoanalytic Diagnosis
of Abe Sada) featured Aubrey Beardsleys
florid drawing of Salome with the decapitated
head of John the Baptist on its cover.
After the war, the Allied Occupation authorities
wanted to keep the populace apolitical
and distracted with an avowed encouragement
of "sports, screen and sex".
They encouraged the publishing of pulp
magazines that would have been considered
obscene a decade before, and the tales
of Abe were now considerably more nuanced
and sympathetic. Her photograph was published
in 1949, showing the remorseful and reformed
woman living modestly and performing the
tea ceremony. Post-imperial Japanese societys
greater freedom for women offered more
understanding of a transgressive one.
By the 1970s movies of the Abe Sada story
focused more on her masochistic lover
Ishida Kichizo than pinning blame upon
her, as sensual Ishida was contrasted
with disciplined men his age serving the
Emperor in the Imperial Army. Oshima Nagisa
directed "In the Realm of the Senses",
climaxing in Abe strangling Ishida in
an act intended to heighten orgasm, was
popular among American college audiences
as well as Japanese. One experimental
play in Tokyo even ended with Abe opening
a packet, which characters and spectators
presumed carried Ishidas severed
part. It was revealed to be a gun with
which she shoots a journalist, so her
story can be published no longer.
The two chapters on Abe and Ichida bear
the unfortunate titles "How To Be
a Woman and Not Kill in the Attempt"
and "How To Be a Masochist and Not
Get Castrated in the Attempt". This
fey humor is not the authors only
academic excess, for at times her perceived
need to buttress her statements with citation
of the published work of contemporary
theorists clogs the flow of otherwise
exciting narratives. Now that Christine
L. Marran has given us this book of literary
analysis, what is truly needed is a flowering
of contemporary Japanese female Pop Artists
work on dokufu subjects along the
lines of the American "bad girl"
painter Niagara, who for three decades
has visualized (and vocalized) wry imagery
of female criminality and social transgression;
this reviewer has seen links to her http://www.niagaradetroit.com
from Japanese artists and hipsters
websites. Perhaps a wave of energetic
Japanese "poison women" artists
already exists, who are thirsty for blood,
so to speak. If so, Christine L. Marran
is qualified to write an appreciative
explanatory text in any book that reproduces
their work.