Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo by Phyllis Birnbaum


Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo
Title : Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0231113579
ISBN-10 : 9780231113571
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 256
Publication : First published November 24, 1998

The stunning biographical portraits in Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, some adapted from essays that first appeared in The New Yorker, explore the lives of five women who did their best to stand up and cause more trouble than was considered proper in Japanese society. Their lives stretch across a century and a half of explosive cultural and political transformations in Japan. These five artists-two actresses, two writers, and a painter-were noted for their talents, their beauty, and their love affairs rather than for any association with politics. But through the fearlessness of their art and their private lives, they influenced the attitudes of their times and challenged the status quo.

Phyllis Birnbaum presents her subjects from various perspectives, allowing them to shine forth in all of their contradictory brilliance: generous and petulant, daring and timid, prudent and foolish. There is Matsui Sumako, the actress who introduced Ibsen's Nora and Wilde's Salome to Japanese audiences but is best remembered for her ambition, obstreperous temperament and turbulent love life. We also meet Takamura Chieko, a promising but ultimately disappointed modernist painter whose descent into mental illness was immortalized in poetry by a husband who may well have been the source of her troubles. In a startling act of rebellion, the sensitive, aristocratic poet Yanagiwara Byakuren left her crude and powerful husband, eloped with her revolutionary lover, and published her request for a divorce in the newspapers. Uno Chiyo was a popular novelist who preferred to be remembered for the romantic wars she fought. Willful, shrewd, and ambitious, Uno struggled for sexual liberation and literary merit. Birnbaum concludes by exploring the life and career of Takamine Hideko, a Japanese film star who portrayed wholesome working-class heroines in hundreds of films, working with such directors as Naruse, Kinoshita, Ozu, and Kurosawa. Angry about a childhood spent working to provide for greedy relatives, Takamine nevertheless made peace with her troubled past and was rewarded for years of hard work with a brilliant career.

Drawing on fictional accounts, interviews, memoirs, newspaper reports, and the creative works of her subjects, Birnbaum has created vivid, seamless narrative portraits of these five remarkable women.

Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo Reviews

  • Patrick McCoy

    I was interested in reading Phyllis Birnbaum's Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women (2000) mainly because one of the chapters, the final one, focuses on Hideko Takamine one of master director Mikio Naruse's favorite actresses (thus one of mine). But all of the women profiled in this book are fascinating on some level. The First Chapter, "Slamming the Door Scaring the Neighbors" is about the volatile actress Sumiko Matsui, who is said to have been responsible for her lover's, the writer Hogetsu Shimmamura, death through negligence. The woman from rural Japan through force of will became the defining stage actress of her generation. The Second Chapter, "He Stole Her Sky", tells the tragic story of the life of the poet Chieko Takamura. She established her reputation with Chieko's Sky and died an early death from tuberculosis after having been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The early feminist and author Byakuren Yanagiwara was the focus of Chapter Three, "Shinning Stars, Lonely Nights." This woman may be the most complex and difficult to understand of the women profiled in this collection. Yanagiwara was ill treated by her family who essentially sold her off first to her childhood sexual abuser then to a much older and wealthy merchant from faraway Kyushu. She was from an influential family with ties to the emperor and used poetry as a diversion from her unhappy marriage and eventually broke free by publicly breaking from her husband via a newspaper article and going off with the husband of her choice Ryusuke Miyazaki. Chiyo Uno, subject of Chapter Four: "Modern Girl", was another trailblazer and man-eating writer and kimono designer who broke the mold for modern women in the Taisho era. She went through a number of husbands while supporting herself as a writer over a long career. The final chapter, "The Odor of Pickled Radishes", focuses on Hideko Takamine, a well-known star of Japanese cinema in the golden years. Takamine also worked with several other notable directors like Keisuke Kinoshita for example. She lived a very sad life as a child star before maturing into memorable roles for elite directors in the golden age. It's interesting that in the preface Birnbaum talks about the difficulties of meeting biographical subjects with preconceived notions that were often repelled by the subjects. Therefore she chose to focus on dead subjects later, grappling only with the written histories rather than the subjects themselves. Only the final two subjects Chiyo Uno and Hideko Takamine were alive at the time of the writing of the book. Overall, it was a detailed look at five exceptional modern Japanese women.

  • Nicole

    I read this book as it was written by a friend of a friend. The subject matter was very interesting, but I found it a bit too academic for my tastes. She has a new book out that I'd like to read sometime just the same.