In The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction, Julia C. Bullock raises the compelling question of why there is so much violence and seeming misogyny in the fiction of three prominent female writers of the 1960s. Why, for example, does Kono Taeko in “Toddler Hunting” create a female protagonist who fantasizes about orchestrating the whipping of a young boy until his stomach splits open and his intestines “slither out”? (p. 61). Why would a contemporary of Kono's, Takahashi Takako, craft a scene in “Secret” in which a woman, naked and posing on a cross as in a crucifixion, has her breasts pulled through sharp metal holes intended for nails, enjoying “the fact that men demanded this”? (pp. 75–76). And why would yet another woman writer of the same postwar era, Kurahashi Yumiko, have a female character in “Like a Witch” refer to menstruation as “an angel of death that comes to pick the vines clean”? (p. 233) The writers whom Bullock groups together focus on female violence and degradation in ways that challenge both conventional models of femininity and the general parameters established by first-wave feminism.

Bullock's causal claims are twofold: first, that their writings were a reaction to the restraints placed on women's roles during the postwar high-growth period, and second, that the issues raised in these writings anticipated the agendas of the feminist liberation movements that were not to develop until a decade later—hence the name of the book, The Other Woman's Lib.

Bullock opens with a lengthy introduction of the postwar period and the Japanese polity's pursuit of increased economic prosperity—a national project in which women were assigned the roles of enablers and supporters of both the productive work of men and the education of children. The following four chapters are organized around literary tropes at play in the works of each of the three writers under discussion. Chapters 2 and 3 explore disciplinary mechanisms that keep women in check, focusing on the internalization of the male gaze and the imbalance in power relations between male mentors, or lovers, and female writers. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the false dichotomy that “underwrites such binary distinctions” as gender difference (p. 96) by invoking bodies that fail to meet gendered notions of “normalcy” (p. 98), and by exposing the vast differences that render problematic easy assumptions about solidarity or intimacy between women.

Bullock threads her argument evenly through the chapters, transitioning at the end of each chapter with both a summary and a look forward. This guidance, along with the socioeconomic context provided in the introduction, will make The Other Woman's Lib an effective text for classroom use. Maintaining a focus on engendering as a violent process, Bullock repeatedly exposes gendered logic as non-natural, but she is careful not to move to quickly toward claims of “subversion.” Her coverage goes far beyond the stories that are usually presented as representative of each writer's oeuvre—Kono's “Toddler-Hunting” or Kurahashi's “Partei,” for example. Indeed, the most powerful contribution of this book is the introduction and analyses of texts that are willing to wade in the complex emotions of female anger and dissatisfaction.

The connection between the nonmaternal and violent nature of many of the cited texts, and the subsequent agendas of the feminist movements, has its richest illustration in the case of Nagata Hiroko and the Red Army purging incident of 1972. Drawing on the excellent work of Setsu Shigematsu, Bullock presents the events in which Nagata is involved in ordering the purging of her fellow red-army members—among whom is included a pregnant woman—as “consonant with the feminine misogyny” expressed by the protagonists of the texts under discussion (p. 160). Besides this parallel, however, which is made in the concluding pages of the book, the connections to the political movements remain relatively general and abstract.

Bullock concludes with a call for the value and relevance of a literary imaginary when she writes that “it may be time to rethink histories of feminism that privilege explicitly political speech over other methods of feminist discourse” (p. 166). It is a call that is well supported by the textual analyses that Bullock performs. For while politics demands transparent language and articulate goals, the literary imaginaries of these women writers are murky and contradictory; the experiences depicted by them are transitory and ill suited for the permanent positions of a political platform. However, this is also why the political claims of Bullock's overarching frame works somewhat against her close readings—for though the thrust of her readings champions rich contradictions and confusing corporeal and emotive experiences, her broad argument concedes to the primacy of a transparent, universal mode of expression. The women's liberation activist of the 1970s may, as Bullock asserts, “have picked up where these writers left off” (p. 166), and these writers likely did react against the role that women were assigned in postwar Japan's single-minded pursuit of prosperity, but such tight connections are not necessarily the most significant gifts that their complex imaginations have to offer.