The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family

by Elisabeth Bumiller

Overview

With Bumiller's intimate, beautifully written portrait of a middle-class Tokyo housewife, readers finally penetrate the mysteries of the Japanese people to see how they differ from us, and how they are alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307765888
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Elisabeth Bumiller, a Washington reporter for The New York Times, was a Times White House correspondent from September 10, 2001, to 2006. She is the author of May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India and The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family. Bumiller lives in the Washington, DC, area with her husband, Steven R. Weisman, and two children.

Editorial Reviews

An examination of contemporary Japanese society as seen through a year in the life of a middle-class woman. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

While interviewing in Japan for the Washington Post in 1991-92, journalist Bumiller chronicled through an interpreter a year in the life of Mariko, "an ordinary Japanese woman," and her family and neighborhood. Her struggle to balance her own needs with those of her family is a "reminder that certain universalities transcend borders." Like the author's May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (LJ 5/1/90), about Indian women, Mariko is best suited to young adults despite its occaisional clichs. In 1910 Makiko Nakano (1890-1978) was a newlywed daughter-in-law with responsibilities in a busy family community that functioned both as a residence and as a store. Likable, assiduous Makiko detailed changes taking place in her early-20th-century Japanese town and domestic life in her diary. Nakano Takashi's 1981 publication of his mother's record is in Japanese-language collections of many university libraries. Translator Smith (Japanese, Cornell Univ., ret.), who is associated with the creation of The Diary of a Japanese Innkeeper's Daughter (Cornell Univ. East Asia Program, 1984), provides all the relevant explication, notes, maps, and illustrations a researcher of modern Japanese social history could desire. Both works offer insights into the daily lives of 20th-century Japanese women and help dispel the mythology; both are recommended for public library and women's studies collections, though Makiko's Diary is essential for academic and scholarly libraries.-Helen Rippier Wheeler, formerly with SLIS, Univ. of California-Berkeley,

Library Journal

"Washington Post" feature writer Bumiller studied Indian women in "May You Be the Mother of One Hundred Sons" (1990). Here, by capturing a single family's experiences, she explores a nation that "likes to think of itself as one large family." Over 14 months in 1991 and 1992, Bumiller (and interpreter Sachiko Kamazuka) talked with the pseudonymous Tanaka family, particularly with Mariko, the 44-year-old wife of Takeshi, mother of two sons and a daughter aged 10 to 16--and a daughter herself, who moved her family into her parents' home to care for them in their old age, as well as holder of two part-time jobs and active in school and neighborhood organizations. In a sense, Mariko and her husband spent the year of Bumiller's visits in midlife crises, recognizing the dreams they had not (and would not) achieve and viewing their futures with some dismay. But Bumiller's narrative gracefully explores the strength of the Tanakas' commitment to family, the responsibility Mariko in particular feels to both children and parents, and the complexity of the spouses' feelings about each other. A nuanced, "inside" view of Japanese life.

Mary Carroll

"A rich, sustained look at real life in middle-class Tokyo....full of cultural insight.... Her discussions of [Japanese society] are clear, well-reported and skillfully interwoven with the portrait of Mariko"—Kyoko Mori, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher