Word: shidzue
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...Ashihei Hino" is really Katsunori Tamai, known to a highbrow handful of Japanese readers for his The Warship on the Mountain, The Fish with Poison, for which in the past two years he has won Japan's highest Akutagawa Prize for literature. Translater is pacifist Birth-Controller Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, who translated the book out of "deep devotion to my country...
FACING TWO WAYS-Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto-Farrar & Rinehart...
...When Shidzué Ishimoto was born in Tokyo at the turn of the century, the life of a woman of the samurai class was confined to a rigid pattern, from which deviation was instantly punished. She could expect to lead a sheltered life, become accomplished in penmanship, drawing, ethics, the three forms of bowing, the elaborate and agonizing rules for entertaining at dinner, the equally elaborate rules for serving tea, the subtle and difficult art of arranging flowers in vases. She could expect her parents to arrange her marriage, to be dominated throughout it by her husband and her mother...
Daughter of a successful engineer who had adjusted himself to Westernization, Shidzué was educated at the Peeresses' School, where little Japanese princesses, even in their games, never forgot their rank or the distinction of their families. Shidzué's mother played the part of a samurai's wife as if giving a theatrical performance. Training her daughter in ancient Japanese graces, she made Shidzué study the difficult tea ceremony, saw to it that she mastered the intricate technique of flower arrangement. Shidzué felt about these instructions much as a Western child might feel about...
Western influences pulled powerfully at her. Her liberal, widely-read Uncle Yusuke fired her imagination with tales of Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale. When Shidzué, at 18, was married, she found that her husband was far more deeply dissatisfied with feudal customs and restraints than she had been. Head of a wealthy and powerful family, a Christian humanist, young Baron Ishimoto became a mining engineer, took his inexperienced bride to the grimy coal fields of western Japan. There they lived for two and a half years on an equal footing with other employes, housed in a miserable thatched...