The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics by Amy Borovoy

By Amy Borovoy

Social ingesting is an permitted element of operating lifestyles in Japan, and ladies are left to regulate their drunken husbands while the lads go back domestic, restoring them to sobriety for day after today of labor. In trying to focus on their husbands' alcoholism, the ladies face a profound cultural difficulty: while does the nurturing habit anticipated of a great spouse and mom develop into a part of a development of habit that's truly harmful? How does the party of nurturance and dependency masks the exploitative points not only of kin existence but in addition of public lifestyles in Japan? The Too-Good spouse follows the reports of a bunch of middle-class girls in Tokyo who participated in a weekly help assembly for households of substance abusers at a public mental-health health center. Amy Borovoy deftly analyzes the dilemmas of being woman in smooth Japan and the grace with which ladies fight inside of a method that helps other halves and moms yet thwarts their makes an attempt to discover achievement open air the relations. The relevant matters of the booklet succeed in past the matter of alcoholism to check the women's personal strategies of self-reflection and feedback and the deeper fissures and asymmetries that undergird jap productiveness and social order.

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Extra info for The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity)

Sample text

Since children respond to their mother just like a reflection in a mirror, if the mother’s disposition is not pure, then the children, reflect- 16 INTRODUCTION ing this, also cannot be pure. If we desire children of fine character and disposition, therefore, then their mother by all means should also attain similar perfection. (Arinori, cited in Braisted 1976: 252) The complicated mixture of servitude and pride, or sacrifice and entitlement, that is the legacy of Meiji articulations of gender and family has been one of the key tensions of women’s lives and feminist politics in Japan, and has continued to resonate in contemporary times.

Others see Tomo’s plight as a masochistic path to which she is bound. Yet, despite Tomo’s moment of awakening above, one sees within the structure of the novel the reasons that Tomo is drawn to her path, and indeed in the conclusion of the story she is somewhat vindicated, as the extent to which the fate of the Shirakawa family lay in her hands emerges into public consciousness. If Enchi’s novel is meant to be an indictment of the patriarchal family system that forced women into misery, it is also a text that vividly portrays the seductiveness and importance of this role.

The work of caregiving and nurturance was assumed among these women, and they received a considerable degree of validation as Japan prospered and Japanese society evidenced stability and cohesion. And yet the tensions and rifts in the system can be seen even among these women, particularly in the context of the Center, 32 INTRODUCTION where they were grappling with social problems that were in part exacerbated by the demands of urbanization and economic productivity. As I discuss in chapter 6, these tensions are even more evident today in a younger generation of women who no longer derive the same sense of validation from domesticity (now frequently viewed as frivolous and separated from public concerns) and who increasingly desire the rewards of economic self-su‹ciency and professional prestige.

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The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics by Amy Borovoy
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