On Taking Over Seito

In January 1915 the nineteen-year-old Itō Noe announced that she was taking over Seitō (Bluestocking), the journal of Japan's first feminist literary circle, and that it would henceforth have no rules, no policy and no principles. This collection gathers her writing from those years: the preface to her translation of Emma Goldman, a quarrel at home that becomes a meditation on solitude, an attack on women's magazines and girls' schooling, a memory of a lie told against her as a schoolgirl, open letters from Tokyo and from her native Kyūshū, and frank portraits of the men she met in literary Tokyo.

Contents: Author's Preface to The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation; The Consciousness of Being Human; On Taking Over Seitō; I Hope Women Will Reflect; Reflections on Lying; To Mr. Nakamura Kogetsu; From Kyūshū: To Ms. Ikuta Hanayo; To Raichō; The Men I Have Met, Parts One and Two.

For readers of feminist history, Japanese women's writing, and the Taishō-era literary world.