| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Anne Walthall. The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration. (Women in Culture and Society.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 412. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.00.

Anne Walthall's work has, from the beginning, been characterized by her interest in breaking new ground and her unwillingness to accept easy answers. In that sense, this book on Matsuo Taseko seems very much on a continuum with her earlier work, but its scope is larger. Here Walthall is ready to contest important aspects of the "settled" history of the Meiji Restoration, as well as Japanese interpretations of Taseko, a woman lionized by the Meiji establishment as a model of their particular version of "good wife, wise mother" and by later recreators of the Japanese past as an uncomplicated advocate of the "Emperor system." Walthall's work makes it clear that Taseko was anything but uncomplicated, and she certainly does not seem to fit the mid-Meiji version of "good wife, wise mother." She is, however, very interesting, and she clearly lived in interesting times. 1

Japanese specialists on this side of the Pacific will find in the book a serious, and quite intentional, challenge to what Walthall describes as "a male-centered genre of history writing that demands the public story of the public life . . . Taseko became famous because she came to know some of these [public] men. Hers is not a success story; it disrupts the sequence of events, confuses public and private acts, foregrounds ideology, and makes sense only in terms of her class and gender" (p. 3). "In the sense both of who has been written about and who has done the writing, at least within the English speaking world, the Meiji Restoration has constituted masculine turf. Let us now proceed to violate it" (p. 16). . . .

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