Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life
by
[Farrar & Rinehart, $3.50]
THE story of any woman who has chosen to reject the security of wealth and tradition, who has learned to command new experience and bear notoriety and opposition, is always interesting — particularly when she achieves a life of independent action whose only security springs from her own ability and conviction. Baroness Ishimoto is a woman sensitive in perception and mature in judgment. She has written a warm, human account of a life that started under a tradition which dictates behavior in every small circumstance.
At the age of seventeen, she first met her future husband at the home of the ‘go-between’ who negotiated their marriage. Soon afterward she left her family and entered her husband’s, taking with her an elaborate and expensive trousseau, supposedly the only wealth she herself could command for the rest of her life. Fascinating are the chapters on the marriage. The customs governing the betrothal and wedding, the functions of the ‘go-between,’ and the bride’s status in her husband’s family are set forth, together with an extraordinary document, a list ten pages long, itemizing the Baroness’s wedding trousseau. A few months later she was living on $25 a month, her husband’s salary as an engineer, in a remote and poverty-stricken mining town and striving to understand the ideas and aspirations of a young aristocrat whose far from conventional concern with social problems had taken him there.
Facing Two Ways might well be the starting point for a reader who is taking up for the first time the problems of modern Japan. For those who have read the Murasaki stories or Lafcadio Hearn’s essays and wondered how much of the life depicted there has been carried over to the Japan of factories and aggressive diplomacy, the book will be invaluable. Baroness Ishimoto, sensitive of these changes, views Japan at once from the short range of an individual who has devoted her life to the immediate problems of poverty and restriction, and from the long range of one engrossed in the task of evaluating dominant aspects of Japanese life.
To-day, little more than twenty years out of the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo (where she learned, among other things, the care of silkworms and Japanese penmanship), Baroness Ishimoto is an acknowledged leader of women and founder of the birth-control movement in Japan. Her book is a genuine contribution to Western understanding of her native land.
ELIZABETH G. BROWN