Imagine how difficult it would be to squeeze our diverse lives into a standardized, state-mandated family structure that redefined our identities and social relationships. An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel captures the Japanese novel at just such a historical moment—the emergence of the “Meiji family” (p. 3), the modern Japanese patriarchal family (ie) system imposed as part of the consolidation of the Meiji emperor's powers in the late nineteenth century (p. 22). The new ideology of the “family-state” (kazoku kokka) “regarded the ie as a constituent unit of the nation” (p. 73), and, as Ken Ito shows, was swiftly incorporated into the cultural mainstream. Ito's book chronicles the response of fiction to the concept of the ie and highlights how gender roles and social hierarchy were negotiated in the production and reinforcement of the ie ideology.
Ito examines...
