Abstract
The week of the murder of Yoshida Kichizō by his lover Abe Sada was one filled with passion. The two had been meeting secretly for months behind the back of Kichizō’s wife who was also Sada’s boss. This time the lovers snuck off to the Masaki Inn on May 11, 1936. Sada remembered in testimony the passion of their lovemaking in reflecting on one tryst at the Tagawa inn:
We kept the bed out from the evening of the 27th to the morning of the 29th, and hardly slept at night doing every nasty deed possible. When I said I was tired Ishida would make love to me and even while sleeping he would massage my body very sweetly It was the first time in my life that I had met a man who treated a woman so well and who made me so happy I fell in love. I could never be separated from him…1
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Notes
Hon no Mori Henshū-bu, ed. Abe Sada Jiken chōsho zenbun (Kosumikku Intōnashonaru, 1997), 48–49.
Sakaguchi Ango, “Abe Sada-san no inshō.” Zadan 1, no. 1 (December 1947): 36.
For further discussion of the poison woman in Japanese literary history in English, see Christine Marran “‘Poison Woman’ Takahashi Oden and the Spectacle of Female Deviance in Early Meiji,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement 9 (1995): 93–110;
Mark Silver, “The Lies and Connivances of an Evil Woman: Early Meiji Realism and The Tale of Takahashi Oden the She-Devil,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63, no. 1 (2003): 5–67.
For a discussion of sexology in Japan, see Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),
and Ryūichi Narita, “The Overflourishing of Sexuality in 1920s Japan,” in Gender and Japanese History, vol. 1, ed. Haruko Wakita et al. (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 1999), 345–370.
Maesaka Toshiyuki, Abe Sada shuki (Tokyo: Chūkōbunko, 1998), 164. Sada in testimony expresses that she felt a sense of futility and believed at some points that becoming a geisha was the only path left for her after being raped by a college student when she was young.
Awazu Kiyoshi et al., eds., Abe Sada: Shōwa jū-ichi nen no onna (Tokyo: Tabatake Shoten, 1976), 35.
See Fukushima Akira et al., Nihon no seishin kantei (Misuzu Shobō, 1973), 31–60 for the full report.
See Horinouchi Masakazu, Abe Sada shōden (Tokyo: Jōhō Senta Shuppan Kyoku, 1998), 224–225.
William Johnston, Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 139.
Jitsuroku Abe Sada (The true story of Abe Sada), and Ai no koriida (In the realm of the senses); Watanabe Jun’ichi, A Lost Paradise (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000).
Sekine Hiroshi, Sekine Hiroshi shi-shū: Abe Sada (Tokyo: Doyōbijutsusha, 1971).
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© 2005 Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley
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Marran, C. (2005). So Bad She’s Good: The Masochist’s Heroine in Postwar Japan, Abe Sada. In: Miller, L., Bardsley, J. (eds) Bad Girls of Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977120_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977120_6
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