Norma Field '65                   Review     

Review copied from the Spring 1998 issue of the ASIJ Ambassador.

From My Grandmother’s Bedside: Sketches of  Postwar Tokyo,  
by Norma Moore Field ’65  University of California Press, 1977.

Norma Field’s newest book deals with the same large themes as her groundbreaking 1991nonfiction work In the Realm of a Dying Emperor—personal and political responsibility in a changing age—but this time from a more personal perspective.

Field is a scholar of East Asian language and culture at the University 
of Chicago, the daughter of a U.S. serviceman and a Japanese woman. Having spent her childhood in Japan and adulthood in America, she came back to Tokyo in 1995, but this time the person who lay dying
was not a political figurehead but her grandmother, and the era that 
was passing was that of her own childhood.

As much memoir as moral inquiry, this book’s complex themes are nestled in a deceptively simple structure. Richly drawn portraits of everyday domestic life that read like journal entries or postcards from afar slowly give way to the subtle thread of Field’s larger sociopolitical concerns, exposing the "partings and dispirited returns that must have gone into the economic miracle."

As Field, her mother and aunts struggle to defuse their differences, united in the effort to feed, bathe and care for the speechless grandmother, the domestic snapshots gain greater depth through the pointed descriptions of the difficulties in caring for the dying in a non institutional setting. Even further layering is achieved through explorations of the political influences that shape our lives. As this book suggests, even the small movements of everyday life are a series of negotiations through past, present and future. Yet Field’s awareness inevitably shifts to the political arena—whether it be events occurring at present, or historical events resurfacing due to anniversaries or museum exhibitions.

As in her earlier works, Field is not afraid to risk difficult questions and to probe an underlying emotional core of being that links us to moral responsibility. What does it mean to be a daughter, a mother, a family? What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to be a nation-state?

From My Grandmother’s Bedside burns brightly as a moving farewell to a matriarch, a childhood and an era. In it, the author is a kind of archaeologist digging into the microcosm of her family history, unearthing details that reflect the macrocosm of modern Japan. "If nostalgia is useful, it must be so as a tool of history, as kindling for a common future," Field writes, expressing concern about appearing nostalgic in her recollections. Not to worry. This is an unsentimental argument for the preservation of the individual in an age of mass culture, a probing and pinching of the numb repose that moves us away from responsibility, accountability and caring toward apathy, alienation and consumerism.

It is also another reason why Norma Field is one of our most brave and intelligent voices on 20th-century Japan, and why this book should be read by anyone who cares about its future. This review appears courtesy of author Leza Lowitz and The Japan Times.