Young Women in Japan

'Okano, a Japanese scholar transplanted to Australia, has conducted a long-range study of a cohort of working-class young women originally from Kobe, extracting the specific and exemplary stories of eight of them. Her intriguing study, divided into two parts ("life stories" and "themes"), is remarkably accessible and appealing on a number of levels. In recounting the eight subjects' life stories over a 12-year period, Okano (Latrobe Univ.) makes each of them come so vividly alive that the book will be highly usable and appealing even to undergraduates or neophyte readers. The range of "transitions" is remarkably wide, from transcendence to failure, giving the strong impression of general coverage of a whole category from this small sample. As an interviewer, the author is compassionate, forthright, nonjudgmental, kindly, and altogether appealing. Her analytic second part continues to reference the eight individuals in detail, thus taking what could have been a ponderous assessment and welding it into an accessible and altogether delightful book that is simultaneously rigorous and analytical while reading as charmingly as a novel. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.' - R. B. Lyman Jr., emeritus, Simmons College, CHOICE, February 2010