In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist

This autobiography of Japan's foremost feminist presents a vivid portrait, rich in detail, of the education and everyday life for the daughter of a government bureaucrat growing up in Tokyo during the 1890s. Raicho Hiratsuka's transformation into an activist intellectual who, as the founding editor of the landmark journal Seito, recast the boundaries of feminist discourse deserves the widest possible readership in Japanese studies. Teruko Craig's admirably smooth and fluid translation is a pleasure to read and a major contribution to our field.

A significant contribution to Japanese Studies and to the study of feminist thought as a transnational phenomenon.

An absorbing read for Asian specialists and for general readers.

Everyone interested in Japanese feminism owes Craig an immense debt of gratitude for choosing to undertake this translation, and for doing it so well... Essential.

A tour de force of meticulous scholarship and exquisitely rendered English.

— Jan Bardsley

An absorbing read for Asian specialists and for general readers.

— Kathleen S. Uno

— Kathleen S. Uno

This book is fascinating for the light it sheds on a single family of the upper-middle social class in Meiji, Japan, and on the formative factors that led Raicho Hiratsuka to her later endeavors. The translation is excellent: it reads smoothly and Craig seems able to convey Hiratsuka's individual voice.