Woken earlier in the day, Anne Sokolsky was so sleepy she assumed me to be a Japanese woman speaking bad English rather than the other way around. A rocky start dispelled by the wide-awake vivacity with which she approached me at Tokyo's Yotsuya Station midafternoon.
Anne is halfway through a year on a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship at Waseda University, researching feminist literature of the Taisho period in general and writer Toshiko Tamura in particular. "She's virtually unknown in Japan today. If I make her known abroad, perhaps she can find her way back here." As to translations in English, Anne knows of only two published stories, in the anthology "To Live and To Write" by Yukiko Tanaka.
Anne's Polish paternal grandfather -- a journalist in Shanghai in the early 1900s -- left for New York just before the Depression. Having allied himself to the Nationalists in China, the U.S. ate up his anticommunist rhetoric. He achieved fame and success, but never the academic kudos he craved. "I wonder what he'd make of a feminist granddaughter studying leftwing women writers?"