cogit8 comments

for anyone interested in a good biography of her life, with many pictures:

www.yoshikoyamaguchi.blogspot.com

Hadfield (like Buruma) adopts a mocking tone also, but never reveals the sources for his denigrating summary of Yamaguchi's life.

Buruma is another naysayer who presents his work of fiction as being true, but the only truth in it are the bare-bones historical facts that everyone knows. Everything else in this work of historical fiction-book is imagined.

Hadfield never gives Yamaguchi her due respect - she was someone who led such an event-filled life that Buruma required 3 separate individuals to give their (flawed) imagined impressions of what she was. Hadfield also uses words like "reinvention" - perhaps if Hadfield had to leave Japan and go back to someplace else he would have more appreciation for what a person goes through (and it is not reinvention to use all your talent and energy to find work and keep going and doing what you've always been doing).

I challenge anyone to name any person in history who can match her dedication, energy, range of talent, and yes, her beauty of body and mind (called integrity - look up the Ashi Shimbun editorial at her passing away in Sep 2014).