In Professor Noriko J. Horiguchi's Women Adrift: the Literature of Japan's Imperial Body, the “bodies” are the lens through which the Japanese female subjects respond to the expanding Japanese Empire and its discourse on women. Through three female writers' works – Yosano Akiko, Tamura Toshiko and Hayashi Fumiko – Horiguchi challenges the popular critics portraying these three writers as “apolitical figures or transgressors moving and residing outside the state discourse on Japanese women” (p. 157). Horiguchi analyses their literary works as well as the writers' personal travel in the expanding Japanese Empire, from naichi (‘the inner territory of Japan/the mainland’) to gaichi (‘the outer territory of Japan/the colonies’), to underline their active participation in the state's expanding project and to challenge the popular view of Japanese women as passive victims of the government and military.

By connecting literature with history and politics, Horiguchi not only demonstrates how literature constructs Japanese women as active agents in modern Japan, but also how these writers transgressed the polarized idea of the role of Japanese subject as participant/dissenter in the nation's policies. The author points out that each writer shows various positions toward national aggression, at different junctions of their career or life, and in different ways according to social class and other circumstances.

In the first three chapters, Horiguchi tackles the main theme of this book, which is “the reason for and processes of the connection and disconnection between migrant bodies of women and the expanding body/border of the Empire” (Introduction, p. viii). Horiguchi makes a detailed statement to connect the body in motion, Japanese Empire and female subjects. Chapter 1 begins with the concept of kokutai (‘the body of the nation’) which prompted the debate from the 1870s. Tracing diverse metaphors developed from the concept of kokutai, Horiguchi shows how Japanese citizens, the Emperor and colonial subjects were conceived in the expansion of Japanese Empire, as their roles were metamorphosed into different parts of the body. Horiguchi then raises the connection between the expanding border and body in motion, and asserts that as the bodies of Japanese subjects moved from naichi to gaichi, they “expanded the borders, and operated to liberate and strengthen the imperial body” (p. 17).

Chapter 2 analyses the relationship between female subjects and state discourses. Besides exploring the state policies which placed the maternal body as the womb of the Empire and limited female subjects' activities within the border of the home by using the concept of ryō sai kenbo (‘wise mother, good wife’), Horiguchi also concentrates on two other types of women – lower and middle class, and migrant women. Horiguchi shows how female subjects were subjugated as parts of the body of Empire and how “ideas and practices of female bodies changed in accordance with the shifting concepts of Japan as body” (p. 19), by outlying participations of Japanese women from different social classes and their diverse implications in the state discourses on female bodies.

Chapter 3 explores the way in which women activists and artists responded to the dominant state discourse and how women negotiated with the transgression of borders of female bodies. Horiguchi ends this chapter by the discussion of the significance of female migrant bodies, which is the dominant theme in the fiction of Yosano, Hayashi and Tamura, leading the analysis in the next three chapters. Horiguchi questions the single role of migrant bodies of female characters in transgressing the discursive border and body of the Empire and suggests that the female bodies in the works of three writers rather “redrew the imperial borders” (p. 50).

Each of the final three chapters treats a single writer, analysing the female bodies in her writing and the writer's personal movement around the Empire borders. In Chapter 4, Horiguchi challenges the popular idea of Yosano Akiko as a rebel defying militarism and underlines the paradox in Yosano's writings which “challenges the state-driven nationalism regarding women yet simultaneously celebrates war and reaffirms the expansion of the Empire” (p. 56). Horiguchi shows that the writer's contradictory discourse on the potency of the female body and mobility was in coordination with the borders of Empire. In relation to women in naichi, Yosano's writing urges female subjects to act against the central discourse of the state on women; concerning gaichi, she re-creates the female bodies as a site that “attains agency to reproduce the Empire” (p. 69) by producing future soldiers. Furthermore, Yosano's writing elevates the body to the scale of the universe by celebrating fecund bodies and embracing the expansion of Japanese Empire which it was believed would bring eventual peace to the world.

Chapter 5 treats the work of Tamura Toshiko who lived as a wanderer in “self-imposed exile”. Horiguchi focuses on the migrant women's bodies in Tamura's works produced during her stay in Vancouver from 1918 to 1935, Los Angeles from 1935 to 1936 and Tokyo in the late 1930s. These works have been curiously neglected by most critics and analyses, in contrast to to her most-studied writing produced in Tokyo in the 1910s. Horiguchi argues that in Tamara's texts the shifts from resistance to support of the state's designation of the role of Japanese subjects align with the “changes in [Toshiko's] positions as a woman and a migrant at different times and in different places as the Empire of Japan expanded” (p. 120), while the forces of the Empire inscribed in women's transnational bodies move between and outside the borders of Japanese Empire.

Chapter 6 explores the disconnection and reconnection between female bodies and the Japanese Empire with examination of migrant women moving between naichi and gaichi in Hayashi Fumiko's texts. Three types of bodily movements implied by Hayashi's female characters are tackled. First, Horiguchi treats the heroine in Hōrōki who represents the female body moving within naichi; second, Horiguchi deals with the body of women moving in gaichi in Hayashi's war reportage Hokugan butai; the examination is ended with the heroine in Ukigumo who moved between naichi and gaichi. Following Chapter 6 on Hayashi's works, the conclusion of this book takes up the examination of representation of female bodies in Naruse Mikio's film adaptation of Hayashi's novels, in order to explore how the visual narratives “re-create the Japanese imperial past in the present” (p. 157).

Tying together literary, historical and film studies, Horiguchi offers a substantial exploration of migrant female bodies in the literary works as well as the female writer's bodies in motion responding to the major discourse of the state on women and to the expansion of Japanese Empire. Horiguchi makes a remarkable effort to question constantly the one-sided critics about female bodies in the state discourse and review the single meaning attributed to the female bodies moving around the borders of Empire. The value of Women Adrift lies in its exploration of the coexistence of resistance and conformity of female bodies in motion within and outside the expanding Japanese Empire, which suggests the potency of female bodies in being able to both re-create the borders/body of Empire and resist the designation of the state.