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Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world s largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo s sex industry, Healing Labor explores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care a healing labor that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women s work, sex, and the gendered economy.
Dec 19, 2020 As 2021 approaches, six Japan Times book reviewers look back on their top reads released in English this year. Breasts and Eggs, Fiction, Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd), Picador, 432 pages If you missed “Breasts and Eggs,” Mieko Kawakami’s expansive and lively omnibus, put it at the top of your 2021 reading list. The book is made up of two connected novellas that were combined and translated into English this year, and together the story explores the human condition by examining what it means to be born. No one delves into humanity quite like Kawakami, who adroitly balances social issues with humor and juxtaposes philosophical questions with streetwise answers. Kawakami’s sprawling, soaring, sometimes stumbling prose always rights itself into a sly meditation on human flaws and fallacies, taking on single motherhood, social isolation, gender norms and sexual abuse. ....