Drawing on a supply of autobiographical narratives, as well as literary and cultural texts, this title situates this phenomenon against a backdrop of profound social change in Japan and within an intricate network of larger global forces. It exposes the racial and erotic politics of trans-national mobility.

"Taking cover under her more innocuous theme of the recent internationalization of Japanese women's lives and careers, Karen Kelsky bluntly asks one of the great taboo questions in Japanese studies: why do so many Japanese women, if given the chance, prefer white husbands over those of their own ethnicity? What are the historical and psychological reasons for a powerful attraction enshrined in popular culture since "Madame Butterfly "but until now never critically examined, certainly not from a modern feminist perspective? Kelsky's provocative answers to these questions make her "Women on the Verge" the first study we have of Japan's eroticization of the West, in a world already so full of books that would tell us how the West has eroticized Japan."--John Whittier Treat, Yale University