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Precis: " The Cafe Waitresses Serving Modern Japan" (1998) by Miriam Silverberg

In Miriam Silverberg’s “The Cafe Waitresses Serving Modern Japan” (1998), her main focus was to drawn attention to the history of the cafe waitresses of the 1920’s and 1930’s, particularly into her labors and desires, such as those manufactured within the confines of the cafe and those experienced with heartfelt emotion at a time when women and men were aware of the construction of the known traditions that it was also possible to change them. In addition, the sense of what a cafe can offer to its customer was also discussed, thus highlighting what or how exactly the cafe waitress was serving modern Japan, such as the variety of themes and experiences (often catering to the taste of the customers), cultural practices found within the confines of the cafes, and the appearance and propagation of jokyū dialect (satokotoba – reminiscent of the premodern Yoshiwara district manner of speaking). This is further discussed by examining the cafe waitress (jokyū) in terms of her representation in the case of the erotic, the grotesque and the nonsense, to which by focusing on a textual analysis of Fumiko Hayashi’s autobiographical novel “Hōrōki”, the experience of the cafe waitress is brought to a new light. As part of the conclusion, Silverberg argues that everything becomes a form of negotiation, whereby the cafe waitress of that time were very much aware of the political power of the erotic, though grotesque at times, but clearly never nonsensical in nature, and that situating the cafe waitress was always in relation to the men, to the small rooms of their work, to the cafes, all of which was governed by domination.

(November 2, 2018)

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