Book Reading: Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women Phyllis Birnbaum (Writer)

March 18, 1999

Book Reading: Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women
Phyllis Birnbaum (Writer)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. & Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM

The Columbia University Press and the Donald Keene Center host Phyllis Birnbaum as she reads from her new book Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women.  Ms. Birnbaum’s work explores the lives of five strong-minded women who challenged the status quo of Japanese society through the fearlessness of their art and their private lives.  These women include two actresses, Matsui Sumako and Takamine Hideko, poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, novelist Uno Chiyo, and painter Takamura Chieko. Phyllis Birnbaum has also authored the novel An Eastern Tradition and translated Rabbits, Crabs, Etc.: Stories by Japanese Women and Uno Chiyo’s Confessions of Love, for which she was awarded the 1989 Japan-U.S Friendship Commission Japanese Literary Translation Prize.