It is always a great temptation to read works of literature from other cultures as sociology, or even to read fiction from our own cultural past as social history. It is possible, of course, and indeed often necessary, to construct a context from a text, but it is a dangerous process. While the best literature often contains both particular and universal truths, they are likely to be partial; it is rarely accurate to generalize from them in order to broadly characterize the social setting. The dangers of the activity are exacerbated not only by the differing assumptions an author makes about his readers' knowledge, but by the limits on the availability of works in translation. Were we to read as social history either Tanizaki Jun'ichirii's F&en r6jin nikki [Diary of a Mad Old Man], or Kawabata Yasunari's Nernureru bijo [The House of the Sleeping Beauties],2 for example, both of which deal with sexuality in old men in particular ways, we would end with a skewed view of elderly Japanese men.
However, two works recently made widely available in English translation, Ariyoshi Sawako's KGkotsu no hito [The Twilight Years], and Inoue Yasushi's Wa ga haha no ki [A Chronicle of My Mother], for different reasons do work well as social description. They are, in fact, particularly valuable in providing the texture of experience, the flesh for the skeleton of information available in sociological texts. The rosy picture provided by our expectations of a culture with a traditional respect for the aged is, in many ways, backed by darkness, and some of that darkness is contained in the physical details of modem life. The picture becomes the more disheartening when the old people are infirm. Erdman Palmore, for example,