A Feminist's Creed

Decided to spend some time to reconnect with my old *nerdy* self from the undergraduate days in the university's main library while waiting for Maghrib, along the Language and Literature shelves in the General Collection Section. If heaven is a place on earth, then that is exactly where and how mine would be. I tried to eye every single spine, but could not - there are just too many that caught my attention.

Thus I decided to focus on books that are quite familiar to myself (title-wise, subject matter-wise) and to come back for more later when I have all the time in the world. Not. I mean all the time in the world. But I made a mental note to make time that the rest of the books deserved.

One of the books that I could not help taking off the shelves was "The Doctor's Wife", a novel by Sawako Ariyoshi. It was one of the texts that was studied during my final semester in the IB program under the Malay A1 subject. I vividly remembered how distasteful I felt about Hanaoka Seishu (he was never really a likeable character anyway) at the end of the novel. My feelings were/are based on the following lines:

"Even larger than twice the size of the two women's tombs combined is that of Seishu, who died six years after his wife...If you stand directly in front of Seishu's tomb, the two behind him, those of Kae and Otsugi, are completely obscured."

I did not remember if I had decided to be a feminist way before I read the novel, but post-The Doctor's Wife, I made it clear (with myself at the very least) that men are not worth sacrificing for. Emotionally, and in the case of Kae - physically.