H. Yumi Kim forcefully reclaims the prime role families and women played in shaping the impact of institutions on madness, no matter whether understood as an affliction by a fox spirit or a nervous illness, managed via domestic caging or psychiatric treatment. A truly impressive achievement.

Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara

Madness in the Family focuses on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan-a key transitional moment in the changes brought to mental care-when psychiatrists who had been trained abroad returned with new knowledge and intellectual orientations to madness and therapies that came to be used in new institutions. Yumi Kim does a masterful job of covering that fascinating story, but the main contribution of this book is the laser-like focus it brings to the central role played by women and family-based care in that history. Her evocative narrative reveals what can be learned from paying close attention to the everyday experiences of families in the care for the afflicted.

James Robson, Harvard University

This is such an important contribution to the field that it will be difficult to discuss the history of Japanese psychiatry from now on without Kim's book...This history is written from the viewpoint of patients and their families, focusing on issues related to women's domestic labour and caregiving, and women's bodies and physiology, a significant improvement on what has previously been lacking in research by Japanese scholars.

Akira Hashimoto, Social History of Medicine

Kim's use of historical records of psychiatric experts interviewing women who were stigmatized as having mental illnesses is a key strength of the book...Kim's book deserves a wide audience, as it will be of interest to students of mental illness, gender, the rise of the professions, as well as modernization and post-colonial studies. As such, the book makes a significant contribution to the fields of social history of Japan, Japanese studies, and women's and gender studies. For these reasons, we highly recommend this book as an ethnographic account that is accessible, clarifying, and useful for both students and scholars alike.

Anne S. Aronsson, Social Forces

Kim deftly shows how Japan's shifting identity and relationships with the rest of the world affected everyday experiences like living with mental illness and treating it...Although the Japanese state created institutions and public health systems that mirrored those of Western countries, it could not fully eliminate long-held ways of thinking, including ideas the state itself had created around women's roles in society.

Tanya L. Roth, Nursing Clio

This book delivers what its title promises and far more. In keeping with the title, Kim argues strongly that despite the introduction of European psychiatry into Japan in the 19th century and the subsequent construction of psychiatric institutions, care for mental illness remained the responsibility of family, with the burden of care falling primarily on women. Whereas earlier scholarship has analyzed expertise and institutions, Kim ventures into the 'rough ground of the ordinary.' Her four substantive chapters consider fox spirits, home confinement, hysteria, and how assumptions about women's reproductive functions could win women reduced sentences in courts of law... The book thus provides rich detail on both the ambitions of the Japanese state and the limits of its control over its subjects. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Choice

We highly recommend this book as an ethnographic account that is accessible, clarifying, and useful for both students and scholars alike.

Social Forces

This book is a detailed account of the multifaceted landscape of mental healthcare that will be of interest to historians and clinicians alike.

Harry Yi-Jui Wu, Asian Medicine 18

H. Yumi Kim has authored an excellent work on the history of mental illness in Japan, a topic that has received little attention in academic research and remains unknown to the general public. The book exhibits high scientific quality while remaining accessible to a wide audience interested in Japanese society and mental health issues. With its original focus on women and family, and clear, precise, and well-documented writing style, the book establishes itself as an indispensable reference in the field.

Nicolas Tajan, Asian Studies Review

In recent years, there has been a steady increase in research on listening to the stories of people with mental disabilities, but historical research is relatively scarce....The narratives of family members, especially women, who care for the mentally ill have not been fully explored... This book, which makes us think about this point, has succeeded in opening up a valuable field in the historical research on psychiatric medicine in Japan.

Junko Nagai, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

This well-researched and well-written book will be useful for scholars of early modern and modern Japan interested in family, gender, mental health and relations between state and society. Individual chapters are topi-cal and constructed so that they can be read separately with profit by read-ers with differing interests. The great merit of this book is that it shows how by simply changing the central focus of a tale, in this case shifting the story of mental illness from the progress of doctors and institutions to instead center on the family, we create new questions and new dimensions of understanding of the experiences of people with "madness" and "mental illness."

Luke S. Roberts, The Journal of Japanese Studies