Intimate Disconnections

"A panorama of Japanese mores and attitudes toward marriage, many of them in flux as people negotiate dependences and self-interest. . . . Japan isn’t known as a model for marital romance, a sentiment that is reflected in Intimate Disconnections. But in the spirit of anthropology that aims to explain without judgment or prescription, Alexy’s book helps understand a society moving away from equating marriage with normalcy." * Japan Times *
“Intimate Disconnections offers an extraordinarily rich account of changing expectations for marriage, intimacy, and relationality in contemporary Japan. Alexy’s deeply empathetic analysis of divorce is destined to enrich our empirical understanding of this globally increasingly common life decision and its legal, economic, and emotional consequences.” * Hirokazu Miyazaki, Northwestern University *
“This is a rich ethnographic study about increasing divorce in Japan, public discourses on later-life divorce (jukunen rikon), and popular images of divorced women’s empowerment that Alexy explores in depth. This accessible and carefully crafted book will be an important addition to the fields of cultural anthropology and gender studies, with Alexy’s nuanced depiction of gender dynamics, the labor market, and socioeconomic structures in contemporary Japan.” * Akiko Takeyama, University of Kansas *
"I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in understanding the current marriage and divorce landscape in Japan... the book also includes excellent insights into the legal, economic, and labour realities in contemporary Japan, providing a useful overview of shifts over the past two decades." * New Voices in Japanese Studies *
"In Intimate Disconnections, cultural anthropologist Allison Alexy paints an exceptionally nuanced picture of the performance of divorce in early twenty-first century Japan based on several years of participant observational fieldwork, during which she was able to conduct many interviews... Alexy’s interpretation is original and goes beyond the usual simplistic explanations in terms of general dissatisfactions with or ambivalence toward traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity." * Monumenta Nipponica *
"Intimate Disconnections is a fascinating study of not just how marriages end through divorce, but the place of discourses about divorce on intimate practices. The strength of Alexy's work lies in her stories, particularly of older men and women, working out the anxieties and fall outs of what later life-divorces foreclose and/or open." * PoLAR *
"Intimate Disconnections provides fascinating insight into the troubles of Japanese marriages, gleaned by Alexy over meals or drinks, in one-on-one interviews, and during small group counseling sessions and discussions. . . .   The author’s sensitive handling of these intimate, often painful, stories helps us understand the challenges of divorce and the shifting ground of intimacy in marriages during the economic transformations of the last several decades." * Journal of Japanese Studies *
"Allison Alexy is utterly sensitive to the situations of the women and men she talks with—several of them her personal friends—who did, or are going through, or will divorce. . . She does a lot of the heavy theoretical lifting as well." * American Ethnologist *
"[A] thorough ethnographic and sociological exploration of divorce in Japan. . . . One of the great strengths of this volume is how it brings together clear macrosocial insights with nuanced personal accounts of divorce." * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *