Shōko Ieda

is a Japanese writer of non-fiction. She is known for titillating novels replete with interracial sex scenes, and has aroused a great deal of controversy in Japan; her works have been accused of "demonising female sexuality".

Career Ieda rose to public prominence through her 1986 book Gokudō no Tsuma-tachi, about the girlfriends and spouses of yakuza. She spent nearly a year getting to know her subjects, and had also been shot at during the course of writing the book. It was later adapted into the Yakuza Wives film series by Toei, which initially starred Shima Iwashita, and later Reiko Takashima. Hug Me, Kiss Me was an account of her time volunteering in organization offering assistance to AIDS patients while living in Savannah, Georgia in 1987, along with an epilogue about the risk AIDS posed to Japanese tourists in Hawaii; its cinematic adaptation was the first film in Japan to openly address AIDS. However, her descriptions of the African American community were accused of making AIDS seem "alien" and "distant" to her Japanese target audience. George Sarratt, her research assistant for the book, later denounced major portions as "fraudulent", even indicating that she had altered direct quotes from interviewees. Japanese women in New York also set up a protest group against the book, feeling that the stereotype had damaged their professional image; their activities, which were described as "Ieda-bashing" by one scholar studying the "yellow cab" phenomenon, resulted in a sharp decline in her literary reputation.

Despite the negative attention she received for Yellow Cab, Ieda continued to produce popular works; her 1994 novel Women Who Slept with the Bubble was made into a series of movies, the newest of which, starring Yoko Mitsuya, was released in June 2007.

Selected works