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Japanese Language and Literature
Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese
jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 56 | Number 2 | October 2022 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2022.230
ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online)
Toddler-Hunting in Wartime: Kōno Taeko’s “On the Inside”
Mary A. Knighton
As late as the spring of 1944, Welfare Minister Koizumi
Chikahiko spoke against the drafting of women: “Although in
Germany and among enemy countries women are
conscripted,” he said, “out of consideration for the family
system, we will not draft them.”
1
When I was at my most beautiful
The dead piled up all around
In factories, at sea, on nameless islands
Any excuse to get all dressed up was long gone.
Ibaragi Noriko, “When I Was at My Most Beautiful” (1957)
2
Introduction: Representing War
In a taidan (public discussion) with Yamada Eimi 山田詠 美 (b. 1959),
Kōno Taeko 河野多惠子(1926–2015) describes her experience of living in
Manhattan on the day that the World Trade Center’s twin towers fell. This
dialogue began serialization in the literary journal Bungakkai (文學界
2001–2007) the same year as the terrorist attacks and was later published
in book form as Bungaku mondō. Here two women writers of very
different generations and backgrounds share stories about America, life,
war, and literature, and soon turn to the subject of 9.11 (“Let’s Tell the
Truth About War: From New York and Military Bases”).
3
Yamada relays
how family on her husband’s side died in 9.11. She evokes the trauma of
loved ones’ bodies never recovered, and friends unable to protect their
children from the sight of people falling from crumbling skyscrapers.
4
In
turn, Kōno describes how that day began for her with a series of strange
disruptions: someone she was supposed to meet never showed up, and she
was unable to reach anyone by phone. Hours later she learned of the attack
on the news. Living on the forty-first floor of a high-rise apartment
building on the Upper West Side, she and her artist husband, Ichikawa
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(“Henry”) Yasushi 市川泰 (1925–2012), witnessed from the building’s
rooftop the huge plumes of dark smoke emanating from the disaster in
lower Manhattan. Memories of wartime Japan resurfaced.
5
What does it mean to represent war as an artist, and to represent war
in one’s own life story as both its witness and active participant? How do
gender and sexuality shape such representations? What roles should
aesthetics and fictionalization play in documenting war? Kōno’s wartime
experiences shaped her as a writer, just as 9.11 inspired her husband
Ichikawa’s abstract oil painting entitled “September 11, 2001” (Figure 1).
One year later, that painting would grace the cover of Kōno’s essay
collection, Omoigakenai koto (思いがけないこと The unexpected, 2002).
6
Questions about representing war inform this essay’s approach to “Hei no
naka” (塀の中 “On the Inside,” 1962), a vital story in Kōno Taeko’s quasi-
autobiographical writing of her wartime experiences.
7
I contend that her
postwar writing is centrally concerned with representing the ways that war
both reveals and warps the social fabric and individual psyches long after
war is over. Ichikawa exemplifies this claim, one might say, in creating
hundreds of untitled war paintings after the triggering event of 9.11.
Ichikawa had studied art as a student and after the war took up painting
(洋画 yōga) as a vocation, teaching art and participating in artists’
cooperatives. During WWII, he served as a soldier and was later promoted
to second lieutenant (少尉 shōi) in the Imperial Navy. Based in Sasebo in
1945, he witnessed first-hand the immediate aftermath of the atomic
bombing in Nagasaki where he was sent to help the wounded and handle
the dead.
8
From 2001 he began to paint what he had witnessed there, telling
his niece that the smell of 9.11 reminded him of the smell of Nagasaki,
awakening in him the need to express what he knew about war.
9
Kōno’s wartime experiences had a profound impact on her as a writer,
so it is hardly incidental that she chose a life partnership with a man who
had also experienced war first-hand and expressed it in his art. Most of
Ichikawa’s oil paintings fall into two dramatically different styles, with
“September 11, 2001” being something of an outlier. His earlier travel and
landscape paintings show the influence of Western art and are generally
representational, deft in their simple architectural lines, emphasis on light,
and use of pastel watercolors or bright oils. His portrait of Kōno Taeko
(Figure 2) provides a recognizable shape and then a defining gesture or set
of details to represent his subject without being strictly realistic.
10
His later
paintings of atomic bomb (原爆 genbaku) victims swerve into altogether
different territory, however, adopting violently expressionistic qualities.
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Figure 1. “September 11, 2001” (2011), Henry Ichikawa. Courtesy of the Kōno Taeko
estate.
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Figure 2. Untitled, undated portrait of Kōno Taeko, Henry Ichikawa. Courtesy of the
Kōno Taeko estate.
These compositions frequently contrast distant bright yellow suns or
flashes of light with murky deep red and brown human figures in the
foreground, as if covered in blood or burned flesh. In one haunting
painting, a human form has been disfigured and burned beyond
recognition, but the startling white of human eyes gaze out of a painful
corporeal shell (Figure 3). Another painting is unusual among all of
Ichikawa’s genbaku works, exhibiting characteristics of both his genbaku
expressionistic style and the abstract two-dimensional shapes and vibrant
colors in “September 11, 2001”; indeed, this painting’s composition
literally divides the canvas into two planes, the upper half abstract and
geometric while the lower half dramatizes the representational figure of a
woman crouched over and embracing her dead child in a posture
suggestive of death and childbirth simultaneously (Figure 4). Here a motif
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recurs in Ichikawa’s genbaku style and his abstract 9.11 painting: a
persistent return to “eyes.” Eyes remind the viewer of the living human
still trapped in a destroyed body, and at other times demands that both the
artist and the viewer bear witness to war, as in the tower-like geometric
figure reconstructed of exploded fragments in “September 11, 2001.”
Strikingly, the eye figures prominently on the cover that Ichikawa
illustrated for Kōno’s most autobiographical of fictional works built
around her wartime youth, a quartet of stories collected into the single
volume, Tōi natsu (遠い夏 A distant summer, 1977) (Figure 5).
11
Figure 3. Untitled, undated genbaku painting, Henry Ichikawa. Courtesy of the Kōno
Taeko estate.
Roughly chronological with Kōno’s wartime childhood and youth
growing up in Osaka, each of the stories in Tōi natsu weaves fictions
around historical and autobiographical kernels. Beginning with
“Michishio” (みち潮 Full tide, 1964) set the year before the invasion of
China in 1937 when Kōno was eleven years old, the collection continues
with “Toki kitaru” (時来たる The time will come, 1977), set between 1936
and the date of June 1945 that appears in the first line of “Hei no naka,”
the third story and focus of this essay. The final title story, “Tōi natsu” (遠
い夏 A distant summer, 1964) picks up where “Hei no naka” leaves off to
cover the last months as the war comes to a close.
12
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Figure 4. Untitled, undated genbaku painting, Henry Ichikawa. Courtesy of the Kōno
Taeko estate.
Figure 5. Untitled, undated dust jacket artwork for Tōi natsu (1977), Henry Ichikawa.
Courtesy of the Kōno Taeko estate.
Mary A. Knighton |
Japanese Language and Literature | jll.pitt.edu
Vol. 56 | Number 2 | October 2022 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2022.230
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In closely reading Kōno’s “Hei no naka,” I bring to bear the ways in
which the author’s life informs and at times intersects with her fiction and
literary aesthetic. My aim, simply put, is to explore what it means for Kōno
to represent war. In doing so, I pursue questions of the distorting forces of
war on society and gendered power relations. Wartime enables a
particularly visible manifestation of what Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben (b. 1942) calls the “state of exception,” when the state justifies
the legal abuse or suspension of the law for extralegal or authoritarian
ends.
13
Such a state of exception not only excuses atrocities on the
battlefield but also creates the conditions for a proliferation of corruptions,
lies, and perversions on the home front and in everyday life that may not
end with the end of war.
14
Historian Chalmers Johnson argues for an
ongoing state of exception that continued into the postwar with the Cold
War’s expansion of military bases around the world, all brought into bright
focus on 9.11.
15
That women and children serve as staple subjects of wartime fiction
and art reminds us of not only a powerful anti-war message in such
representations (amply visible in Ichikawa’s genbaku paintings) but also,
paradoxically and simultaneously, of a profoundly militaristic and
formulaic one too that demands that sacrifices in the name of everyday
home and family be presented in propagandistic ways to provoke
sentimental patriotism. This paradox creates a kind of representational trap
for women writers like Kōno struggling to represent the realities of war
beyond simplistic lines of victimhood and oppression, as a matrix of
individual lived experience and traumatic memory constituted within
larger overlapping forces and contradictory laws and ideologies.
Cited in an epigraph to this essay is an oft-cited example of such a
lived contradiction for Japanese citizens during the war: bordering on
hypocrisy, Welfare Minister Koizumi in 1942 boasted of the Japanese
government’s policy line of protecting women in direct contradiction of
the reality. To openly recognize the need for women’s labor would mean
going against military propaganda about a paternalistic war carried out to
protect the family.
16
The dissonant reality was that the 1939 National
Conscription Ordinance (国民徴用令 kokumin chōyō rei) required
everyone to register for the draft, and targeted males 16–40 years old,
females 16–25 years old, along with girls who were unmarried or
unemployed.
17
By early 1944, conscription expanded to include males 12–
60 years old, and females 12–40 years old, unmarried, or widowed.
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Various women’s, patriotic, and volunteer organizations such as the
Women’s Volunteer Corps (女子挺身隊 Joshi teishintai), moreover, had
long harassed and pressured girls into “volunteering,” a practice that
escalated with the government’s backing from 1944.
18
These policies
meant that Kōno herself could be mobilized for labor and sacrificed for
the war effort along with boys and men conscripted as soldiers. Kōno was
able to commute from home for factory work but, as described in “Hei no
naka,” many others were forced to live in dormitories at factories cut off
from their families. It lies beyond the scope of this essay to lay out the full
history of general conscription, student mobilization (学生勤労動員
gakusei kinrō dōin), and the evacuation (学 童 疎 開 gakudō sokai) of
children during the war, much less to do justice to the rich scholarship of
Jerome Cohen and Yoshiko Miyake 三宅義子 in this area.
19
Suffice to say
that although the official policy was that women were never conscripted,
their actual mobilization functioned to expose one characteristic of the
state of exception during Japan’s war years: more women were conscripted
in Japan by war’s end than in Germany, if fewer than in Britain.
20
What
began as registration in 1939 became “volunteering” and small-scale
mobilization of students from 1943, and turned into 3.4 million students
mobilized for labor by 1945.
21
“Hei no naka,” first published in 1962 in mentor Niwa Fumio’s 丹羽
文雄 (1904-2005) literary journal Bungakusha (文學者 Literati), is set on
the outskirts of an unnamed city and tells the story of school girls
mobilized to a factory in the last months of the war.
22
It dramatizes the
kinds of complicities and deceits that operate in tandem with contradictory
realities and blatant sloganeering in wartime Japan. Kōno reproduces, and
questions, the rhetoric of just causes and righteous victors from the
viewpoint of girls caught up in war to show how, in a very real sense, no
one wins in war, no matter how it ends; at the same time, no one escapes
complicity even as all are deformed by its half-truths and bald lies.
This essay builds on previous scholarship that considers in depth the
psychoanalytical concepts and literary qualities of Kōno’s masochistic
aesthetic. It seeks to open new lines of inquiry about how Kōno’s
experience of war inflected her representations of sadistic violence against
women and children, masochistic and eroticized power dynamics in
heterosexual and familial relations, and the gendered dimensions of
national identity in the “everyday” life of not only wartime Japan but in its
postwar, including the Occupation era. Ichikawa Henry obsessively
painted with one kind of “eye” on war, and in fictions like “Hei no naka,”
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Kōno adopts her own more decadent and “fallen” (堕落 daraku) viewpoint
on the corruptions of wartime. Her writerly eye has much in common, one
might say, with Sakaguchi Ango’s 坂口安吾 (1906–1955) idea that the
writer’s “demon eye must crawl at ground level.”
23
In his “Discourse on
Decadence,” Ango presents his theory of a necessary turn away from
wartime idealism and propaganda about nation, home, and family towards
what looks like decadence. For Ango, recognizing the inhumanity of
humanity is necessary before redemption is possible.
24
Thus, daraku
literature insists on beginning with the realities of base human desire,
weakness, and failure at “ground” level as the only possible starting point
for starting over after war. Strikingly, Kōno insists in her interview with
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit that her masochistic aesthetic may at first
appear negative—decadent and base—but it actually aims for the opposite
effect: much like the jujitsu of Ango’s daraku, masochism turns a negative
force against itself until it becomes, or reveals, something necessary and
affirming about human desires amidst the limits of the human condition.
25
The Child as Enigma: Childless Women Go Toddler-Hunting
By the early 1960s Kōno had been heralded in the bundan literary
establishment at the late age of thirty-seven, winning the Akutagawa Prize
in 1963 for the story “Kani” (蟹 “Crabs”) after prior acclaim in 1961 for
“Yōjigari” (幼児狩り“Toddler-Hunting,” 1961).
26
Besides taking all of
Japan’s highest literary accolades, Kōno garnered widespread praise as a
literary critic for her 1972 study of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 谷崎潤一郎 (1886–
1965) and the concept of literary masochism.
27
She was the first woman
elected to join the Akutagawa Prize committee and presided there for
twenty years. Only in 2007, at the age of eighty-one, and after returning to
Japan after fourteen years’ residence in New York with Ichikawa did she
resign from this powerful position.
Kōno’s reputation rests on complex psychological realism sharpened
by a quality of sadomasochistic suspense and a disturbing predilection for
pederastic and violent erotic fantasies on the part of her women characters.
Translated into English and many other languages, Kōno is particularly
well known at home and abroad for translator Lucy North’s story
collection that includes the representative title story, “Toddler-Hunting.”
Scholarly attention to feminist issues of gender, sexuality, and erotic
violence in Kōno’s prolific output—ranging from short and long fictions,
essays, interviews, and critical writing—makes her work inextricable from
the historical “boom” in postwar writing by women, as so-called 女流作家
(joryū sakka).
28
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Although Kōno is rarely treated as an autobiographical writer per se,
critics usually note the traits of her female protagonists that overlap with
their author’s life. For instance, her characters are not infrequently
childless or barren as a result of illness, and Kōno too suffered with bad
health and was finally diagnosed with tuberculosis after the war. Just as
her characters are typically self-sufficient if rather alienated modern
women who deem marriage and children unnecessary to their working
lives or private sexual freedom, Kōno herself never had children and did
not marry Ichikawa until late in her life, and then only after first becoming
a professional writer.
29
For feminist literary critic Mizuta Noriko, Kōno’s
work played a major role in carving out a singular “back alley” for later
women writers through which female protagonists might narrate pleasure
in sexuality without reproduction.
30
The ongoing struggle for Japanese women’s civil rights and sexual
liberation in the postwar surely inform the shocking sexuality and taboo
fantasy life that Kōno and other women writers created for their women
characters.
31
Julia Bullock argues in her study centered on Kōno,
Takahashi Takako 高橋たか子 (1932–2013), and Kurahashi Yumiko 倉橋
由美子 (1935–2005) that these writers (but especially Kōno as the eldest)
wrote rebellious representations of “women” and “femininity” in their
fictions that acted as a bridge between the oppressive silencing of women
in the early Shōwa era and the outpouring of expression that came with
radical women’s liberation activists by the 1970s.
32
Setouchi Jakuchō 瀬
戸内寂聴 (1922–2021) too wrote and lived a radical life of free sexual
expression before becoming a Buddhist nun and activist helping to found
the Little Women Project to aid abused and homeless girls.
33
Upon Kōno’s
death in 2015, Jakuchō wrote a tribute to her close friend, noting that in
their late night phone calls Kōno had no compunction about describing her
sexuality in terms as diverse and rich in fantasy as any of her fictional
characters.
34
“Yōjigari” may well be Kōno’s best-known story but the enigmatic
allure of the child for the childless woman out toddler-hunting also appears
in “Hei no naka,” a wartime story that Kōno had conceived earlier and
published at roughly the same time.
35
The figure of the child that recurs in
various ways in Kōno’s fictions—usually a boy toddler—is perhaps not
solely the representational object of liberated female sexual desire or base
deviance, or merely a trope of women’s rebellion against family and child-
bearing expectations, but also a complex figure deeply anchored in the
author’s wartime youth that carries diverse representational and
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metaphorical meanings in her work.
As fellow Osaka-born poet Ibaragi Noriko 茨木のりこ (1926–2006)
expresses in the epigraph to this essay, Kōno too felt that her generation
had had their youth stolen, and their subsequent lives distorted, by war. In
the context of toddler hunting and war, Ibaragi’s poem “Onna no ko no
māchi” (女の子のマーチ Girls’ march, 1958) proves even more resonant
in the context of Kōno’s toddler-hunting women:
I like bullying boys
I really like making them whine.
Just today, I knocked Jirou about the head in school.
He said Ouch and ran away, tail between his legs.
A hard-headed boy, Jirou
Put a dent in my lunchbox
Pa says, I mean Father the Doctor says
Girls shouldn’t race about, act wild.
Inside each of our bodies is a special room,
So we must go quietly, softly.
Where’s my room, do you think?
Tonight I’ll look for it….
Grandma’s pissed Mrs. Dried Plum
Tells me girls who don’t eat all their fish get kicked out,
They don’t last three days as brides before they’re returned.
Eat everything but the head and the tail, she says.
Well, I’m not marrying
So you can keep your darn fish bones!
The old baker started yelling,
Women and socks have gotten tough! Women and socks!
The women behind the counter were laughing at him.
Of course women have become strong—there’s a reason for it.
I, too, am going to be a strong woman.
Tomorrow, who should I make cry?
36
Against the traditional codes of society and family that dictate how a
proper girl should behave to live out her destiny as wife and mother,
Ibaragi’s speaker interjects between stanzas her resistance to such norms,
offering sassy retorts to euphemisms for maternity (“special room”) by
evoking a liberated sexuality (“Where’s my room, do you think? Tonight
I’ll look for it”). She opens and closes her poem with the pre-emptive
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bullying of boys who in the future might threaten her progress (her “march”
forward). Women writers like Kōno Taeko and Ibaragi Noriko of the
wartime generation dared to survive the war, and even thrive in the postwar
(“Women and socks!”) when women gained new freedoms and rights. And
yet, they could not escape the march of the war’s ongoing history,
including the double bind of postwar domestic resentment and backlash to
their growing strength while bearing the same trauma and responsibility
for war as men.
Historian John Dower offers a resounding critique of the self-serving
rhetoric of masochism and victim consciousness in the postwar that best
hits its target when trained on the male-dominated structures of Japanese
society and culture resurrected after the war. Dower shows how then and
now such rhetoric seeks to evade war responsibility by emphasizing
Japanese suffering and downplaying or omitting aggression. He balances
a rich critique of masochistic victim consciousness with insights about the
kasutori bunka (dregs culture) that arose amidst postwar hopelessness and
impoverishment and provided fertile ground for Ango’s daraku literature.
And yet, Dower does not reckon seriously with masochism as a discourse
in itself most often centered on women and derived from sexology and
psychoanalysis. In such theories, masochism is considered abnormal only
when applied to men; for women, it has long been prescribed as
appropriate feminine sexuality and sacrificial behavior.
37
The gendered
and sexual language of Kōno and Ibaragi replay these gendered dynamics
to acknowledge the familial and societal expectations for women’s proper
masochism. They then warp these structures from within with willful,
unexpected fantasies of not only violence received but also violence
imagined or even usurped. When such women writers get to voice their
own stories and wield the pen rewriting masochistic scripts for liberatory
ends, they express the double bind of victimized infantilization and
newfound postwar power in occasionally violent, often unconventional,
ways.
Literature offered Kōno a way of writing herself positively into the
future from out of a negated past and destroyed youth by unsettling
sacrificial maternal images of women and dogmatic certainties around that
potent, if enigmatic, symbol of the future: the child. Toddler hunting
certainly acts as a trope within Kōno’s complex literary aesthetics of
gendered power dynamics and decadent desires, one finding expression in
various forms of carnal, psychological, and spiritual masochism. But
toddler hunting also signals Kōno’s hunt for her own lost childhood and a
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quest to imagine the kinds of future possible for “childless” modern
Japanese women emerging fully grown in the postwar. “Hei no naka”
harbors vital clues to Kōno’s aesthetic as well as the intersections of life
and literature that shape how she represents war.
Secrets and Lies “On the Inside”
The first line of “Hei no naka” announces its historical and personal moment
simultaneously: “On June 8th, 1945, Masako forgot that it was her
nineteenth birthday.”
38
The story proceeds from there in limited third-
person narration focalized through nineteen-year-old Sone Masako.
Together with other girls and teachers mobilized from their urban school
twenty kilometers away for the war effort, Masako is worn out from long
hours of tedious labor and the accumulated toll of facing death with each
new shriek of the air raid sirens. All the girls can think about is their desire
to go home. Although in March there had been a devastating firebombing
of the city nearby, Lieutenant Sakamoto did not allow the girls to return
home to check on their loved ones; instead, he lectures them on getting
revenge on the enemy nation who burned down their homes by ratcheting
up their levels of production.
39
But the girls go from restless to rebellious in their imprisoning factory
life. To quiet the growing unrest, the school principal meets with
Lieutenant Sakamoto and decides that one girl each Monday will be
allowed to act as courier for reports to their former school in the city. The
authorities make clear they will look the other way should a girl stop by
her home on the way back to the factory. Masako’s report day is scheduled
for the second week of July, and she wants only to survive each day’s labor
and each air raid until she gets to go home. At this point, the story returns
to its opening air raid and why Masako forgot her birthday: she had spent
a terrifying, sleepless night in an air raid shelter, worked a full day helping
civilians whose homes had been destroyed, and then, to top it off, she had
found a lost boy.
Nearing midnight, the night before her birthday, Masako and the
others are rushed into a bomb shelter as the sirens sound. She grasps the
air raid bag that contains a tiny scrap of paper on which she has written a
final testament in case of her death. Originally begun as an honest letter to
express her true feelings, it ends up as a single line for any person who
might discover her dead body: “I was happy” (私は幸福でした Watashi wa
kōfuku deshita).
40
In this way, Masako will appear to any stranger as a
devoted daughter and patriotic woman of the nation in its time of war. Her
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very name, “Masako” (正子), predicts her destiny as literally this kind of
tadashii ko (正しい子), a “proper daughter.”
Yet her patriotic fate is subtly called into question when Masako
survives instead of being sacrificed. The light of day after the massive
firebombing reveals a neighborhood once visible from the girls’ dormitory
windows now completely gone. Although the girls are tasked with meeting
wounded, hungry, or dispersed civilians who enter the compound for
urgent help, their help is greeted by citizens who leave frustrated and angry
after receiving nothing but tedious paperwork to fill out at bureaucratic
offices that no longer exist. At the end of the day walking back to the dorm,
Masako is demoralized, exhausted, and thirsty when she suddenly
remembers a possible water source. There, she finds a five-year-old boy,
Sugao Shin’ichi (スガオ・シンイチ nicknamed シン坊 “Shinbō”).
41
Masako takes him back to the dormitory, where together with her
roommates Takeko, Sakiko, and Fumiko she enlists the help and secrecy
of other factory girls to keep Shinbō without reporting him.
At first, the girls rationalize their inaction as a chance to enjoy Shinbō
for a short time until his mother inevitably comes, but when no one shows
up, they go to great pains to hide him, feed him, and keep him as their own
precious secret. Thanks to him, the boredom and misery of the girls’ days
are eased, and they look forward each day to collaborating to hide him
from the authorities while taking care of him. They take turns guarding the
door, stashing food supplies, or making him clothes. Shinbō calls all the
girls “Oneechan” (big sister) but only Masako “Obachan” (Auntie). As
Sakiko points out, Masako is special to him for having come to his
rescue.
42
As if to heighten the impact of the boy’s death to come, much of
the story centers on the girls doting on Shinbō, and treating him, by turns,
as a little brother, their own child, a boy to embrace in their beds, or a kind
of pet. Lieutenant Sakamoto only learns about his existence with his death.
A sudden inspection of the compound by visiting authorities sends the
girls into a panic to hide Shinbō, fearful of greater punishment now that
they have covered up his presence for so long. At the last minute, they put
him in the bottom of an immense sake barrel used to store water for
dousing fires. Their plan might have worked but for an overzealous factory
supervisor who, suspecting that the giant barrel was not topped off, orders
it filled. Over the rushing sound of water splashing into the barrel, any
sounds made by the drowning boy apparently go unheard. The girls are
interrogated and beaten in order to find out where the boy came from, and
how he died. Furious at the deception by the girls and the possible
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ramifications along the chain of command, Lieutenant Sakamoto threatens
to use all means necessary to find out who caused Shinbō’s death, a crime
of involuntary manslaughter (過失致死罪 kashitsuchishizai).
43
At the end of the story, the real mother suddenly appears. Lieutenant
Sakamoto warns the girls beforehand to stick to the story of no boy having
appeared, relaying to them what the mother had told authorities: she had
temporarily abandoned the boy in the compound because there was food
there and their family home had been burnt down in the bombing. She had
come back soon afterwards and asked around for her son but no one had
seen him. In the story’s final paragraphs, a humble grieving mother stands
beside Lieutenant Sakamoto asking about a boy wearing a light blue shirt.
Lined up to face her, the girls are silent, having been ordered to say nothing.
When asked to raise their hands if they might have seen him, the turmoil
inside Masako reaches a fever pitch.
“Raise your hand if you saw anything,” the Lieutenant said, but not a
hand lifted.
Masako could not bear it any longer. Ever since the child’s death, her
heart had felt as though it were being torn asunder. The teachers had warned
them that their crime was to be sealed up tightly inside and never see
daylight beyond these walls, which only intensified the pressure that now
expanded to full capacity—if only she could release a little of that pressure.
Her heart breaking in two, Masako could no longer hold it in. If she let
this chance go by, it would be all over. If only she could lift her hand. She
tried to open a window into her heart, her crime.
She hesitated. The Lieutenant would be put on the spot.—That child was
not in this compound on that day, nor on the day of the inspection. Whether
the boy had been here at all was not even a question. But in fact that child
had come from somewhere and had been inside these walls.
Something inside Masako was starting to rend. But the Lieutenant’s face
was right in front of her.—Where in the world had that child come from?
Did he just percolate up from the earth? No, that’s not it. Well then, how
about we say the boy fell from the skies?
If we say that, Masako thought, then of course the boy would be an angel.
He was an angel fallen from the skies who came just for us. And I killed
him.—In one fell swoop, her heart cracked in two. It opened wide.
Suddenly, Masako’s right hand was caught. Takeko pressed it down,
having stopped it before it reached shoulder level.
44
Mounting pressure behind the mental anguish and impending
heartbreak in this final scene accompanies the dueling voices of the
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narrator and Masako. These voices fight for control over the story that
must be told, for the story’s weight in fiction versus reality. Masako’s
divided heart signals doubled maternal grief as Shinbō’s fictional mother
Masako faces Shinbō’s real mother. That breaking heart is the locus too of
the doubled “sin” and “crime” (罪 tsumi) in covering up and lying about
him, which led to the child’s death. Literally opening her heart to us in the
story’s final lines, Masako shows us that Shinbō’s death was not a tragic
accident caused by the schoolgirls together with the unwitting factory
teachers and military administration but rather a death and cover-up for
which she feels responsible.
Masako’s crime turns out to be a necessary act of rebellious survival
and even creative destruction, and her heart split open figures that painful
confession. Having to choose between Lieutenant Sakamoto’s story filled
with administrative lies and forced silences or make up her own to justify
the unjustifiable to Shinbō’s real mother, Masako conjures forth the child
as an angel, a boy without past or origin falling from the skies. Making
Shinbō into an “angel,” she can imagine him saving her while also being
a willing sacrifice. In finally killing him, Masako takes his place as the
right child (tadashii ko) to survive the war.
Kōno’s unique form of “I-novel” fictional autobiography fragments
into multiple confessions in this story. Some lead us back to the author’s
own life, certainly, but even more often they mark the place of lies, secrets,
and ellipses in the storytelling of history through fiction’s mirror hall. One
such confession occurs in Kōno’s 2014 essay “The Unthinkable” (考えら
れないこと “Kangaerarenai koto,” 2015) first published in Shinchō (新潮
New tide) as Kōno was entering the last months of her life, going in and
out of the hospital. Here she relays most directly the historical and
autobiographical details of her wartime years with her family.
45
The essay’s title refers to a veritable ghost story that leads to her sister-
in-law’s barely averted miscarriage and finally a family secret. Kōno
begins by recounting the last months of the war: their family home was
burned down in the infamous 14 March 1945 incendiary air raid on Osaka
that luck alone enabled them to survive; her father finds a rental house for
her, her mother, older sister, and younger brother to move to in the southern
part of Osaka that had not yet been bombed; and she sees dead bodies and
destruction as she walks in the destroyed city, feeling a curious numbness.
After student mobilizations became compulsory in 1944, her classes were
increasingly cut and Kōno was mobilized along with classmates to work
in fields tilling crops and later in a clothing factory that she commuted to
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each day.
46
Meanwhile, her older brother had escaped the draft but was
sent with his company to work in China, while her unmarried older sister
had narrowly evaded the dreaded Women’s Volunteer Corps by finding
gainful employment. Her younger brother was mobilized for labor like
Kōno herself. Kōno describes the sudden end to the war and the family’s
waiting, then relief, when her oldest brother finally returns safely from
China.
The “unthinkable” happens about a year after the war. Her brother has
just married a long-time friend, and after their modest wedding the couple
leaves for a nearby honeymoon on an overcrowded train. Suddenly, a voice
calls out over the crowd to the brother. The brother recognizes it as
belonging to an old university friend of his. The friend calls out again,
asking if he has married. Strangely embarrassed, the brother is unable to
admit his good fortune in dire times. The friend disappears in the crowd.
Later, the wife and brother relay this story to the rest of the family as a
humorous anecdote. But actually, the brother was upset by this event.
Despite a long separation as soldiers at war and the good luck of finally
meeting his friend again, he had not only lost his friend all over again but
also lied to him. Some months later, the brother makes his sister Taeko
promise to keep secret what he is about to tell her. To the best of his
knowledge, he confesses, his friend had already died. He could not have
been on that train. He was one of many young men of his generation who
died in the war, never able to marry or go on with their lives. The brother
had confessed this story to his now pregnant wife too, but it so upset her
that she was hospitalized and at risk of miscarriage. Kōno concludes
“Kangaerarenai koto” by writing that even though mother and child turned
out fine, and now in 2014 her brother and his wife have long passed on,
right up until this day she still has told no one in or outside of her family
this story. She asks plaintively why this is a secret she must take to her
grave—she did not know personally this friend of her brother’s, or
anything about him—and concludes by saying she will not keep this secret
anymore. It is an intensely personal and yet curious piece written and
published at the end of Kōno’s life. It evinces her well-known belief in the
supernatural, and the power of chance events and superstition. It conveys
too the weight of a war-related family secret that she had carried all her
life.
And yet, buried in the essay is an anecdote that deserves mention for
being perhaps just as “unthinkable” for Kōno as the ghost story. Kōno
relates that her brother didn’t like to talk about the war. Only once did she
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hear him mention that while part of an entourage walking on the road to
reach a boat for demobilization from China, he noticed how there were no
older people there, just women with kids, and dead children abandoned on
the road. Young unmarried men like her brother were tasked with clearing
away and disposing of those bodies. From Kōno’s account, it is unclear if
these women and children are from the local Chinese population or
Japanese.
Ostensibly confessing her brother’s secret about the ghost of his dead
friend as her own secret and confessing her broken vow to him in order to
do so, Kōno actually describes a story of women and children left behind
on the home front and the kind of “unthinkable” brutal work that soldiers
did. Having gone to China with a Japanese company and not as a soldier,
by the war’s end, her brother is demobilized, impoverished and ragtag, and
must perform a military task like any soldier. Mobilized girls like Masako
and Kōno herself were not soldiers either but had to carry out military roles
and contribute to the war effort. Civilian or soldier, ally or foe, the stain
from the blood of war reaches everyone. In this essay, Kōno represents
war itself as ongoing and “unthinkable” as part of myriad untold and half-
told stories, memories, and silences that continue to haunt long after war
is over. Wartime ghosts—and angels—exert their pressure as secrets,
confessions and a sense of responsibility to tell the fuller story. At the end
of “Hei no naka,” Masako’s split heart cannot bear this pressure and it is
unclear whether the story’s concluding confession signals Masako’s
liberation or her irredeemable fall.
47
The language of falling from the skies in the story’s final confession
scene is striking. It repeats similar language used throughout “Hei no naka”
about the threatening propaganda flyers dropped by American planes on
her home as well as the constant threat of bombs falling from above. The
reader knows too that less than a month after this July moment in the story,
the war will end with another “Little Boy” dropping from the skies over
Hiroshima. In this way, the victorious masochistic defeat in Masako’s final
confession scene raises complex questions about the war’s end as
simultaneously liberation and defeat, soon to be followed by Occupation
and exhaustion (虚脱 kyodatsu) for those who survive and struggle to go
on after the war.
48
Itohan Taeko and the Senjika Generation
Okuno Takeo 奥野健男 (1926–1997) locates Kōno Taeko among what he
and others call the “wartime generation” of writers (戦時下の世代 senjika
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no sedai). Okuno includes “Hei no naka” in his co-edited volume Senjika
no hai tīn (戦時下のハイティーン Teenagers in wartime, 1965) along with
poetry by Inoue Mitsuharu 井 上光 晴 (1926–1992), and fiction by Ōe
Kenzaburō 大江健三郎 (b.1935), Mishima Yukio 三島由紀夫 (1925–1970),
Yoshiyuki Junnosuke 吉行淳之介 (1924–1994), and others.
49
For Okuno,
the category senjika no sedai is comprised of an “older” and “younger”
generation of writers. The older generation gained their values in prewar
Japan, and many were already actively publishing and known by the
postwar. Unlike the amorphous Third Generation of New Writers (第三の
新人 daisan no shinjin) that arose with the Occupation to make the postwar
their theme, or writers still young children during World War II, Okuno’s
younger generation of wartime writers (including Kōno) falls into a kind
of no man’s land because they were in their upper teenage years during
Japan’s fifteen-year war. For Okuno, this generation lost their chances for
education, family, and marriage due to the deaths of family members and
classmates drafted as soldiers or mobilized for labor instead of school. As
impressionable youth still innocent about loss and grief, this generation
experienced the traumas of mass death and destruction in war as well as
Occupation after defeat. If they became writers at all, it took years of
personal trial and error to find their way amidst diminished material
circumstances and despite psychological barriers.
50
Kōno was an example
of this, Okuno contends, struggling for fifteen years after the war to regain
her health and find her voice as a writer.
51
Kōno Taeko’s fictionalized autobiography Tōi natsu traces the span of
Kōno’s girlhood from quite literally the start of the Shōwa era and her
country’s growing militarism until its final defeat and occupation. As her
autobiographical essay “Kangaerarenai koto” makes clear, she and her
family were witness and participant to full-scale mobilization for war on
the home front in ways that overlap with her protagonist Masako in “Hei
no naka.” Critics Kanda Yumiko 神田由美子 and Kawamura Jirō 河村二郎
implicitly treat Kōno as a member of the senjika no sedai based on such
life experiences and the role that the war plays in her fictional corpus.
52
Ōta Saburō 太田三郎 goes so far as to say that all of the major themes in
Kōno Taeko’s fiction germinate from “Hei no naka.”
53
When “Hei no naka”
appeared in a collected volume with the title work Yōjigari in 1962, leftist
critic Hirano Ken 平野謙 (1907–1978) singled out the former as the “key”
(カギ) for understanding the latter. He notes the precarious and
extraordinary balancing of both war responsibility and victim
consciousness in “Hei no naka” through the figures of Masako and Shinbō,
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adding: “One cannot help but think that it would be only natural for this
nineteen-year-old schoolgirl to grow up to be the thirty-year-old woman
in ‘Toddler-Hunting.’ In the hands of this writer, that would not be just
another chapter in the life of her I-novel but rather demonstrate the growth
and strength of her artistic expression.”
54
Hirano’s appraisal of Kōno’s sophisticated “artistic expression” of
gender and war is evident in a later story concerning war, “Tetsu no uo”
(鉄の魚 “Iron Fish,” 1976).
55
Here, two women visit a museum dedicated
to soldiers and wartime Japan. One of the women had lost her husband in
a manned suicide torpedo known as an “iron fish.” At one point, finding
herself alone, she gets inside an iron fish at the exhibit in mimicry of a
child she had seen do the same thing earlier. This moment condenses into
a single striking image of both empathy—walking in the soldier’s shoes,
so to speak, and trying to see his suicidal sacrifice through his eyes—yet
also a chilling rejection of this sterile model of Japan’s past and future in
women’s militarized and sacrificial wombs. “Tetsu no uo” dramatizes
women’s wartime roles as simultaneously idealized vessels of life, and
mobilized weapon of destruction carrying an aborted life inside.
Osaka-born Okuno implies that the deprivations of wartime were
traumatic for Kōno raised as a typical Osaka merchant’s itohan いとはん
(in standard Japanese, ojōsan, or “well-heeled daughter”).
56
Born in Nishi-
ku, Nishidōtonbori in 1926, Kōno grew up in Osaka’s lively commercial
shitamachi district (traditional downtown merchant area). Her father ran
an established wholesale business in shiitake mushrooms and other
mountain vegetables, while her mother’s family had long operated a well-
known pharmaceutical business. In her reading of the biographical
elements in “Michishio,” Kanda Yumiko notes that Kōno’s merchant
family rose a notch on the economic and social class scale when they
moved to a more upscale suburban neighborhood and kept their family
business downtown.
57
“Michishio” opens a year before the Marco Polo Incident of 7 July
1937 that led to full-scale war with China, a historical sea change that only
appears in the story’s background. The foregrounded story centers on
family relationships, and secrets, told through the point of view of a ten-
year-old girl—Kōno’s age at that time. As in Kōno’s real life, the girl has
moved, but in the fiction she maintains connections with her shitamachi
roots through postcards and visits to an aging neighborhood granny that
her mother in particular has long looked after, Oiesan (or おえはん Oehan,
Kansai dialect for “wife”).
58
The start of the war is conveyed indirectly
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through an unwitting child’s perspective, in details and anecdotes of her
frustration at having to wear rayon instead of proper wool school uniforms,
collect metal foil for the military, and avoid playing with summer
fireworks out of “proper restraint” (自粛 jishuku) during wartime.
59
At one
point, the father makes an apparently innocuous request that his daughter
keep a secret: his arrangement of a special dinner with Oiesan. Although
the girl agrees to do it, she is troubled that the secret can also be a form of
lying. It is only many years later that she learns of her father’s broken
promise of marriage to Oiesan’s daughter, which led to her suicide and the
collapse of the old woman’s family and financial future. For the narrator,
this delayed revelation compounds her complicity in having kept her
father’s secret as a child.
Casual details given inordinate weight act to characterize Kōno’s
literary style, together with structural and psychological techniques that
reinforce themes of secrets and lies: gaps, omissions, displacements, and
delayed revelations.
60
The casual reference in “Michishio” to cheap rayon
(スフ sufu) reoccurs in “Hei no naka” when Masako bemoans the shift to
rayon for the school girls’ uniforms. Historian Thomas Havens writes that
complaints about cheap sufu clothing wearing out quickly were virtual
catchphrases during the war.
61
As Masako’s psyche begins to fray, this
detail acts as an objective correlative to her dubious ability to withstand
the new pressures, the new kinds of wear and tear of militarized daily life
at the textile factory. In her taidan with Yamada, Kōno emphasizes that the
experience of war is not just large-scale history but rather something that
warps the fabric of daily life (日常 nichijō). She states: “What war robs us
of is not ‘peace’ but rather our ‘everyday’.”
62
That the looming war with
China is sited in the background functions not to diminish the role of
history or the fiction’s correspondences with Kōno’s own life but rather to
give such details understated power; these details create depth as well as
delayed, revelatory force in her character’s internal psychic life just as
larger historical forces loom in the background only for their full impact
to be registered later. In “Hei no naka,” Kōno uses Masako and the factory
girls to knit together a story in which an oppressively masculinist wartime
Japan demands women’s complicity and invisible sacrifice to naturalized
structures of gender hierarchy, filial piety, and both emperor and mother
worship.
Details of history might at first appear to recede behind the more
sensational plot in “Hei no naka” that culminates in a child’s death. Yet
these details are essential for building the fictional world’s foundations in
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realism. Beyond the story’s treatment of student mobilization itself, one
such important detail is the May 25, 1939 revision of the Meiji-era
“Imperial Rescript on Education” (教育ニ関スル勅語 kyōiku ni kansuru
chokugo, 1890) that targeted students, known as the “Imperial Rescript on
Education for Students and Youth” (青 少 年 学 徒 ニ 賜 ハリタル勅語
seishōnen gakuto ni tamawaritaru chokugo). Allusion to it in the story
shows how students had to memorize—indeed, internalize—the language
and thinking of nationalism and emperor worship that put masculine and
paternalistic worship, endeavor, and sacrifice at the center of all
activities.
63
Another similar but perhaps less well-known fact of Japan’s
everyday wartime occurs in the story as a kind of prayer that apparently
had regional variations throughout Japan. At the meal scene everyone
chants this prayer as thanks to a divine Emperor for the bounty of food
before them.
64
Kōno also makes historical reference to psychological
warfare in the massive quantities of propaganda dropped on civilian
populations by American warplanes urging surrender or threatening
further destruction.
65
Concrete details such as these in “Hei no naka” act
as dense nodes of history that index the state of exception become the rule,
how the mobilized students’ daily lives are saturated with militaristic
rhetoric and practices that hem them in on all sides. Autobiographical and
historical details build Kōno’s house of fiction in her wartime stories.
By the late 1960s, with the complex figuration of the “house” in Fui
no koe (不意の声 A sudden voice, 1968), Kōno had developed a motif of
not only childlessness but also homelessness for modern women left
stranded and alienated by traditional family structures. The house as ie is
no home for the modern daughter Ukiko in that story, and as in “Hei no
naka,” it is Ukiko’s stint mobilized to a factory that marks the beginning
of her profound alienation from family and society. Ukiko’s father
becomes a ghost lingering in postwar Japan, haunting his daughter in
Tokyo from his deathbed in Osaka. The imprisoning compound of the
factory where Masako works in “Hei no naka” functions similarly, as the
wartime version of the ie seido (家制度 household system).
Kōno Taeko’s life story merges with the fictional in “Michishio” and
“Hei no naka” to signal the author’s future themes. She writes her way
through the rhetorical contradictions and traps of representing women and
war, building on works by Hirabayashi Taiko 平林たい子 (1905–1972) and
Sata Ineko 佐多稲子 (1904–1998) whose realism, she claims, paved the
way for her and later women writers.
66
Kōno develops her own fictional
and theoretical architecture of masochism for her characters’ complex
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sexual pursuits, psychologies, and power struggles in the world around
them, and adds a dose of the supernatural and ghostly to other stories.
67
In
the imprisoning factory compound of “Hei no naka,” the girls play house
and raise a lost boy as their own despite not one of them feeling at home
there, and despite the fact that several girls insist they never want children.
Ironically, the girls’ sense of escape is inextricable from the masculine
militarism that traps them in the first place, built on the foundations of
Japan’s prewar idealization of the traditional household system, the ie
seido.
68
Whether it is on the students’ side or Lieutenant Sakamoto’s side,
the state of exception created in wartime doubles down on the patriotic
scripts and role-playing even as such unstable, unpredictable times
produce contradictions and gaps that challenge the coherence of the
official story.
From Konno to Kōno: The Regressive Birth of an Author
To grasp the desire motivating Masako’s final confession and her
paradoxical form of victorious masochistic defeat, it is necessary to
backtrack to other parts of the story where the author’s own “I” life story
has been reanimated by fiction’s creative power. The story’s unfolding plot
distracts from just what the opening sentence preemptively warns us not
to forget: it is Masako’s birthday. The distractions come from the air raid,
specific historical dates, and then the discovery of Shinbō. In giving “June
8, 1945” such prominence, Kōno deliberately locates readers in a realistic
world with historical facts in a manner strikingly similar to a writer whom
she admired greatly, Hirabayashi Taiko 平林たい子 (1905–1972).
Hirabayashi’s 1946 story, “Mōchūgokuhei,” (盲中国兵 “Blind Chinese
soldiers,” 1946) famously opens with the record aerial bombardment of
Tokyo on March 10, 1945.
69
“Hei no naka” notes elsewhere the well-
known bombing of Osaka after Tokyo, and stresses instead the June
bombing in its opening line.
70
Autobiographical and historical details are
displaced, and function obliquely rather than overtly, as in the name of the
city in Kōno’s story. Her details add up, though, to make it Osaka (other
stories in Tōi natsu are clearly set in Osaka). The historical details of the
students’ mobilization, labor at the factory, and day-to-day life buttress the
story’s realism without diminishing the power of fiction. Indeed, Shinbō
and the plot events centered on him function as a fictional device
inextricable from its author as a woman writer finding her voice and re-
presenting the experience of war on the home front.
71
The story’s opening
pulls together threads of history and Kōno’s autobiography to
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simultaneously raise, and question, the grounds on which war and one’s
true story can ever be told, just as the story begins with both death and
survival on Masako’s birthday.
Masako’s trip home in early July finally arrives, only to illustrate
Kōno’s claim that war robs us of our everyday. Masako goes first to the
school to deliver the reports, and hardly recognizes the hometown she sees
along the way. The city has been reduced to rubble. Even her old school is
merely an extension of the factory now. The strangeness she feels upon
returning “home” grows until it is manifestly alienation. Despite initial
relief at discovering her home and parents safe on the south side of town,
Masako’s earlier feelings about the city and the school appear to overtake
her view of home too: “Is this what she had so looked forward to for
months on end? Masako felt disappointed.”
72
In the very brief and rather
cryptic “home” scene, it is as if Masako balks at the routine of domestic
life. Her parents are happy to see her, and while they offer her a bath and
food, they appear resigned to the fact that their home will be bombed. They
refer to the factory as Masako’s “home” to return to (帰る kaeru) now. She
does not feel at home with them, and wonders why she came.
But Masako avoided her [mother] by going out to the verandah. There,
she gazed at the expanse of summer sky stretching out overhead. It was a
high and clear azure, with the cumulous clouds of midsummer sparring with
each other. In their freedom, they made her want the days that should
belong to her.
What she had wanted was to see a world of peace, freedom, prosperity.
Not this. Her arms and legs were worked to exhaustion at the factory. Her
head was used for nothing more than counting summer underwear. She
knew she was tough but still, and again the sense of unfairness weighed
heavily on her heart.—No, not this. I want a living and breathing body and
mind—and a larger life, one where I can really live, in a world where I can
actually feel, and think, and experience things.
73
Masako herself is surprised by these waves of disappointment instead
of joy. War has changed everything. Her strong desire for something more
from life—in short, her desire to live, to escape—makes her family home
an extension of her school displaced and transformed into the wartime
factory: her family now joins the school in forming the wider wall of a
single prison under the same sky.
Before she heads “home” to the factory, Masako dredges up a curious
memory:
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Masako recalled a story often told about the day she was born. It was her
mother’s first time to give birth. And yet on the morning when it was due,
the baby had leaped out without a moment’s hesitation. You’d have thought
it expected the world to be chock full of wonderful things and just couldn’t
wait to get started…. Recalling that child along with her own recently
passed nineteenth birthday, Masako couldn’t help but see just how precious
that child was.
・・・
No matter what, I have to get that child back to its mother, Masako
thought, as she turned into the front gate at the factory.
She had begun to think that all their clinging to small diversions and acts
of rebellion was shallow, and rather ugly.
74
First thinking of her own birth, Masako’s thoughts slide
metonymically to Shinbō, until just who “that child” is—the one who
needs to be returned home to its mother—becomes unstable. Is it Masako,
whose home and childhood have been stolen from her by the war? Or is it
Shinbō, who has become separated from his mother as a result of war’s
dislocations? Masako’s thinking blurs the line between two different
children as she returns from her real home to the factory and Shinbō.
Emotionally vulnerable after the disappointment of “home,” Masako can
see “for the first time” that she and her classmates are wrong to keep the
boy and that they have been keeping Shinbō for selfish reasons. Despite
this newfound resolve to report him, Masako will fail to act on it.
Even before Shinbō’s death and its accompanying trauma has set in by
the last scene of the story when she stands before his real mother, Masako
has already confessed to herself that keeping Shinbō was never really for
his sake. After his body is found, and after being interrogated and beaten
repeatedly by Lieutenant Sakamoto, Masako and her cohorts repeat the
story they conspired to tell, a “confession” of their “charity” (慈善 jizen)
and kindness. They say that the lost boy had nowhere else to go and needed
their help—they saved him. But privy to Masako’s first-person thoughts
in limited third-person narration, the reader sees that by story’s end she
does not really believe this—and did not, it turns out, even before his death
when she searches furiously for a place to hide him.
75
How about cajoling him into the closet and getting him to hide behind the
futons? The inspectors would probably only take a glance in each room
from the doorway, and probably wouldn’t hear him even if he cried a little
in the dark. But that presented its own dangers. A large futon could fall on
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that little child from above and smother him. It was so hot and humid in the
closet, and with no one to hear him, finally his sobs would end, completely
muffled… I would never do such a thing to him. Masako knew this, but just
as she resolved never to be so careless she also experienced a brief surge of
some fresh new feeling linked to the glimpse of a possible accident.
76
Masako “would never do such a thing” as cause his death—murder
him—intentionally; and yet, just as unintentionally feelings emerge of her
own liberation should the boy die. The problem of the boy’s hidden
existence is intimately tied to Masako’s need for him in the first place, so
it is no accident, so to speak, that Masako’s feelings of liberation from him
are described as sugasugashii (すがすがしい refreshing) in a simultaneous
displacement and mimicry of Suga Shin’ichi’s name. In the end, both
Shinbō’s unexpected appearance and his sudden death tell us something
that Masako is as yet unable to articulate for herself or for us, but that
“something” clearly has more to do with Kōno’s persona Masako than
Shinbō.
Discovered on Masako’s birthday, Shinbō marks the “rebirth” of
Masako. When she finds Shinbō, Masako takes him to the dormitory
where the girls try to learn more about his family and where he comes
from. He tells them his family has two baby girls. Fumiko presses him,
teasingly asking if these babies are not really twins.
He told them that his father was a soldier who had been in hospital but
then sent back to fight in the war, and that there were two babies in the
family, both girls.
“Twins perhaps?” Fumiko’s thoughts had inadvertently become audible
but the boy answered anyway. “Nope. Two regular babies born nearly
together.”
Fumiko gave a wry smile, probing further. “So living at your house are
you and your mama, two little babies born less than a year apart—anybody
else?”
“There is Konno. She goes to the factory though.”
“This factory?”
“Nope…. Konno always brings me back dried bananas.”
At the boy’s mention of dried bananas, Sakiko recalled that she had some
dried bread left over from lunch and gave it to him. He started to eat,
making loud crunching sounds.
77
It is not only Masako’s and Shinbō’s “birthdays,” as Shinbō gains a
new mother in Masako on her actual birthday. The new life that emerges
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in this passage and that will come to full growth as a result of Shinbō’s
sacrifice is Shinbō’s mysterious co-parent or sibling named “Konno” (コ
ンノ). This name is written without kanji, sounded out instead as katakana,
in the same manner as “Sugao Shinbō”—as if alienated, foreign words not
at home in the language, unmoored from either family or context. Both
names fluidly move to encompass wider meanings beyond either a literal
boy or any real person named “Sugao Shinbō” or “Konno.” As if a lurking
spirit or a rumor, the author “Kōno” inserts herself as both distraction and
uncanny echo in the gaps between the names’ similar sounds and the
orthographic uncertainty born of katakana and spoken speech.
Konno/Kōno incipiently emerges in relation to Shinbō’s life,
simultaneously a character in the story and member of his family sent
away to the factory. Konno/Kōno acts as a proper noun in unstable kinship
to him or his family.
Masako is similarly split long before the heart-rending scene at story’s
end: she is both any and all girls who were conscripted for factory work
during the war, like Konno/Kōno, and Masako, the specific girl who will
return from her visit home wanting nothing more than to escape her
double-walled feudal prison of the traditional ie system and the wartime
“family state” (家族国家 kazoku kokka). The subtle overlapping of Masako
with Konno/Kōno finally cracks in two with the Masako who wants to
confess at the end of the story, revealing in that split heart the birth of
Kōno’s authorial voice. That voice comes at great cost.
78
Only now does that earlier metonymic slide into the confusion of
which child, which mother, upon Masako’s return “home” to the factory
after leaving her real “home” become legible. When Shinbō enters
Masako’s life she has just faced death in surviving one of the worst fire
bombings of the war on her birthday. Shinbō serves as a figure of both
rebirth and escape from death. At first his “mother,” Masako will gradually
usurp the place of the boy himself to achieve her own rebirth. Perhaps his
name had always hinted at his true function as her rebirth: the “new child”
(Shinbō) is the “right child” (tadashii ko). Her own death by air raid the
night before his discovery is deferred and displaced onto his sacrifice to
come, in order for Masako/Konno/Kōno to defeat both actual death in
war—the unrecognized wartime deaths of women and children on the
home front and mobilized to factories—and social death, her daughterly
sacrifice within a household system that would have preferred a boy whose
sacrifice would bring honor.
Discovered by Masako when going to look for water, killed by
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drowning in water, identified by his real mother as having worn a shirt on
the day he went missing that was sky blue (mizu iro, or literally, the color
of water), Shinbō is from the start less a real child than a mizuko (水子);
that is, an aborted child. From the start, he stands for the aborted destiny
awaiting Masako in the ie seido. Ryōsai kenbo (良妻賢母 “good wife, wise
mother”) ideology binds the family system’s traditional strictures to the
ends of the family state under militarism, where women’s value lies in
being mothers who increase the population, bearing soldiers and heirs.
Patriotic “ume yo, fuyase yo” (産めよ増やせよ “Give birth, increase [the
nation]”) wartime slogans put women in their reproductive place of
bearing children and increasing the population while ignoring the
significance of their productive labor in factories building that nation.
79
Like their mothers before them, such “filial daughters” will work in
factories “for the sake of the country” or as mothers sacrifice themselves
for father, husband, and son. Masako’s freedom from the social death of
the double-walled prison, one where her life matters less than a man’s, as
if a woman’s life were less human, will demand that she abort that life.
Just where and what other kind of freedom might be possible, though,
remains unanswered.
Redemptive Violence and Violent Dis-Placements
Putting Shinbō in harm’s way despite their intent and plan to save him, the
girls together with Shinbō’s “mother,” Masako, dramatize a story that is
part William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and part Ōe Kenzaburō’s Shiiku
(飼育 Prize Catch).
80
With Shinbō’s forced confinement, where he is
treated as a plaything by the girls before ending in his death, the “toddler
hunting” seeds of a typical Kōno story whose protagonist desires boys,
fantasizes masochistic abuse, or stalks children out of displaced feelings
of oppression and thwarted passions are planted.
Displacements structure “Hei no naka” as they do so many of Kōno’s
fictions. One such displacement occurs with the author’s presence in the
fiction as “Konno” and numerous details that align with or come very close
to Kōno’s own life and wartime experiences. Another striking
displacement lies in the structural parallel between Masako’s actual family
home and the pretend family and domestic life Masako creates with
Shinbō and his “sisters” at the factory.
When the military authorities in “Hei no naka” break their own rules
to forge the time of each report’s delivery by the girls, tacitly enabling the
girls to stop by their homes on their way back to the compound from the
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school each month, it is hard not to sympathize with such white lies that
benefit the girls. But by the story’s end, the girls are complicit in keeping
another more burdensome secret, the truth about Shinbō’s existence—
soon to be followed by the lie that he never existed at all. For Masako, the
gap between reality and the official “story,” resulting from escalating
levels of mendacity behind and beyond the walls, will reach the breaking
point in the final scene. In that moment, Masako faces the fiction/lie
embodied in Lieutenant Sakamoto standing before her, and simultaneously
the story/truth embodied in the mother who refutes Masako’s delusional
maternal claim to Shinbō. Shaken by her inability to reconcile these
competing stories, the last line of “Hei no naka” shows Masako barely held
together by her friends. Under threat of punishment, all the girls must keep
a new secret, and tell official lies. The girls maintain a complicit silence
with the very military authorities they had at first protested against, then
joyfully cooperated with in order to go home on Mondays, while all along
they hid the secret of Shinbō. By story’s end, they are forced to collude in
the dirty secrets and official story making of the authorities about his death,
thereby compounding their captive bonds.
Recall that Masako had wanted to write a different final testament to
carry in her air raid bag, one that would respond to her father’s feelings
about her as a girl instead of a boy. She struggles to find the words:
To My Revered Parents
I have been sent to the factory and so if it is bombed I will likely die. That
is why I am writing this. I was the oldest among all of us girls, and Father
used to say, “If only you had been a boy.” As the war dragged on and I grew
up, though, he became glad I was a girl after all. And yet, it looks like even
I—a girl—will end up dying for the war….
81
At this point, Masako pauses, and then discards her confessional
testament. She understands that, either way, she loses. Her father once
regretted that she was not born a boy, only later to be glad she is a girl
because it means she will not be sent to war as a soldier. Yet her father’s
old-fashioned feudalistic thinking about girls’ inferiority to boys aligns in
the wartime context with the government’s hypocritical failure to
recognize the sacrifice of mobilized girls and women. Masako and the
factory girls know that they are as likely to die in the war as any young
man sent to fight. Enemy planes targeted factories, and labor conditions
affected the workers’ health through exhaustion, overwork, and the spread
of diseases. The real difference is that her sacrifice and her life will not
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count as similarly valuable, fully as human.
Masako cannot even confess her true feelings in this final testament.
She sees that to continue with her letter as she began it, exclaiming her
dissatisfaction, could only come across as unfilial, or even unpatriotic (非
国民的 hikokuminteki).
82
Whatever stranger discovers her body and the
note attached might even implicate her family in her unpatriotic
transgression. Masako struggles with her final testament but ends up lying,
betrayed by language itself. As we have seen, she oversimplifies her
complex feelings to “I was happy,” suspending her real feelings in silent
lacunae.
This literal scene of writing that cannot say what it means has much
in common with the beating and interrogation of Masako by Lieutenant
Sakamoto. Masako comes to realize that she cannot tell Lieutenant
Sakamoto why she and the girls did what they did because she simply has
no words that he would understand. Perhaps the voice of the writer Kōno
can be heard at this point, suggesting that neither history’s facts nor
fiction’s lies can fully convey what has happened in wartime “on the
inside.”
Beyond her fictional worlds, essays, and interviews, Kōno’s voice can
be heard years after her own death in yet another striking way. At a
memorial for Kōno a few months after her death in 2015, her family
displayed a crumbling old piece of paper found among her most private
belongings that had been folded until it was tiny and could fit inside a
small pouch. Its words are remarkably close to those in Masako’s final
testament:「私は本当に幸福でした。皆さんへ 多恵子」(“To all of you:
I was truly happy. Taeko”).
83
Kōno’s transmutation of autobiography into thoroughgoing fictional
worlds echoes in surprising ways her literary forebear, the proletarian
writer and activist Hirabayashi Taiko. Certainly, Hirabayashi’s stories of
factory life and wartime resonate with the mobilized factory labor of
wartime Japan depicted in Kōno’s story even if overt political or didactic
messages inherent in proletarian fiction are simply lacking in Kōno’s
fiction. As is well known, Hirabayashi wrote stories generated around an
autobiographical kernel of her own, specifically, the death of her newborn
while in Manchuria. “Seryōshitsu nite” (施療室にて “In the charity ward,”
1927) is the best known of these stories.
84
This only child, later given a
name without kanji and denoted in katakana as “Akebono,” died while
Hirabayashi was ill with beriberi. Her former employers at the factory
where she had worked, and the doctors at the charity ward where her
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destitution inevitably takes her, refuse to provide safe milk for the baby
until she gets well. Hirabayashi’s persona is forced to infect and kill her
baby. Shocking as an autobiographical tale of infanticide, the story’s social
commentary bluntly asks why some human lives are worth more than
others. Kōno’s “Hei no naka” picks up a similar thread, we might say, one
where a boy is unnecessarily killed and Kōno, via her alter ego Masako as
the boy’s surrogate mother, asks why the sacrifice of a girl’s life does not
have the same value as a boy’s.
85
Linked in a series of maternal displacements from Shinbō’s real
mother by Masako first, who discovers him, and then Takeko, rumored to
have covered up a false abortion of him, and then back to Masako, Shinbō
stands in not only for the brother or boy Masako should have been for her
father but also for the dawning of a writer, as with Akebono for
Hirabayashi. As a boy, Shinbō’s sacrifice would count as one that her own
death could never measure up to as a mere female, while her privileged
maternal role with Shinbō serves to supplement Masako’s feminine lack,
fulfilling her responsibilities as a properly filial daughter become mother
under the ie seido. Displaced from any real family into the ideological one
created and rationalized by the nation state, Masako meets the needs of
fictional family with her own competing fiction, a kind of mamagoto
(playing house) with Shinbō and the other girls at the factory dormitory.
There they create a fantasy space that simultaneously revises the ie and
exposes its grotesque distortions from the vantage point of a girl trapped
within it.
Masako’s masochism means taking upon herself harsh punishment for
the crime of Shinbō’s death even though, as the teacher reminds Takeko,
if anyone killed him, it was those who filled the barrel or ordered it done.
Sunk in grief and harassed by interrogations, Masako not only faces the
beatings Lieutenant Sakamoto gives her, but wants more:
I want you to hit me harder. I want you to hit me more furiously.
And then, when all my feelings of irritation, frustration, and
bitterness that are tearing me up get condensed into one tight little
ball I want you to smash it to smithereens. If you were to do that,
what a new and refreshing feeling that would certainly be.—
Preoccupied with this vision, Masako let the Lieutenant do as he
pleased.
86
Masako’s sentiments might indicate her guilt-stricken acceptance of
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punishment except for the masochistic pleasure the beating clearly holds
for her. Leading into the final scene of Masako’s guilt and self-dissolution
facing Shinbō’s real mother, this transformation of Masako from rebellious
daughter to masochistic woman cautions us to read the story’s conclusion
not simply for Masako’s straightforward narration, her “testament” that
the world expects to hear, one might say, but rather for the contortions her
willful self must assume. In apparent masochistic submission to her guilt,
Masako actually refuses the walls and traps of the gender roles presented
at each stage in the story until finally, when she faces Shinbō’s real mother,
she claims not the real child but rather herself as the fictional child she
could never be for her father or her country. She confronts the “good girl”
that must be killed off in order to find her own voice as a woman telling
the truth of her story in historical moments when it cannot be heard or
understood. For the author Kōno Taeko that would have to wait until long
after the war. Deep inside the heart of her fictional persona Masako, Kōno
expresses the desire to be “smashed to smithereens” in order to see if she
might reach a clean slate, a “refreshing” (once again, sugasugashii すがす
がしい) new starting place, to begin anew out of a painful wartime past.
Sugao Shinbō’s sugao (素顔), his “true face,” wavers between the
ultimately unrecognizable swollen face of the drowned boy—“Masako
could not summon forth from that face his real face”—and Masako’s own
face looking in the mirror, swollen and distorted from the beatings of
Lieutenant Sakamoto as he demanded a confession.
87
In the final scene,
her heart finally cracked open for the reader alone, these overlapping faces
merge and become clearer when we hear Masako’s silent confession—and
it looks a lot like Kōno’s.
Coda
In a tribute to Kōno just after her death, genbaku writer Hayashi Kyōko 林
京子 (1930–2017) writes about Kōno’s generous encouragement of her as
a writer, and contends that while the meaning of defeat in August 1945
looked very different to each of them—for Hayashi in Nagasaki, it was the
beginning of a new horror, while for Kōno it offered hope of survival and
liberation just ahead—they shared the need to write about war and the
difficulties of representing that experience. Moved to tears when reading
Kōno’s “Hei no naka” by the memories it brought back of her own
mobilization to a heavy industrial factory in Nagasaki right up until the
dropping of the atomic bomb, Hayashi asserts that both boys and girls
shared difficult lives in their mobilization to factories during the war but
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only girls had to worry about protecting themselves from their own
countrymen while there.
88
For Hayashi, as for Kōno—and in a different
way, for Ichikawa too—wartime experiences are too often untold, hidden
and silenced behind the walls of past and present politics, history, and
family stories.
NOTES
1
2
3
I wish to express my profound gratitude to the Kōno family for permission to
translate Kōno Taeko’s story. I remain indebted to them for sharing their family
stories and the artwork of Ichikawa Yasushi. The patience and generosity of
colleagues with both general advice as well as detailed feedback on drafts of this
essay and on the story’s translation cannot be overstated. Deep appreciation goes
out to Tonooka Naomi, Tatsumi Takayuki, Arimitsu Michio, Yoneyama Hiroki,
Michiko Suzuki, Helen Weetman, Takahashi Shoichi, and Nakazawa Kazuo.
Special thanks go to the hardworking editors and anonymous reviewers of
Japanese Language and Literature.
1
Translation by, and cited in, Yoshiko Miyake, “Doubling Expectations:
Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work Under State Management in Japan in
the 1930s and 1940s,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee
Bernstein (University of California Press: Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 267–295, 288.
Koizumi’s speech to the Diet, Feb. 1942, originally cited in Mitsui Reiko 三井
礼子, ed., Gendai fujin undōshi nenpyō 現代婦人運動史年表 (Tokyo: San’ichi
shobō, 1963), 169.
2
Ibaragi Noriko, “Watashi ga ichiban kirei datta toki” わたしが一番きれいだっ
たとき, in Onna no kotoba おんなのことば (Tokyo: Dōwaya, 1994 [1957]), 48–
51. The translation here of one stanza is my own.
3
Kōno Taeko and Yamada Eimi, Bungaku mondō 文学問答 (Tokyo: Bungei
shunjū, 2007), esp. 45–84. All translations from this book are my own.
4
Ibid., 45. See also the Asahi TV short program that aired on August 5, 2018,
accessible on YouTube, that includes interviews with Ichikawa’s and Kōno’s
family, Tsuiseki: ‘Maboroshii no genbakuga’ no shinjitsu 追跡:「幻の原爆画の
真実, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeuZQEpGGPE. Accessed May 7, 2022.
5
Kōno Taeko and Yamada Eimi, Bungaku mondō, 45–84. See also the website
dedicated to Ichikawa (“Henry”) Yasushi: 市川泰, Henry Ichikawa no kiseki no
genbakuga. www.hhichikawa.net/. Accessed May 7, 2022.
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6
Kōno Taeko, “Omoigakenai koto,” in Omoigakenai koto (Tokyo: Shinchōsha,
2002), 166–170. This book’s middle section is comprised of New York essays
and concludes with the title essay written around 9.11 and its aftermath.
7
Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 塀の中 in Kōno Taeko zenshū 河野多惠子全集 vol.
1 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995), 51–88. All translations from “Hei no naka” cited
in this essay are my own. The translation appears in full in this volume, entitled
“On the Inside.” The story’s literal title is “behind a fence or wall” but the
idiomatic expression in Japanese hei no naka immediately connotes prison
conditions much like the English expressions “behind bars” and “on the inside.”
Moreover, a concrete “wall” (replete with locked gate and guards) is a
prominent architectural feature of the fictional factory compound. The final
translation of the title seeks to preserve both the idiom in Japanese and English
while having the further advantage of suggesting both the psychic interiority of
the story’s protagonist and the secrets and lies that get covered up in the story.
Italics are not used for emphasis in this essay’s cited passages. See the
“Translator’s Note” at the end of the story for explanation of italics and dashes
in the story’s translation.
8
Ichikawa was born “Hiroshi” (宏), but took the name “Yasushi” (泰) as a
professional painter, and in the final decades of his life, many of which were
spent living in the U. S. and traveling abroad, he often used the name “Henry”
(ヘンリー) as well as “Yasushi.” He rarely gave his paintings titles or dated
them, making it difficult to historicize his output; the “September 11, 2001”
painting is a striking exception in this regard. See the chronology in both
English and Japanese documenting his life and work: Henry Ichikawa no kiseki
no genbakuga. www.hhichikawa.net/. Accessed May 7, 2022.
9
In the Asahi TV program, Tsuiseki: ‘Maboroshii no genbakuga’ no shinjitsu.
Ichikawa’s niece Satō Yasuko testifies to her uncle’s explanations about his
work. This remains some of the only evidence extant about when these paintings
were done, and Ichikawa’s motivation for doing them.
10
Ibid. On the website Henry Ichikawa no kiseki no genbakuga see also the
portrait of the couple’s close friend, the writer Setouchi Jakuchō.
11
Kōno Taeko, Tōi natsu (Tokyo: Kōsōsha, 1977).
12
Kōno Taeko, “Atogaki” [Afterword], Tōi natsu, 225–6. In her “Afterword”
(atogaki) to Tōi natsu, Kōno stresses that each story was originally written out
of chronological order. While the different fictional protagonists certainly stand
in for her own experiences, she contends, they also stand in for many others
who will surely recognize the details of life in wartime Japan. Of these four
stories, “Full Tide” has been translated by Lucy North in Toddler-Hunting &
Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1996), 45–68, and “On the Inside”
appears in translation in this volume for the first time.
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13
Agamben’s ideas about sovereignty and the law in and out of states of
emergency and war developed out of the political theory and biopolitics of Carl
Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault. His concept of the “state of
exception” was especially catalyzed by the U. S. (and increasingly global) so-
called War on Terror since 9.11. Representative works include Giorgio
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roarzen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998) and State of
Exception, trans. Kevin Atell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005).
14
Agamben’s “state of exception” as the implementation of “extraordinary” or
“emergency” extralegal measures without legal sanction or clear end comes to
mind here. A recent popular dramatization of this can be seen in Anthony
Horowitz’s deeply researched ITV television series about the suspension and
evasion of civil procedures and the rule of law on the home front in Britain
during WWII, Foyle’s War (2002–2015). Chief Superintendent Foyle’s job on
the home front is to make sure that the rule of law and civilization—the very
thing the war is reputedly being fought to protect—does not break down at
home where it is at risk of doing so at every level of society, no matter social
or economic class.
15
See Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback trilogy, particularly Blowback: The Costs
and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007).
Of course, the lengthy occupation of Japan by U. S.-led Allied forces con-
tributed largely to the reality of Japan’s ongoing “state of emergency” that
included conditions of censorship, as well as to debates in Japan about just
when the “postwar” began.
16
Miyake, “Doubling Expectations,” 286–8. Miyake’s thorough research details
“emergency” and “wartime” measures put in place that actually eliminated
hard-won gains for protection of women and child workers in the prewar, such
as the revision of the 1923 Factory Act into the 1943 Wartime Factory Act (戦
時下工場法特例 Senjika kōjōhō tokurei). Miyake describes contradictory
policies of support for maternity together with encouragement of labor in
hazardous jobs by women and those under sixteen in the 1942 Control of
Important Plants Ordinance (重要事業場労務管理例 Jūyō jigyōjō rōmu
kanrirei).
17
Economist Jerome B. Cohen’s Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949) remains the single best
source in English on wartime industries in Japan. Cohen often refers to the
government policies on student mobilization and the conscription of women
and children as “secret” policies. He also notes that Japanese scholars tend to
say that women were not conscripted until late 1944 but this is not accurate
since, in fact, women at war plants were frozen in their jobs so they were never
“officially” conscripted by labor mobilization officers. Similarly, married
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women working in plants were never required to register so their labor and
mobilization were rendered effectively invisible. From November 1941, men
and unmarried women were required to register as part of a potential labor pool
(Kokumin tōroku seido), and all others, including schoolchildren, had to
volunteer on projects with patriotic labor associations (Kinrō hōkokutai), all of
which underlines the degree to which students and women found it difficult to
“choose” or “escape” labor during the war. See Cohen, 272, 278, 309, 317–318,
325–6.
18
Ibid., esp. 319–322. Cohen has a section focused on women, and notes too the
change in the name of the Women’s Volunteer Corps from 1944 to eliminate
“volunteer.” See too Miyake’s section, “Military Conscription of Women,” in
“Doubling Expectations,” 288–290. Women were long threatened with the draft
if they did not “volunteer,” and Miyake shows how ordinances regarding the
Women’s Volunteer Labor Corps resulted in women’s compulsory industrial
labor for one year from March 1944.
19
Considering this story’s focus on the unintended death of a child in wartime, it
is worth noting here that the Japanese government’s policies of evacuation of
children to the countryside, ostensibly to protect them, functioned to separate
them from their families and often resulted in their being orphaned and working
in rural plants by war’s end. In the course of being evacuated by the Japanese
military in large numbers, they also became targets of military attack.
20
Cohen, 272.
21
Ibid., 324.
22
There are several variants of this story having minor discrepancies, including
the first version of the story that appeared in Bungakusha, the one in Tōi natsu,
and the last version in the zenshū. My decision to use the zenshū version is
simply because it was the final revised version overseen by Kōno herself for
the collected volumes and the most complete.
23
Sakaguchi Ango’s words 「作家には地ベタをはいずる鬼の目が必要だ」 are
quoted by Ogino Anna 荻野アンナ in Komori Yōichi 小森陽一 and Inoue
Hisashi 井上ひさし, Zadankai: Shōwabungakushi 座談:昭和会文学史 (Tokyo:
Shūeisha, 2003), 9–118, esp. 96. Ango’s language of the “demon eye” that
writers need to cultivate appears in the stories Omochabako おもちゃ箱 and
Gaitō to aozora 外套と青空, both available at Aozora bunko online:
www.aozora.gr.jp. Translations here are my own.
24
For translation and exegesis of Ango’s essays on decadence, see James Dorsey
and Douglas Slaymaker, eds. Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and
the War (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010).
25
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Joryū hōdan: Shōwa o ikita joseitachi 女流放談: 昭
和を生きた女性作家たち (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2018), 39–75. This taidan
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with Kōno took place in the 1980s, along with all the interviews in this book,
but was only published in 2018. Hijiya-Kirschnereit places Kōno first in a
section entitled Senchūha no sengo「 戦 中 派 」 の 戦後, and their rich and
illuminating conversation reveals how central Kōno’s wartime experiences
were to her life and development as a writer. At one moment, she even switches
the interview tables, so to speak, to ask Hijiya-Kirschnereit how she feels as a
German scholar of Japan about war responsibility. Such questions were long
on Kōno’s mind, we might say, as this essay argues in its emphasis on
confessions and tacit deceits in “Hei no naka.”
26
Kōno Taeko, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, trans. Lucy North (New York:
New Directions, 1996). Both stories appear in North’s collection.
27
Kōno Taeko, Tanizaki bungaku to kōtei no yokubō 谷崎文学と肯定の欲望
(Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1976). She would go on to write a second volume of
Tanizaki criticism: Kōno Taeko, Tanizaki bungaku no tanoshimi 谷崎文学の楽
しみ (Tokyo: Chuōkōronsha, 1998).
28
For more on the history of this term see Joan E. Ericson, “The Origins of the
Concept of ‘Women’s Literature,’” in The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory
in Japanese Women’s Writing, ed. Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 74–117. Kōno never, to my
knowledge, shied away from the word “feminist,” although she apparently
wanted to see both feminisuto (feminist) and joryū sakka used more precisely
for different historical moments. See her discussion with Hijiya-Kirschnereit
about joryū sakka. The term “feminist,” for instance, in the early postwar years
referred to men, not women in Japan, as is evident in “Toddler hunting.” It is
worth noting too that in her taidan discussion with Ōba Minako, she agrees
with Ōba that a token single woman on literary prize committees is not enough:
more women must be at the table so that committees more fairly judge and
evaluate women’s works together with men’s as no longer exceptions or
unusual. See Ōba Minako zenshū, vol. 22, ed. Tani Yū 谷優 (Tokyo: Nihon
keizai shinbun shuppansha, 2011), 416–437.
29
She lived and traveled with Ichikawa until his death in 2012, having married
him in 1965 after living with him for some years first. His artwork appears on
some of Kōno’s book covers, and he illustrated and co-authored a book of New
York essays: Kōno Taeko and Ichikawa Yasushi, Nyū yōku meguriai ニューヨ
ークめぐり会い (Tokyo: Chuōkōronsha, 1997).
30
Mizuta Noriko, “Women’s Self-Representation and Transformation of the Body.”
Josai International Review, 1.1 (1995): 85–102. Accessed 22 August 2021.
Online: https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/AN10479396?lang=en
31
For an excellent overview of women’s movements and activists in Japan, see
Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and
Sexuality (Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the 1970s
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“women’s liberation” movement, in particular, see Setsu Shigematsu, Scream
from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
32
Bullock sees Kōno’s wartime girlhood as a departure point, though, rather than
as a formative stage in her development as a writer that continues to shape her
work as I argue in this article. See Julia Bullock, The Other Women’s Lib:
Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2010). Critics Yonaha Keiko 与那覇恵子, Gretchen Jones, and
Nagaike Kazumi 長 池 一 美 have explored the disturbing sexual violence
throughout Kōno Taeko’s corpus and the feminist implications of her
masochistic aesthetic. Jones’s application of film theorist Gaylyn Studlar’s
concepts of masochism and suspense to Kōno’s work offers one of the most
original takes on Kōno’s literary techniques. Yonaha deftly interpolates
biography into analysis of the three types of masochism that Kōno develops as
a critical tool for analyzing Tanizaki’s work, and then persuasively deploys
them to analyze Kōno’s own fictional world. Drawing upon psychoanalytic
theory and Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten” for her provocative reading
of sexuality in “Toddler hunting,” Nagaike explores connections between
violent father figures, male children, and the female masochist in order to
theorize Kōno’s “perverse aesthetics.” See Gretchen Jones, “Subversive
Strategies: Masochism, Gender, and Power in Kōno Taeko’s ‘Toddler-
Hunting,’” East Asia: An International Quarterly (Winter 2000): 79–107;
Nagaike Kazumi, “Japanese Female Writers Watch a Boy Being Beaten by His
Father: Female Fantasies of Male Homosexuality, Psychoanalysis, and
Sexuality,” PAJLS (Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary
Studies) vol. 5 (Summer 2004); Yonaha Keiko, “Kōno Taeko ron,” Gendai josei
sakkaron (Tokyo: Shinbisha, 1986), 7–29. My own scholarship has benefited
from these critics’ readings of Kōno while trying to take into account how her
wartime youth and the postwar Occupation period inflect the violence and
masochism so persistent in her fictional worlds. See Mary A. Knighton, “The
Masochist’s Masquerade: Kōno Taeko’s ‘Beautiful Girl’(Bishōjo),” Japan
Forum 29.4 (2017): 496–517.
33
“Hei no naka” actually references Little Women (1868), American writer Louisa
May Alcott’s novel of women left at home while their father goes off to civil
war. This detail is a reminder that despite wartime government education
policies that forbade the teaching of texts in English and other languages, there
is often a gap between national policy or law and implementation at the local
and everyday level.
34
Setouchi Jakuchō wrote explicitly about sexuality and gender in her fiction. In
her own life, too, she rather scandalously abandoned a husband and child to
pursue a relationship with another man. Writing about Kōno, see Setouchi
Jakuchō 瀬戸内寂聴, Tsunoru wabishisa つのる侘しさ in Gunzō 群像 4 (2015):
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188–189.
35
Kōno Taeko, “Atogaki,” Tōi natsu, 225–6. Kōno explains that “Hei no naka”
and two other stories in this collection were written closer to the end of the war.
Only “The time will come” 時来たる (Toki kitaru) was written expressly for
this volume at the editors’ urging in order to fill in chronological gaps in her
life and the background history.
36
Ibaragi Noriko, “Onna no ko no māchi” [Girls’ march] in Onna no kotoba
(Tokyo: Dōwaya, 1994), 24–26. This translation is Mulvey’s in his article
looking at women’s poetry aesthetics, including Yosano Akiko’s famous anti-
war poem (Kimi shi ni tamau koto nakare [Love, You Must Not Go to Your
Death]). See Bern Mulvey, “Sweet Music from a Strange Country: Japanese
Women Poets as ‘Other’,” Japanese Studies Review XIV (2010): 91–111, esp.
100–101.
37
See Chapter 16, “What Do You Tell the Dead When You Lose?” in John Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W. W. Norton &
Company and The New Press, 1999), 485–546. Here, and in the following final
chapter, Dower discusses at length not only positive changes but also
unfortunate continuities between prewar and postwar economic and political
structures that form the legacy of the U. S.-led Occupation of Japan. Subjection
and power are inextricable from the workings of masochism. Gilles Deleuze,
in his groundbreaking study of Sacher von Masoch’s fictions (from whence the
sexological term “masochism” now derives), stresses the necessary contractual
and storytelling elements of masochism as the limits within which freedom and
pleasure can be experienced. Masochistic pleasure in bondage acts as a fantasy
of liberation; indeed, constraints set surprisingly realistic conditions in which
abstract masochistic theories might offer a sobering critique of liberatory
politics, feminist and otherwise. Deleuze goes to great lengths to separate
masochism from sadism but Kōno makes clear that masochism contains sadism
but sadism has no room for masochism. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness
and Cruelty (including Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs) (New
York: Zone Books, 1989). It is worth recalling in this context the classic text of
J. S. Mills’s On Liberty (1859), which stresses that freedom is not absolute but
always exercised within constraints. For more on how gender inflects power
dynamics in masochism relevant to Kōno’s work, see Knighton, “The
Masochist’s Masquerade.”
38
Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 51.
39
Ibid., 51.
40
Ibid., 54.
41
Ibid., 56.
42
Ibid., 61.
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43
Ibid., 85.
44
Ibid., 88.
45
Kōno Taeko, “Kangaerarenai koto,” Kangaerarenai koto 考えられないこと
(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2015), 63–90.
46
Uranishi Kazuhiko 浦西和彦 ed., Kōno Taeko bungei jiten/shoshi 河野多惠子文
藝辞典・書誌 (Osaka: Izumi shoin, 2003), 476–7.
47
The confessional quality at the end of this story calls to mind the language that
Kōno uses to describe the stories in Tōi natsu. She stresses that she wrote them
with a “feeling of secrecy” (密かに) and rather hopes that the reader too will be
able to read them that way. Kōno Taeko, “Atogaki,” Tōi natsu, 225–6.
48
On how U. S. Occupation authorities’ censorship, particularly of the atomic
bombings, functioned to “impede reasonable and therapeutic expressions of
grief” (Dower, Embracing Defeat, 413) as well as get in the way of a healthy
transition to true democracy, see chapter 14 in Dower, Embracing Defeat. Also
see John Dower, “The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese
Memory,” Diplomatic History 19.2 (Spring 1995): 275–295.
49
Okuno Takeo, “Kaisetsu” [Literary commentary], in Shōwa sensōbungaku
zenshū iinkai 昭和戦争文学全集委員会, eds. Senjika no hai tīn, vol. 11 (Tokyo:
Shūeisha, 1964–5), 468–475.
50
See Okuno Takeo, “Kōno Taeko,” Sakkaronshū 作家論集 (Tairyūsha, 1978),
239–245, esp. 242–3. The historical and literary category of the senchūha, or
senjka no sedai 戦時下の世代, is problematic, not least because it is based on
loose criteria of generation and theme besides being variable in focus on which
war or geographical region provides the author’s experiences. That said, the
designation of “wartime generation” remains widely used in the critical
literature to refer to those who experienced and wrote about war starting from
the Japanese invasion of Manchuria from 1931 leading to the outbreak of the
second Sino-Japanese war in 1937, and the expansion of the Pacific War with
the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the war’s culmination in Japan’s surrender in
August 1945 following two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by the U. S. Anthologies of wartime literature often include only literature
written during the war, necessarily limited due to censorship and proscriptive
conditions for publication, or else include colonial and multilingual gaichi
literature in addition to naichi domestic literature and postwar writing about the
war. One condition might be said to unite most definitions, however, and that
is the expectation of an author having had direct experience of war. A recent
volume in a historical series on women writers does not even include an essay
on Kōno although she is mentioned twice in the Introduction, first to locate her
in the postwar 1960s “decade” of emerging writers, and then to bemoan not
having included an essay on her (and several others) in this volume. The
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Introduction makes an important contribution to thinking about periodization,
however, by focusing on early and late Shōwa itself as a rupture in history and
society in Japan, between fascism with its attendant ideological apparatuses and
democracy and women’s rights imposed under Occupation with the
contradictions of censorship and prosperity as a result of Cold War proxy wars
in Korea and Vietnam. See New Feminism Critique Group 新・フェミニズム
批評の会, eds. Shōwakōki josei bungakuron 昭和後期女性文学論 (Tokyo:
Kanrin shobō, 2020), 7–13.
51
Okuno, “Kōno Taeko,” 243.
52
See Kanda Yumiko, “‘Sonzai’ kara ‘jidai’ e no ikō: Kōno Taeko ron” 存在から
時代への移行：河野多惠子論 Meiji kindai bungaku 明治近代文学 9 (1994):
117–126, wherein Kanda explores how the war experience distilled in “On the
Inside” unites the themes of humiliation 被凌辱 and death 死seen in much of
Kōno’s masochistic “existential” fiction. See also Kawamura Jirō, Genkai no
bungaku: fukusūkei no genjitsu 限界の文学：複数形の現実 (Tokyo: Kawade
shobō shinsha, 1969), esp. 267–283, who argues that Kōno builds multiple
“realities” through narration that does not allow the reader to distinguish clearly
between fantasy and reality, character and author. On women and the home
front of war, see also historian Kanō Mikiyo 加納実紀代: Joseitachi no “jūgo”
(Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1987 [Expanded edition, Impact shuppankai, 1995]).
Kōno’s “Tetsu no uo” appears in vol. 14, Joseitachi no sensō, in the twenty-
volume collection Sensō to bungaku (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2012).
53
Ōta Saburō, “Sensō taiken ga tsuranuku bungaku: Kōno Taeko no sekai” 戦争
体験が貫く文学：河野多惠子の世界 Bungei 文藝 (April 1972), 218–228.
54
Kōno Taeko zenshū, vol. 1, 306. The translation here is my own.
55
Kōno Taeko, “Iron Fish” in Van C. Gessel and Tomone Matsumoto, eds., The
Shōwa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories, trans. Yukiko Tanaka
(Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1985), 362–374.
56
Okuno Takeo and Kanda Yumiko both describe Kōno as itohan, denoting
thereby her class background and regional identity simultaneously. Okuno
Takeo, “Kōno Taeko,” 240; Kanda Yumiko, “‘Sonzai’ kara ‘jidai’ e no ikō:
Kōno Taeko ron,” 117–126, esp. 118.
57
Kanda Yumiko, “‘Sonzai’ kara ‘jidai’ e no ikō: Kōno Taeko ron,” 118. See Lucy
North’s translation in Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories.
58
Kōno rarely uses dialect even when her works are set in Osaka, and Tomioka
Taeko makes clear that this is Kōno’s deliberate choice as part of her philosophy
of fiction (shōsetsukan 小説観). See Tomioka Taeko 富岡多恵子 (b. 1935) ed.,
Osaka bungaku meisakushū 大阪文学名作集 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2011), 328–9.
Consequently, whenever Kōno does use dialect to mark the traditional culture
of a place it deserves close attention.
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59
Kōno Taeko, “Full Tide,” translated in North, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories,
27–44.
60
Elsewhere I have stressed the techniques of displacement, open secrets, and red
herrings that characterize Kōno’s fiction, all of which contribute to the powerful
delayed revelatory force of her fictions’ psychological realism. See Knighton,
“The Masochist’s Masquerade.”
61
See Thomas R. H. Havens, “Women and War in Japan, 1937–1945,” The
American Historical Review 80.4 (Oct 1975): 913–934, 919, 924. The
experiences of housemother Urabe Takeyo are cited from Shufu no sensō
taikenki, ed. Izumi no Kai (Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 1965): 144, 146. Is Izumi no Kai
the publisher?
For those who lived in company dormitories, fatigue and filth were especially
demoralizing. Urabe Takeyo, a housemother in a factory lodge for twenty-five
teen-age girl workers near the campus of Keio University in Tokyo, noted how
exhausting the nightly air raids became when the great American
bombardments began in late 1944. Living so close to a noisy plant made sleep
fitful at best, and the bombings meant that rest was nearly impossible. What
was more, smoke from the coarse fuel used by the factory coated the
surroundings: “The entire neighborhood seemed black from oil.” Urabe, in
charge of having the girls’ work uniforms laundered, found that the staple fiber
(sufu) from which they were made soon tore. Near the end of the war, she
reported, clothes and bedding could no longer stand washing, and food was so
scarce that only the ubiquitous lice grew fat.
62
This emphasis can be seen in the heading for this section of their talk: “Sensō
ga ubau no wa ‘heiwa’ de wa naku ‘nichijō” (戦争が奪うのは「平和」ではな
く「日常」). See Kōno and Yamada, 55–57. The translation here is my own.
63
See Benjamin C. Duke, The History of Modern Japanese Education:
Constructing the National School System, 1872–1890 (New Brunswick, N. J.:
Rutgers University Press, 2014) on the Meiji-era Imperial Rescript on
Education and the ideologies invested in it by the politicians and Ministry of
Education policymakers who created it, including Confucian values of filial
piety and loyalty, secular ideals about education, as well as emperor worship.
However, Duke does not discuss the 1939 revision of the Imperial Rescript for
Students and Youth. See Miura Tōsaku 三浦藤作, Seishōnen gakuto ni
tamawaritaru chokugo kinkai 青少年学徒ニ賜ハリタル勅語謹解 (Tokyo and
Osaka: Tōyō tosho, 1939). See the National Diet Library (NDL) online for the
version used in 1939 by Tottori Prefecture Normal Girl’s School 鳥取県女子師
範学校 at https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1098126. Accessed 9 May 2022.
64
The Collaborative Reference Database of the NDL responded to a patron’s
question about this “prayer” and answered with several examples from local
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sources (March 13, 2007 created; August 25, 2012, last updated) of its use at
mealtimes in schools from the early 1940s in Shimane Prefecture and Machida
near Tokyo. See online: https://crd.ndl.go.jp/reference/detail?page=ref_
view&id=1000072089.
65
See Ferenc Morton Szasz, “‘Pamphlets Away’: The Allied Propaganda
Campaign over Japan During the Last Months of WWII,” The Journal of
Popular Culture 42.3 (2009): 530–540. See Herbert A. Friedman’s website
with visual images and explanation of the technology used to disseminate
PsyOps (“Psychological Operations”) leaflet propaganda, from the Pacific War
to Vietnam and Afghanistan.
66
Kōno mentions the significance of these writers in her early essays of the 1960s;
see Kōno Taeko, Bungaku no kiseki (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1974).
Kōno’s discussion with Hijiya-Kirschnereit in Joryū hōdan also mentions these
influences.
67
Erotic obsessions and violent fantasies in Kōno’s fiction construct characters’
psychological realism and, at times, rely on the supernatural itself (as in “Saigo
no toki,” translated by North as “Final Moments” in Toddler-Hunting & Other
Stories, 185–213).
68
On the ie seido, see Kathleen Uno, “Women and Changes in the Household
Division of Labor,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee
Bernstein (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991), 17–41.
69
Hirabayashi Taiko, “Blind Chinese Soldiers,” in Japanese Women Writers:
Twentieth-Century Short Fiction, trans. Noriko Mizuta Lippit (New York: M.
E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991), 41–5.
70
Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 51. The Kōno family home was burnt down in the
March air raid. See Kōno Taeko, “Kangaerarenai koto,”65–66.
71
See Yonaha Keiko chronology for Kōno in Kōno Taeko / Ōba Minako, Josei
sakka series (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1998), 426–433, as well as the
chronology in Uranishi, Kōno Taeko bungei jiten/shoshi. Born on April 30,
1926, Kōno had one older brother, Masatomi (正富, coincidently born on the
same day as Kōno herself), one older sister named Masako (政子), and a baby
brother who was two years younger. Neither sibling, nor Kōno herself, is
Masako precisely, despite the echoes heard with the first kanji character for
Masako’s name (正 masa); rather, Masako is a persona through which the
author’s life and experiences, and those of others, are refracted via the medium
of fiction.
72
Kōno describes her sense of liberation with the war’s end in words that share
much with this passage. See Kōno Taeko, “Gobu no tamashii,” Kiseki no
bungaku, 13–21. Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 74.
73
Just as with Masako in the story, Kōno’s family home was on the south side
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during the war and Kōno makes a visit there after the June bombing. See
Uranishi, Kōno Taeko bungei jiten/shoshi, 477. Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 74.
74
In the extended chronology of Kōno’s life, her birth as recounted by her mother
is described in a way remarkably similar to what Masako recalls here: “She was
born so fast it was as if she did not want me to waste any more time with
recovery in bed” (「産褥を述べる暇もありなしというほどの早さで生ま
れた」). The translation here is my own. See Uranishi, Kōno Taeko bungei
jiten/shoshi, 475. Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 74.
75
Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 83.
76
Ibid., 76.
77
Ibid., 57. Note that the children that Shinbō’s mother has might be called in
English “Irish twins,” which refers to children born within twelve months of
each other, but it has a derogatory meaning in English (used to castigate poor
Irish and Catholic immigrants as likely to have too many children); the term
used here, とし児 toshigo, however, does not have that precise negative
meaning in Japanese. That said, even in Japan siblings who are very close in
age might end up being in the same class at school and therefore be subject to
negative perceptions or rumors since they are not actual twins. That Shinbō’s
mother’s husband is at war and yet she has two infants of such a young age
close together dramatizes government policies of rewarding women for having
children while also hinting that one or both might have been born from an affair
outside marriage, perhaps with the mysterious “Konno” as a man, not a woman.
78
Kōno writes about her war experiences not just for herself but for all girls
mobilized for labor during the war (see Kōno, “Atogaki,” Tōi natsu). Hayashi
Kyōko agrees with Kawanishi Masaaki 川 西 政 明 on Kōno’s use of
autobiographical elements in her fiction. See Kawanishi Masaaki, Shōwa
bungakushi 昭和文学史 vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001), 609–619, esp. 612.
Kawanishi argues that Kōno’s fiction has its roots in her life and war but that
she erases the “I” behind her protagonists in order to attain the goal of a more
universal fiction that can speak to the experiences of others besides herself
while striving for her ideal of the literary itself in telling stories of the human
condition. See Hayashi Kyōko, “Ano sensō o dōingakuto toshite ikita jogakusei
no shi” あの戦争を動員学徒として生きた女学生の死 in Gunzō 群像 4 (2015):
222–223. The translation above of Kawanishi as cited in Hayashi’s essay is my
own.
79
These slogans and more are explored in relation to wartime policies enacted to
put women and children in the labor force while also advocating for the sanctity
of motherhood and the home. See Miyake, “Doubling Expectations.” For more
on the ie seido, see Uno, “Women and Changes in the Household Division of
Labor,” 17–41.
Mary A. Knighton |
Japanese Language and Literature | jll.pitt.edu
Vol. 56 | Number 2 | October 2022 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2022.230
517
80
Okuno draws this link to Ōe, while I add William Golding’s Lord of the Flies,
a work that while published in 1954 would only come to global prominence by
the late 1950s and early 1960s, just when Kōno Taeko was making her debut.
Okuno, 241.
81
Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 53.
82
Ibid., 53.
83
Author in private correspondence with the Kōno family, March 2022. See the
Yomiuri shinbun newspaper article Kono Taekosan owakarekai 河野多惠子さ
んお別れ会 (morning edition, March 10, 2015): 25.
84
Hirabayashi Taiko, “Seryōshitsu nite,” in Hirabayashi Taiko zenshū 平林たい子
全集 vol. 1, ed. Enchi Fumiko, et al. (Tokyo: Ushio shuppansha, 1979), 93–105.
See also Linda Flores, “Reading the Maternal Body in the Works of
Hirabayashi Taiko,” PAJLS 5 (2004): 18–32; Stephen Filler, “Hirabayashi
Taeko’s Proletarian Fiction of the Worksite,” in “Rhetoric and Region: Local
Determinants of Literary Expression,” PAJLS 14 (Autumn 2013): 214–228.
85
Hirabayashi’s protagonist will be taken to prison at the end of her stay in the
charity ward after her child’s death. In an essay entitled “Hirabayashi Taiko and
Laughter” (Hirabayashi Taiko shi to warai, 1972), Kōno writes that she once
overheard Hirabayashi claiming that her generation of women writers had too
much realism and insufficient imagination in their writing because they had had
to use their imagination more for life, just for survival. This so-called “wife
realism” (nyōbō riarizumu) is just one aspect of Hirabayashi’s
accomplishments as a writer, one that Kōno describes as “realism beyond
realism” (riarizumu ijō no riarizumu) and a transitional stage of writing unique
to Japanese women writers. As long as women’s modern literary development
runs up against their realities, as up against a wall, as long as their real
experiences remain unexpressed and outside of plausible representation, they
will come out instead in cryptic moments of silence—or, in the case of
Hirabayashi, displaced or abbreviated in inappropriate and mocking laughter.
In striking ways, Kōno’s autobiographical wartime story suggests that Kōno’s
shocking infanticides and “toddler hunting” find their precursor not only in “On
the Inside,” but in a literary “mother”: Hirabayashi Taiko. When Yamada Eimi
asks Kōno who, of all writers living or dead, she would want to talk with about
9.11, Kōno replies “Hirabayashi Taiko.” See Kōno and Yamada, 66.
86
Kōno Taeko, “Hei no naka,” 85.
87
Ibid., 83, 84–5.
88
Hayashi Kyōko, Ano sensō o dōingakuto toshite ikita jogakusei no shi, 223.