SUBVERSIVE STRATEGIES: MASOCHISM, GENDER AND POWER IN KONO TAEKO'S "TODDLER-HUNTING".(author)(Critical Essay)

--You're a naughty boy, the father starts. I'm going to have to teach you a lesson. A crash as the father whacks the boy across the face, hard enough, it seems, to crack his small skull in two. The child crumples up in pain, staggers backwards, then bounces back to his former position. He stands, fearfully touching his cheek with one hand.

Kono Taeko, from "Toddler-Hunting," 1961

Japanese woman author Kono Taeko's (1926-) best known work is also one of her first published pieces, a 1961 short story entitled "Yojigari" ("Toddler-Hunting," 1991, 1996).(1) The story is about a thirty-something single woman who engages in masochistic sexual acts so extreme that, on one occasion, she comes close to losing her life. Perhaps more unsettling however, is the woman's recurring fantasy--a portion of which is quoted above. The fantasy, described in rich detail, focuses on the beating of a little boy. Following an extended beating involving various implements, a final blow is delivered, and "his intestines, an exquisitely colored rope of violet, slither out."(2)

As words on a page, the passage is stomach wrenching, yet it has a distinct sensuality to it; some readers even locate an odd beauty in the image. Not surprisingly, while Kono has received broad critical acclaim, it is measured as well. Since winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1963 for her short story "Kani" (translated as "Crabs," 1986, 1996),(3) her writing has, for the most part, confounded readers, causing one critic to declare that Kono's writing is too "cerebral" (kannenteki) and therefore "difficult to comprehend" (nankai).(4) Yamada Yusaku writes that although most of her works are "masterpieces," they are, at the same time, "enigmas in the literary world,"(5) while Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Selden characterize the author's work pessimistically: "In Kono's world, disease, sterility and the shadow of death deprive people of essential life-energy, and her protagonists are drawn to abnormal psychology to attain a sense of life."(6)

Given the subject of "Toddler-Hunting," critics have also looked at Kono's fiction in terms of the way it represents motherhood or the lack thereof. For instance, Van Gessel states that Kono's "sadomasochistic" fantasies are "intended as a denial of the motherly instincts within the characters."(7) Nina Langton takes a similar view, applying Nancy Chodorow's theory that women fear motherhood as an all-consuming experience and "come unconsciously and consciously to resent, fear, and feel devoured by their children." While Langton emphasizes that mothering instincts are socially constructed, and recognizes that fantasies in Kono's work are used as "a weapon wielded by a marginalized woman as a protest against the society that does not see her as a whole person,"(8) she still reads Kono's "sadistic, immoral, pathological and anti-social" fantasies as "hostility against those individuals who threaten our separateness or who dominate or control our existence ..." (Langton, 293).

Kono's use of violence, masochism, and what could best be described as an ambivalence toward children, has led a number of critics to view her as anti-feminist, or at least embracing a "false consciousness." For example, Orie Muta writes that Kono possesses a "repugnance" at her own femininity.(9) Maryellen Mori concludes:

 
   Kono's typical female characters ... totally reject conventional domestic 
   life and the traditional feminine ideal, yet deviate from feminist values 
   in their revulsion toward girls, the female body, and motherhood, their 
   glorification of the charms and revitalizing power of boys, or their taste 
   for sadomasochistic sexual practices.(10)