Toddler Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono review – sex lives of the quietly kinky
Written in the 60s, these disturbing but deft tales of Japanese women’s repressed desires are steeped in violence and masochism
John Self
Monday 24 May 2021
T
The recurring motifs are sexual violence and masochism, the protagonists women who occupy mid-century Japanese society quietly, but conceal taboo longings. “Fukuko liked physical pain during sex,” we’re told of one character; of another, “Yuko had never been able to be satisfied by ordinary sex... she would demand violent methods of arousal.”
In the title story, Akiko has an unhealthy interest in “little boys” and hates young girls, and imagines that if she had one of her own “she wouldn’t have been satisfied just being cold and harsh to her daughter: her loathing would have required more extreme measures”. A scene that follows, in which Akiko, with lip-smacking relish, imagines a child being beaten so hard that his stomach splits open, is very hard to take. So we nod when we read in Conjurer, a gruesome story of sawing a woman in half, that “the audience had simply been shown a horrible spectacle, that was all. That was not ‘magic’.”
Also, as you settle into Kono’s method, the masochism and violence become less central, and instead help to flavour the subjects, which vary from the nationalistic glorification of war (Full Tide) to satirical observations on the horror of social unease (Theater) and a sensitive exploration, in Crabs, of the psychological challenge of not knowing where to look for what you most desperately want. Kono also has a deft way with characterisation: in the opening story, Night Journey, the queasy way a husband talks about his wife’s friend (“I can’t understand why such an attractive woman isn’t married”) is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith.
In Conjurer, one character imagines being cut open and thinks: “Look, everybody. Here they are: all the deceits and tricks I was forced to hold inside.” This reflects what Sayaka Murata in her introduction calls “the universal world of perverse obsession that exists inside all of us” – and you can see Kono’s influence on Murata’s own work, such as Earthlings, with its evocations of rape and cannibalism. Valuable context is also provided in an afterword by Lucy North, who translated nine of the stories (the other is by Lucy Lower) and explains that Kono’s work builds on a Japanese interest in the mid-20th century in books by De Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as being a feminist response to writers such as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.
This understanding does not make the stories any less overwhelming to read. There’s a drum beat of dread as you turn each page, awaiting the horror that seems as inevitable as the divine retribution in a Flannery O’Connor story. The best policy is to follow the evergreen advice of Mavis Gallant. “Stories,” she wrote in 2002, “should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”
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