Toddler Hunting

by Taeko Kono

  The day the man had said that males probably shouldn’t eat too much chicken, she had deferred to him, although afterward he still brought home roast chicken any number of times. In the intervals between roast chickens, the woman sometimes fixed boiled tuna tail as before, or bought the head of a coastal sea bream and boiled it. Because of the season, that night was the last time they had oysters on the ­half shell, but during the summer they often ate abalone. The man liked the whole abalone, and seemed to enjoy begrudging the woman the least morsel. For her part, she took intense pleasure in savoring the meager flavors of the big shell itself.

  The woman had never been critical of him when they had dishes with bones or shells, because at those times he never made her anxious or brought her troubles to mind. He coveted meat even more fiercely than before, and she even more wholeheartedly savored the tiny bits of bone meat. They were a single organism, a union of objectively different parts, immersed in a dream. Sometimes both would sigh simultaneously from the excess of flavor, and then laugh so much that they had to put down the food they were holding.

  The woman, now grown thin, realized that she longed only for the taste of those dishes. It was not only herself and his belongings that the man had deserted, but that taste as well. However, her sense of taste did not yet seem to understand that it had been abandoned. When she ordered one of the old dishes with bones or shells and something else was brought out, she rejected it at once, saying “No, not that!” The woman began to wonder if this weren’t how a mother, abandoned with a young child by her husband, must feel. And like the mother, she now took pity on the young child’s unreasonableness, now scolded it, at times hugged the still uncomprehending child and cried; she even thought of killing the child and then committing suicide. Once, at her wit’s end with the unreasonableness of her own sense of taste, she raptly imagined the man to be standing just beyond the grillwork partition devouring a chicken thigh, then tearing the stripped bones apart at the joint and throwing the pieces in to her, so that suddenly she felt she heard the sound as it hit the floor. If she could be sure that she would be able to share it, she thought, she wouldn’t mind being swept along the crowded asphalt street barefoot where water streamed from the fire hoses, with only something slipped over her nightgown. Then, becoming aware of the semitransparent top drawer of the wardrobe, she stared at it, trembling. She lacked the courage to look around at the desk drawer, which of course must have become transparent, or at the little ­gauze-covered windows that must have appeared here and there in the thick paper doors.

  “You going to burn this?” The voice seemed to belong to one of the children in front of the large cooperative trash incinerator.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Give it to me!”

  “I can’t do that, I have to burn it, Throw it in, please. I’ll buy you an even fatter red pencil. That’s right — that’s the way.”

  “Are you going to burn the clothing box?”

  “The box? Yes, I am.”

  “Shall we help you?”

  “Well, thank you. But you mustn’t open it. I don’t want the contents to get scattered around. Just burn it that way.”

  “OK. Everything in here can burn, huh?”

  “Yes. Can you burn these up for me? I have a lot to bring over here.”

  “Bring all you want.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Shall we help you carry it over?”

  “Would you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  The words echoed pleasantly in her ears. It was an exhilarating feeling. Tomorrow when she awoke, she would no longer be troubled by anxiety over the semitransparent drawer or all the little ­gauze-covered windows in the thick paper doors, or whether they might be getting even worse. It was months since the woman had felt calm, and so exhilarated; the thought put her completely at ease.

  Just then, there was a knock at the door.

  “Aren’t you the one who used the incinerator today?”

  The woman realized that she hadn’t checked on how the schoolchildren who had helped her had left things, but she knew it was part of the dream, so it was all right. Trying to keep from awakening and interrupting her dream, she kept her eyes shut, the quilt pulled up around her head, as she rose and went to the door.

  “Won’t the people who use it later have a hard time? Leaving a mountain of bones that way. We’re supposed to clear out what’s left unburned. Why, there are oyster shells alone to fill a bucket.”

  To fill a bucket — what fraction of the oysters they had eaten together would that be? But there weren’t very many from that last time, so when might these shells be from?

  The siren of a fire engine wailed somewhere continuously. But what caused her dream to recede was less the siren than the words she had just heard in her dream. From the ashes of the man’s belongings, that there should be so many bones and shells! “Is that so? Is that so?” she said nodding, and the siren, to which was added a furiously ringing bell, filled her ears. Was what she had been told in the dream perhaps prophetic? The bell stopped, and just then the siren arrived blaring under her window. But the woman, her eyes closed, nodding “Is that so? Is that so?” simply snuggled deeper into the quilt as it seemed to begin to smolder.

  translated by lucy lower

  AFTERWORD

  Born in 1926, in Osaka, Taeko Kono (or, in the Japanese order, Kono Taeko) spent her youth engaged in Japan’s war effort, and her young adulthood in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat. Her childhood, twenties, and early thirties were marked by bouts of serious illness, and she had to wait years to be recognized as a writer. “Toddler-Hunting,” published in a coterie magazine in 1961, was her first story to gain wider attention. “Snow,” published in 1962, was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, which she then won in 1963 for the wonderful story “Crabs.” She went on to produce a stream of remarkable fiction, winning nearly every top literary prize in Japan, securing a place for herself at the top of the literary establishment. In the mid-1990s Kono lived for several years in New York. In 2014 she was awarded Japan’s highest culture award. She died in January 2015.

  Kono’s early stories deal with themes, ideas and images that are often troubling and repellent — fantasies of violence towards children, an interest in little boys that seems definitely unhealthy, women’s gender disaffection, and sadomasochism. And yet, as many readers have noticed, these proclivities are sewn into the underside of her protagonists’ everyday life in a way that requires us to consider their logic. Many of her stories feature the insecurity and invisibility of women who are single or who would prefer not to have children — in a society that was pervaded by an ideology of motherhood. They show a preoccupation with male-female relationships, and with the bonds that bind couples together without the presence of a child.

  Many Japanese critics have linked Kono’s themes to her wartime experiences — the assumption is presumably that such an abnormal experience was bound to leave its mark. Kono set many of her early stories either during or just after the war. She was interested in the many different kinds of trauma that war produces; and in the loss of the individual self in the collective experience. But even more than this, it’s worth considering her intellectual milieu. The interest in the novels of the Marquis de Sade and the idea of “freedom” that burgeoned in Europe among postwar existentialist philosophers and critical theorists including Simone de Beauvoir found its counterpart in Japan where the influence of the European world of letters was strong. Sade’s writing, translated by the French literature specialist Shibusawa Tatsuhiko in 1959, became the subject of an obscenity trial in Japan that spanned the 1960s. The works of the Austrian writer Leopold Sacher-Masoch were known in Japan by the early twentieth century, and Sacher-Masoch’s 1869 Venus in Furs was translated by the writer Sato Haruo into Japanese in 1957.

  Meanwhile in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s work
s of sexology proliferated, with the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior in men and women (1948 and 1953 respectively) adding to the sexual sciences that appeared in Europe in the nineteenth century (Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis, for example, was translated into Japanese in 1894) and that had greatly influenced modernist counter discourse in Japan. The writings of Sigmund Freud, early as well as late, as well as those of Theodor Reik (his 1941 Masochism in Modern Man, for example) were known in Japan soon after publication, and translated into Japanese. An intense curiosity in sexuality — and in particular what were now designated as “perverse” forms of sexuality, or hentai seiyoku — had flourished in popular magazines and sexology works in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. With increasing state censorship in the years leading up to the war, public interest in “perversity” was quashed, but after the war it revived and expanded.

  Kono was a lifelong admirer of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, a writer known for his exuberant explorations of masochism. In 1976 Kono wrote a study titled Tanizaki’s Literature and the Desire for Affirmation, in which she argued that the masochistic preoccupation in Tanizaki’s writing arose from the author’s need to affirm life, which she linked to the untimely loss of a pampered childhood. Kono’s use of the word “affirmation” in her title suggests the Nietzschean idea of affirmation of life in spite of tragedy, and a corresponding will to power.

  In many of Kono’s stories there is often a comparable kind of desire — but the optimism, the archness, the self-confidence of Tanizaki’s male masochists is missing. Kono is interested, like Tanizaki, in the link between cruelty and kindness. In Kono’s fictional world, women’s desire is linked specifically with punishment, as if the stronger the desire, the greater the need for self-annihilation. Issues of gender, and the struggle for power between men and women, who are bound together only in mutual dissatisfaction, are never far from the surface. Indeed, the master-slave dialectic pointed out by Simone de Beauvoir in her introduction to The Second Sex (first published in 1949 and translated into Japanese in 1953) is everywhere in Kono’s work.

  The pleasure that masochism promises to bring women in Kono’s stories (and her masochists are — with one exception — always women) is often broken or withheld, by a selfish, insensitive, or uncooperative man, who feels put off, outraged, emasculated, by his partner’s needs. (The single exception is Kono’s 1990 novel Miira-tori ryokitan. In this novel, a husband with masochistic tendencies trains his wife to be his torturer — to use Gilles Deleuze’s term, his ‘pseudo-sadist’ — in a manner that recalls Tanizaki’s male protagonists.) Kono co-opts themes and preoccupations that were previously seen as the territory of male writers, and gives them an uncomfortable, unexpected, and feminist, twist. Her women seem locked in their circumstances, unable or unwilling to see the “truth” about their own situation: and yet they have clear, sometimes violent, needs, dreams, and fantasies. These intense stories of obsession have a strange, disquieting beauty — and a bite. They are disturbing expressions of the 1960s, when, despite social change in Japan, an oppressive differentiation of gender roles still characterized women’s lives.

  — Lucy North

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