Fifty shades of Noir: female masochism and evolving male characterization as cultural critique in Kirino Natsuo’s writing

Abstract

Naoki Prize-winning writer Kirino Natsuo’s socially transgressive approaches to female sexuality have attracted both praise and consternation. Throughout Kirino’s career, she has offered a series of narratives that some have argued can be read as ostensibly validating phallocentric sexual fantasies of female masochism. However, I argue that it is through complicating these pornographic formulas of dominance and submission that Kirino ultimately channels representations of taboo sexual practices into a critique of patriarchal culture, thus subverting such narratives of sexual gratification at the expense of women’s exploitation. Her characters’ sensual indulgence can therefore be read as being truly transgressive. Indeed, the very limitations of gendered power dynamics in society are exposed through Kirino’s characters’ unsettling sexual and psychological bonds with each other. In particular, her male characters’ sadomasochistic practices serve to facilitate the female characters’ reflections on their own identities and their relationship to the patriarchal structures that surround them. To this extent, Kirino’s narratives’ deployment of sexual elements and gender relations parallel that of postwar female writers.