Pregnant Violence in Post-3.11 Fiction

Doug Slaymaker

doi:10.5195/jll.2020.93

Abstract

This essay explores the violence and the threat of violence associated with pregnancy in Japanese fiction after the triple disasters—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown—of March 11, 2011. There is hardly a female character in this fiction that is not confronted with questions about pregnancy and childbirth. The queries are surely motivated by genuine concern about the humans involved, but they are just as often about control, about a woman’s body as a public item, about responsibility to the child, and then to society at large. Childbearing in a disaster zone is profoundly anxiety-producing; but it is also worth examining how quickly childbirth, and then women’s bodies, become at times metaphor and at times synecdoche, for the trauma and fears of the entire society, in these works. In this article I consider Sono Shion’s Kibō no kuni, Kanehara Hitomi’s Motazaru mono, Taguchi Randi’s Zōn ni te, Kimura Yūsuke’s Seichi Cs, and Furukawa Hideo’s Uma tachi yo, sore demo muku de.

Highlights

The Tohoku disasters of March 2011 figure like a black hole, a whirling vortex that threatens to suck all into its center, to wipe and leave blurred, to leave a smudge across the frame of existence, distort and render unreadable the lines of experience
It is a classic horror film scenario: there is an impending threat, one that grows in intensity, one that haunts every crevice, threatens to crawl in and back out of every orifice and pore, one that is inescapable, one that works by a different physics, one that follows different conceptions of time, and one that cannot be sensed
When the narrator of Kimura’s Seichi Cs comes across the corpse of a cow that had been left in the field, she finds that “its anus gaped open like a cave

Summary

Introduction

The Tohoku disasters of March 2011 figure like a black hole, a whirling vortex that threatens to suck all into its center, to wipe and leave blurred, to leave a smudge across the frame of existence, distort and render unreadable the lines of experience.

Results

Conclusion