Sewing Wedding Dresses for Interspecies Marriage: Tomoko Kōnoike’s Reimagining of Animal Bridegroom Tales after the Tōhoku Earthquake

Abstract

Japanese artist Tomoko Kōnoike’s (1960- ) work underwent a radical transformation after the earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan (Tōhoku) on March 11, 2011, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, making it the most devastating case of a combined natural and man-made disaster in Japan. For those living in Japan, this triple disaster has posed a fundamental question regarding human beings’ relationship with nature, urging them to rethink radically the ways in which social, cultural, and economic activities have been organized and conducted at the expense of the natural environment and its nonhuman inhabitants. One of the most distinctive changes in Kōnoike’s work is to do with the representation of animals and human–animal hybrids, motifs that have been central to her work from the earliest stage. The most prominent is the motif of the wolf-girl hybrid that she has reworked in various media and that has been interpreted as a symbolic figure that transcends binary oppositions. The cultural anthropologist Shin’ichi Nakazawa, for example, claims that the wolf in Kōnoike’s early work Knifer Life (fig. 1; 2000–01) functions as the “hole” in mythological thinking that “howl[s] from the realm of the dead in the direction of our world” and “calls over the distance with a power that comes from outside the human realm” (Nakazawa 109). As I have discussed elsewhere, the wolf-girl hybrid also evokes the story of Little Red Riding Hood, suggesting the merging of the two characters conceived as antagonistic in traditional fairy tales (Murai 2015).