Wound as Allegory: Forced Incestuous Rape on the Battlefield and Takeda Taijun's Androcentric Sekai / アレゴリーとしての傷：戦場における近親レイプと武田泰淳の男性中心 的「世界」

Abstract

This article takes up the underdiscussed issue of forced incestuous rape, an act of violence and spectacle of sadism that is frequently seen in warfare. It offers an in-depth analysis of the postwar Japanese writer Takeda Taijun's 1956 short story "F**k Your Mother!" (Nanji no haha o!) by looking into the power dynamics in a rape forced between a Chinese woman and her son by Japanese imperial soldiers that the narrator of the story witnessed years before. After scrutinizing the evocative gender division in the moral crisis that the writer imagines the two victims facing during the rape, this article points out how Takeda ends up reinforcing a patriarchal structure that promises redemption for the humiliated man but sees the woman's mutilated body as nothing but waste excreted by the organic sekai (world). In such a world, since the man's ruination only means a transfer of energy from one man to another, destruction is idealized and shifted away from the ruins that communicate the possibilities of history. The article calls for a revisiting of women's unnamable wounds for a response to the decay of an existing paradigm such as Takeda's sekai.