Pregnant Violence in Post-3.11 Fiction

Authors

  • Doug Slaymaker University of Kentucky

DOI:

https://doi.org/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.

References

Iwata-Weickgenannt, Kristina. “Gendering ‘Fukushima’: Resistance, Self-Responsibility, and Female Hysteria in Sono Sion’s Land of Hope.” In Geilhorn, Barbara, and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt. Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster. New York : Routledge, 2017.

Kimura, Aya Hirata and Yohei Katano. “Farming after the Fukushima Accident: A Feminist Political Ecology Analysis of Organic Agriculture.” Journal of Rural Studies 34 (2014).

Koikari, Mire. “Re-Masculinizing the Nation: Gender, Disaster, and the Politics of National Resilience in Post-3.11 Japan.” Japan Forum. 2017.

Masami, Yuki. Trans. Michael Berman. Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers: An Ecocritical Journey Around the Hearth of Modernity. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.

Prince, Stephen. The Horror Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 2.

Setouchi Jakuchō and Kanehara Hitomi. “Kakukoto, Ikirukoto.” Subaru 38 (9), 2016.

Sipos, Thomas M. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2010.

Sono Shion. “Kibō no kuni mada owatte inai genpatsu no mondai” [Land of Hope and the still unfinished issue of nuclear meltdown], Tsukuru 42, no. 8. September 2012.

Thouny, Christophe. “The Land of Hope: Planetary Cartographies of Fukushima, 2012.” Mechademia. Volume 10, 2015.

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Published

2020-09-25

Issue

Vol. 54 No. 2 (2020): Japanese Language and Literature

Section

SPECIAL SECTION LITERATURE

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