TODDLER-HUNTING AND OTHER STORIES
By Kono Taeko, translated by Lucy North (additional translation by Lucy Lower)
New Directions, $21.95
Reviewed by Gelareh Asayesh
Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories, the collection of short stories by Japanese author Kono Taeko, introduces American readers to one of Japan's most prominent writers. Taeko, who wrote the 10 pieces in this collection between 1961 and 1969, has won all of her country's major literary prizes for fiction.
What readers of these shocking yet poignant stories will discover is not an initiation into Japanese life and thought, however. Instead, Taeko offers a wholly original voice _ one that is deceptively matter-of-fact. Her themes, depicted through the lives of women, are universal, and Taeko presents them with extraordinary subtlety.
Taeko's narratives begin with mundane situations _ a nighttime walk, a winter vacation, a trip to the theater. But, layer by layer, dark truths are revealed: a middle-aged woman's fascination with undressing little boys; orgies of sadomasochism; a couple's foiled attempt at spouse-swapping; and sexual fantasies that involve parents obscenely abusing their children.
If there were no more to her stories than the innocuous surface hiding a rotting core, Taeko's writing would be clever, shocking and little more. But she has managed to secrete into these narratives unspoken reflections on love, betrayal and the accommodations between men and women. "She could imagine the way he would reply if she did say to him, "Please listen to me. I'm wondering now if it's a good thing that we've never had a fight,' " Taeko writes of her heroine in "Final Moments."
Taeko's characters are driven by a powerful sense of yearning. Often presented as a sexual longing, it nonetheless invokes profoundly human quests for freedom, honesty and intimacy.
In Taeko's stories, however, these longings turn in upon themselves, becoming dark and destructive. Shattering sanguine images of normalcy and femininity, Taeko reveals disturbing patterns of human bondage. "Theater" tells the story of a lonely woman separated from her husband, who becomes irresistibly drawn into a chance-met couple's sadomasochistic relationship. In "Night Journey," a middle-class Japanese couple's conventional existence hides a powerful drive toward the forbidden.
Taeko's women, by and large, share a searing loneliness. In "Toddler-Hunting," the title story, a middle-aged woman lives a solitary life except for her purely sexual liaison with a co-worker. He values her only because she enjoys being hurt as much as he enjoys hurting. When he disappoints her, she turns to her chief pleasure and consolation in life _ buying clothes for little boys, then engineering encounters in which she can watch them struggle to dress and undress.
This loneliness is undiminished by the presence of friends, lovers and family. More often than not, Taeko's women are trapped in relationships with their husbands, lovers and mothers that are complicit pacts of self-destruction. In "Snow," for example, a woman forced to raise the daughter of her husband's mistress buries her own daughter in the snow in a fit of insanity. Her husband engineers a coverup; the living daughter is given the name and age of her dead half-sister. The mother's cruelty to her adopted daughter becomes mingled with tenderness as the daughter begins to share her mother's misery _ including getting migraines on snowy days. "At first, she must have looked at her adopted daughter with pure hatred; but as time passed, as she saw how Hayako . . . shared her unhappiness, she had come to feel a certain pleasure in her _ a certain intimacy and love."
Men's callousness toward women is a recurring theme in Taeko's work. Meticulously detailing the dynamics of relationship after relationship, Taeko offers social commentary without ever ascending a soapbox.
In "Conjurer," for example, a woman betrayed by her husband incurs his displeasure when she takes it upon herself to personally deliver his payoff to his ex-mistress.
In "Bone Meat," a woman has been left by her lover. Their relationship was cemented by their mutual love of shellfish _ and the fact that he loved to eat the meat as much as she loved to eat his leftovers _ the delicate "bone meat." Now, he has left her his useless belongings, which gradually take possession of her mind.
Taeko's writing is unadorned. This makes the sensuality of her prose _ whether describing a stroll on the seashore in "Crabs," or the two lovers feasting on oysters in "Bone Meat' _ even more compelling. Full of stark contrasts and surprising depths, Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories is a work of grim beauty.
Gelareh Asayesh is a writer who lives in St. Petersburg.
