Filicide and Maternal Animosity in Takahashi Takako’s Early Fiction

Abstract

Castellini analyses representations of a maternal potential for violence in literary works by Japanese writer Takahashi Takako. He shows how Takahashi’s anti-heroines grope for words as they try to voice the darkest shades of their maternal turmoil, exposing the repeated failure of existing understandings of motherhood to translate “maternal darkness” into a realm of cultural intelligibility. Castellini foregrounds the extent to which Takahashi’s writings resonate with the rhetoric of ūman ribu and reads her early stories as the manifestation in literary form of a programmatic effort to challenge cultural prescriptions of femininity and appropriate maternal behaviour. He draws attention to Takahashi’s denunciation of the gendered violence of Japanese language and how that effects the harmful “naturalization” of a highly romanticized mother–child bond.