Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Seaman Amanda C.;

Author:Seaman, Amanda C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fuyuko removed Midoriko’s long, dark, luxurious hair, the emblem of her beauty and sense of entitlement, and with this simple act performed a symbolic yet equally drastic act of castration. In cutting off her sister’s hair, she has asserted her own emotional independence from her sister and, by extension, from her jealously protective matriarchal family, marking her emergence as an autonomous agent in charge of her own life. With this final transformation, Fuyuko’s journey is complete. At a gathering that includes the newly shorn Midoriko and Kai-kun, Fuyuko passes out, and her family rushes her to the hospital. Refusing his wife’s earlier instructions, Toru insists that the doctor save her rather than the baby if any complications arise. These contingency plans prove unnecessary, however: when Fuyuko awakes, it is to the sight of her smiling husband, a curious toddler seated on his lap.

In an interview with the literary magazine Yuriika, Tadano suggested that the idea to write a novel about an unusually long pregnancy stemmed from observing the helpless state of human babies at birth. What, she wondered, would happen if our babies were like horses or elephants, able to stand and walk soon after they were born? Given the slow physical maturation of human beings, she realized, they would have to spend three years in the womb before attaining the skills of their animal counterparts.26 It is notable, however, that Tadano’s premise has a much longer pedigree, with roots in Japanese literature (intended or otherwise) going back at least six centuries. The earliest and best-known story of an unusually long gestation involves the monk-warrior Benkei, first mentioned in the Tale of the Heike as the traveling companion of the twelfth-century general Minamoto no Yoshitsune. In the fifteenth-century Gikeiki (Chronicle of Yoshitsune), Benkei was said to have remained in his mother’s womb for eighteen months, at which point he emerged “as big as most children of two or three,” with hair to his shoulders and a full set of teeth, to the chagrin of his Buddhist abbot father who tried unsuccessfully to have him killed.27

An unnaturally long pregnancy also features in the Edo-era ghost story Tanba kunihashi ritsu Shuzen (Shuzen from Tanba Kunihashi), which tells the story of a woman (Okiku) pregnant for two years. Upset at her failure to give birth, the stepmother of her husband (Shuzen) had her banished. Okiku was stopped from drowning herself by a passing boatman, who married her. On the third day of the third year of her pregnancy, the baby called to her from her womb, insisting that it be born in its father’s house. Upon her return there, Okiku was beheaded by her stepmother and a serving maid; the child then emerged from her neck wound and was snatched away by its mother, who now had turned into an ubume.28 More recently, the novelist and folklorist Kyogoku Natsuhiko has mined these traditional tales about unnatural pregnancies in his Ubume no natsu (Summer of the ubume); there, an exorcist-cum-detective discovers that the missing

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