Taeko Kono

Taeko Kōno (河野多惠子) is a Japanese writer and critic and is considered one of the most important contemporary writers of modern Japanese literature. She is best known in English for her collection of short stories Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories.

Biography
Taeko Kōno was born April 30, 1926 in Osaka, Japan to Tameji and Yone Kōno; her father was a wholesale merchant. She was ill as a child and as a teenager, she was conscripted to work in a factory during World War II.

After the war, she finished her economics degree at Women’s University (currently Osaka University), graduating in 1947. She has said that at this time "she felt a new sense of freedom and had an urge to do something, but was not sure what". She joined literary groups, eventually moving to Tokyo, Japan. She worked full-time and wrote in the evening. In 1962 "Toddler Hunting" (幼児狩り) was published and awarded the Shinchosha Prize. In the early 1960s, just before she was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for "Kani" (Crabs) (蟹) in 1963, she quit her job to focus on her writing. In 1965 she married the painter Yasushi Ichikawa. In 1967 she received the Women's Literary Prize for Saigo no koki and subsequently the Yomiuri Prize for "A Sudden Voice" (不意の声) in 1968, as well as the Tanizaki prize in 1980 for "A Year-long Pastoral" (一年の牧歌). She also received a literary prize from the Japanese Art Academy in 1984 and the Noma Literary Prize in 1991 for her novel Miiratori ryōkitan (Mummy-Hunting for the Bizarre, 1990). Kōno became popular and received critical attention after the publication of an English translation of Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories in 1996.

Literary analysis
Kōno's writing demonstrate that "underneath the seemingly normal routines of daily life, one may find hidden propensities for abnormal or pathological behavior" and that "reality and fantasy are not so clearly distinguishable from each other". Alternative sexual practices is a theme that permeates Kōno's's writing; sadomasochism, for example, appears in "Ants Swarm" (1964), "Bone Meat" (1971), and Miiratori ryōkitan and Kaiten tobira (Revolving Door, 1970) is about spouse-swapping. Kōno uses these themes to explore sexuality itself and the expression of identity. She combines these elements with illness, childlessness, and the absence of a husband to delve even more deeply into these topics.

More specifically, her writings explore "the struggles of Japanese women to come to terms with their identity in a traditional patriarchal society". Most of her female characters "reject traditional notions" of femininity and gender roles, their frustration "leads them to violent, often antisocial or sadomasochistic ways of dealing with the world". For example, in "Yōjigari", or "Toddler Hunting", one of her most famous stories, she investigates one woman's dislike of children. The protagonist, Hayashi Akiko, is repulsed by little girls but obsessed by little boys—she even imagines a little boy being beaten by his father to the extent that his innards spill out. She also takes pleasure in the sadomasochistic sex she has with her adult partner. One critic has written that the story "turn[s] the myth of motherhood on its head" while another argued that Hayashi was a representation of demonic women who threatened patriarchy itself. In Fui no koe (1968), what one critic as called a "modern woman's Hamlet", Kōno presents the story of Ukiko, whose dead father haunts her. His ghost instructs her to murder the people who are controlling her life. At the end of the story, it is revealed that all of these incidents are only taking place within her mind and she is "trying in her twisted way to bring meaning to her everyday relationships".

English translations

 * Kōno, Taeko. Toddler-hunting & Other Stories. Trans. Lucy North and Lucy Lower. New York: New Directions, 1996. ISBN 0811213919.

Kōno Taeko Kono Taeko 河野多惠子 Коно, Таэко