This chapter looks at three key works by Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Murata Sayaka and explores how these women writers reject motherhood and use vivid and often unsettling depictions of children and reproduction to challenge these conventional depictions. It also explores how the more than fifty years between Kōno’s work and Murata has had an impact on the new options for women who do not wish to become mothers.

Introduction

In the 1920s, the feminist-anarchist writer Takamure Itsue (1894–1964) argued that a woman’s sexual desire is oriented towards reproduction, while men are motivated to have sex by selfishness and greed. In keeping with this fundamental difference, Takamure concluded, female culture is based on maternal love, a love at once natural and instinctive (Ryang 1998, 10–11). Takamure’s identification of womanhood with maternity was shared by the pioneering feminist journalist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), who saw Takamure as her “spiritual daughter” (Suzuki 2010, 111) and who also saw motherhood as both central to feminine identity and predicated upon a woman’s positive relationship with her male partner (Tomida 2004, 221–41). Despite her emphasis upon maternity and maternal love, however, Takamure herself did not have any children; although she was long married, and took a number of lovers over the years, her only pregnancy ended in stillbirth (Loftus 1996, 163). Takamure’s situation was far from an isolated one. Indeed, a number of other modern Japanese women writers, including Hayashi Fumiko and Hirabayashi Taiko, equated female identity with motherhood and valorized the maternal condition while themselves remained childless. It was not until the 1960s that women writers began to actively challenge the primary role of motherhood as a harbinger of women’s maturity and a central element of their gendered identity.

In this chapter, I focus upon three of these postwar authors: Kōno Taeko (1926–2015), Takahashi Takako (1932–2013), and Murata Sayaka (1979–). All are women who became known for rejecting their predecessors’ valorization of motherhood, and all use vivid and often disturbing depictions of children and reproduction in their work to challenge prevailing definitions of womanhood.