Manual Labor

The twenty-first century canonical pregnancy in Japan is one where from the moment of conception the incipient mother is molded internally and externally by both the medical profession and the advice manual industry. In two works, authors push back against the notion of canonical motherhood, by rejecting the idea of the mother-fetus dyad. Pregnancy they say is a social enterprise, demanding that the mother develop or strengthen bonds with her husband and family. In Kakuta Mitsuyo’s My Due Date is Jimmy Page’s Birthday (2007), she traces a conventional story of how a woman grows closer to her husband and family through her pregnancy. In Tadano Miako’s 2005 Three Year Pregnancy, her protagonist remains pregnant for three years while she works out her relationship with her husband, her mother, and finally her sister. These narratives reflect changes in Japanese society—the woman’s demand for the father’s participation in the family.

And Baby Makes One

In two narratives, created twenty-five years apart, pregnancy serves less as a process by which a new life is created, than as a process for re-making an old one, with characters drawn to pregnancy as a way to change their identity or to escape from a dead end in their lives. In the end, when their reproductive ambitions are thwarted, they are left alone trying to reinvent themselves. Tsushima Yuko’s 1978 Child of Fortune features Kōko, a single mom, who believes herself to be pregnant—a fantasy. In Hasegawa Junko’s 2002 “Unfertilized Egg,” Moriko with few career prospects and a failed affair embarks on an ill-fated quest to get pregnant, believing that motherhood will jump-start her stalled life. These similarities indicate that motherhood still equals female adulthood. Thus pregnancy is seen as a means of transformation, a proxy for intimate relationships rather than something produced by, or producing, them.

Write Your Mother

This chapter traces the literary history of Japanese women writing about pregnancy and childbirth, focusing on two key figures in this development. The first is Meiji-era poet Yosano Akiko whose works explored her experiences as an expectant mother and highlighted the unsettling aspects of pregnancy. While Yosano’s works permitted the literary treatment of formerly taboo issues, later writers rejected her lead, instead treating pregnancy as the prelude to motherhood, as a quasi-sacred moment. This persisted until the 1960s and 70s, when writers influenced by second-wave feminism challenged patriarchal society, rejecting the roles of wife and mother. The second was Tsushima Yuko, whose novels and stories explored alternative, mother-centered family models. Since then, writing about pregnancy rests on these two authors: on one side, treatments of pregnancy that emphasize the alien and the disquieting, and on the other, more ironic works, focusing upon the self-assertive and individualistic nature of childbearing.

Afterword

This chapter explores the role of women in late twentieth and twenty-first century Japan and explores how young women look at marriage and the family. Young women, often the focus of the Japanese media, are refusing to get married or have children in larger and larger numbers. This refusal is cataloged in a number of humorous books and essays by female cultural critics such as Sakai Junko, famous for her book Howl of a Loser Dog, Kusunoki Potosu who comes from the field of organic farming, and Haishi Kaori, a journalist. Using all the same demographic data, they make the case that fewer children are better for women and for Japan as a whole.

Em-bawdy-ing Pregnancy

This chapter offers a study of the iconoclastic Uchida Shungiku and her series of pregnancy manga, We are Breeding, 1994-. Uchida has become notorious in Japan not only for her willingness to expose the seamy underside of Japanese family life (chronicled in her 1993 autobiographical novel Father Fucker), but also for her own unorthodox attitudes towards marriage and child-rearing. While becoming a mother has given Uchida a platform to assail the unfairness of the patriarchal Japanese family system, she refuses to allow motherhood to define her as a woman. For Uchida, pregnancy has served as a means of self-assertion, transforming her into an avatar of Japanese post-feminism. More recently, Uchida has turned her attention from making children to raising them: her frank and often funny sex-education manga (Sex for Girls), addressed to her own daughters, attempts to provide an honest discussion about sex and the body in contemporary Japan.

Hey, You, Get Out of My Womb!

This chapter focuses on women writers who have challenged the traditional identification of pregnancy as a standard and "natural" aspect of female existence, depicting childbearing instead as a destabilizing experience and the fetus as an alien, occupying presence within the mother. Takahashi Takako's 1969 "Kodomo-sama" uses an "invasive pregnancy" trope, to chart a woman's pre-partum anxieties that her unborn child is a malevolent spirit, fears amplified by the eerie behavior of her six-year-old daughter. In Takekawa Sei's "On a Moonless Night" (1984), this alienation is explicit, as a woman's ambivalent feelings about her own adulthood elide with her irrational fear of insects to produce a gothic nightmare of impregnation by an enormous bee. Finally, Ogawa Yoko's 1991 Pregnancy Calendar chronicles the revulsion felt by a young woman about her older sister's pregnancy, which she feels compelled to destroy to prevent the parasitical fetus from upsetting her family's delicate balance.

Riding the Wave

This chapter explores the use of humor and satire, directed both at the ungainliness of the pregnant body and at the strict “rules” governing the behavior of pregnant women. In the works examined here pain and discomfort are represented explicitly, but also humorously, to emphasize the pregnant woman's subjectivity and acknowledge the complex emotions of pregnancy and childbirth. After considering Ito Hiromi’s quasi-pregnancy advice manual, Yoi oppai, warui oppai (1985), in which she writes about her own pregnancy and childbirth and pushes the boundaries of language, both poetic and mundane, the chapter explores the Go-Shussan! manga series written by female manga writers from 1998 onward. This new visual and emotional vocabulary for the pregnant subject comes not only from the personal insights of the artists but also to the creative re-deployment of the sexually explicit tropes and images of the "Ladies Comics" genre in which each woman first started.