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Children of the anti-world: confrontations between children and adults in the fiction of Kurahashi Yumiko

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Children of the anti-world: confrontations between children and adults in the fiction of Kurahashi Yumiko

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CHILDREN OF THE ANTI-WORLD:
CONFRONTATIONS BETWEEN CHILDREN AND ADULTS IN THE FICTION OF
KURAHASHI YUMIKO

by
Michael Day

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Michael Day

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Chapter 1: Introduction
About the Author and This Project 1
Denial 8
Oneness 21
Sanctification 34

Chapter 2: Translations
The Holy Family 49
We Are All Friends 56
The Children Who Played Butcher 82

Works Consulted 85

Appendix: Translations of Kurahashi’s Works into English 90

iii

Abstract

Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-2005) is a Japanese female author whose works of
experimental fiction consistently question or negate literary and social norms.
Kurahashi’s stated intent as an author is to create an “anti-world” in which morality and
immorality, being and nothingness, clarity and obscurity are unified. To this end, she
makes frequent use of the motif of children in confrontation with the conventions of the
adult world. In Chapter 1, I explore this theme extensively. In Chapter 2, I present in
English translation three Kurahashi stories which make use of this theme: “The Holy
Family” [“Seikazoku”] (1985), “We Are All Friends” [“Aiko-tachi”] (1965) and “The
Children Who Played Butcher” [“Kodomo-tachi ga butagoroshi o mane shita hanashi”]
(1984). It is hoped that the combination of the preface and the translations will shed new
light on a body of work which is unique in both Japanese and world literature.

1

Chapter 1: Introduction

About the Author and This Project

In a 1966 essay entitled “The Labyrinth and Negativity of Fiction” [“Sh ōsetsu no
meiro to hiteisei”], Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-2005) asserts that her ideal novel is one in
which, at “an uncertain time, in a place that is nowhere, somebody who is no one, for no
reason, is about to do something – and in the end does nothing”
1
(286). Elsewhere,
Kurahashi has used the term “anti-world” to refer to such a setting, and has stated that her
intent is to write an “anti-novel.”
2
Her fiction is interesting and valuable exactly because
it reaches boldly into the unknown and valiantly attempts to give form to nothingness.
Kurahashi’s approach to writing fiction stands in clear opposition to established
literary norms. “My novels,” she says, “are like a ‘cancer’ that parasitically attacks,
devours, and destroys the orthodox, old type of novel” (“Sh ōsetsu no meiro to hiteisei”
285). Her fiction denies, rejects, and negates, but she “sanctifies” these reductive acts
with the force of her imaginative will. Kurahashi’s body of work is a frightening and
awe-inspiring testament to the authentic powers of unrestrained human creativity.

1
Here, I am making use of the English translation provided in Dennis Keene, Introduction, “To Die at the
Estuary,” by Kurahashi Yumiko, trans. Dennis Keene, Contemporary Japanese Literature, ed. Howard
Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1977) 247-81. Keene translates just a few lines of the essay; the other
translations presented throughout this introduction are my own.

2
See Kurahashi Yumiko, “Hansh ōsetsuron,” Meiro no Tabibito (Tokyo: K ōdansha, 1972) 9-120.
2

But the imagination can only express itself fully when worldly restrictions are
transcended. To this end, Kurahashi glorifies antisocial behavior which defies popular
morality. Many of Kurahashi’s works depict children who attack or deny the conventions
of the adult world, just as her own fiction “attacks, devours, and destroys” traditional
approaches to literature. This introduction attempts to explain why Kurahashi is so
attracted to the theme of the tension between the adult world and the world of children, to
place this theme within her body of work, and to explain why it is the perfect subject for
an “anti-novel” which gives tangible form to unknowable nothingness.
I will make extensive reference to three stories, “The Holy Family” [“Seikazoku”]
(1985), “We Are All Friends” [“Aiko-tachi”] (1965), and “The Children Who Played
Butcher” [“Kodomo-tachi ga butagoroshi o mane shita hanashi”] (1984). All three
exemplify Kurahashi’s ideal of the “anti-novel.” All three depict children and adults
engaged in a struggle to define each other, to know the unknowable, to achieve total
knowledge, to exist in the purest possible sense. As none of these works have previously
been available in English, they are presented here in translation. It is hoped that the
combination of this introduction and the translations will shed new light on a body of
work which is unique in both Japanese and world literature.

*

3

Kurahashi was born in 1935 in K ōchi, Shikoku.
3
Her father was a dentist, and he
expected her to take up this line of work as well. She was licensed as a dental hygienist,
but never went into practice. Instead, without her parents’ knowledge or consent, she
applied and was admitted to the French department at Meiji University, where she wrote
her graduation thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Kurahashi’s short story “Partei” [“Parutai”] was nominated for the prestigious
Akutagawa Prize in 1960, while she was still a student, and critic Hirano Ken, who
“discovered” Ōe Kenzabur ō, praised her work in the prominent Tokyo newspaper
Mainichi Shimbun. The following year, Kurahashi’s story “The End of Summer” [“Natsu
no owari”] was nominated for the prize. Again, it failed to win, but the exposure made
Kurahashi famous. Kurahashi continued to write stories, novels, and essays throughout
the 1960s; her important novels from this period include Blue Journey [Kurai tabi] (1961),
which strongly echoes Michel Butor’s La Modification,
4
and The Saint Girl [Seish ōjo]
(1965), which deals with the themes of paternal and fraternal incest. From 1966-7, she
studied at the University of Iowa on a Fulbright scholarship. It has been observed that

3
In composing this biographical sketch of Kurahashi, I have drawn upon Atsuko Sakaki’s dissertation The
Intertextual Novel and the Interrelational Self: Kurahashi Yumiko, A Japanese Postmodernist, Chieko I.
Mulhern’s Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, and Sachiko Shibata Schierbeck and
Marlene R. Edelstein’s Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th Century.
4
There was an extensive debate regarding whether Kurahashi deliberately plagiarized from Butor. This is
referred to as the Kurai Tabi rons ō (“Blue Journey Debate”). Critic Et ō Jun made the accusation of
plagiarism in the prominent newspaper Tokyo Shimbun, and Kurahashi was forced to respond by
articulating her views on pastiche and literary borrowing. For a detailed discussion of the debate in English,
see the first chapter of Atsuko Sakaki, The Intertextual Novel and the Interrelational Self: Kurahashi
Yumiko, A Japanese Postmodernist (Diss. University of British Columbia, 1992).
4

from this point forward, Kurahashi began to exhibit at least a mild interest in literary
realism, though still in the context of her own unique vision, and that her works began to
incorporate elements of world mythology (Mulhern 199). She wrote very little in the
1970s, but with the publication of A Castle Within a Castle [Shiro no naka no shiro] in
1979, she resumed literary production and wrote prolifically until her death in 2005.
Kurahashi is particularly recognized for her short story collection Cruel Fairy Tales for
Adults [Otona no tame no zankoku d ōwa] (1984), which retells myths and fairy tales
from around in the world in a grotesque and erotic fashion.
Despite failing to win the Akutagawa prize, Kurahashi received a number of
literary awards throughout her career, including the Meiji Daigaku gakuch ō sh ō [Meiji
University President’s Prize] in 1960, the Jory ū bungaku sh ō [Women’s Literature Prize]
in 1961, the Tamura Toshiko shō [Tamura Toshiko Memorial Prize] in 1987, and the
Tokubetsu k ōr ō sh ō [Lifetime Achievement Award], which was awarded to her
posthumously by Meiji University in 2006. Kurahashi won over a number of critics,
particularly with her earlier short stories, and also made a number of enemies, who have
accused her of plagiarism, immorality, and superficiality (Sakaki 42). Since Kurahashi’s
death in 2005, several of her most important works, including her early novels Blue
Journey and The Saint Girl, have been reprinted, and it would appear that her literary
legacy is in the midst of reevaluation. Sakuraba Kazuki, winner of the 2008 Naoki Prize,
one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, comments that The Saint Girl is the most
5

important sh ōjo novel ever written in Japan.
5
The work for which Sakuraba won the prize,
Watashi no otoko [My Man], exhibits the clear and overt influence of The Saint Girl;
both works place at the forefront an incestuous relationship between a father and a
daughter. Here and elsewhere, Kurahashi’s work continues to influence a new generation
of authors.
Despite several significant critical works on Kurahashi, the most thorough being
the Japanese language Kurahashi Yumiko-ron and Atsuko Sakaki’s English language
dissertation The Intertextual Novel and the Interrelational Self: Kurahashi Yumiko, A
Japanese Postmodernist, the body of scholarship on Kurahashi remains sparse. To date,
exactly four English language academic theses have been written on Kurahashi.
6
Several
other texts, including Susan Napier’s The Fantastic in Japanese Literature, have discussed
Kurahashi’s work in the context of a larger argument or have included chapters about her.
Two book-length English translations of Kurahashi’s work, The Adventures of
Sumiyakist Q (a 1969 novel translated by Dennis Keene) and The Woman With the
Flying Head (a collection of short stories translated by Atsuko Sakaki) have appeared to
date.

5
See Sakuraba’s commentary included in the 2008 edition of The Saint Girl. Sh ōjo literally means “girl,”
and a sh ōjo novel is simply a novel for or about girls (which would ordinarily be regarded as entertainment
and not “pure literature”). There is probably some irony in this comment, because the heroine of The Saint
Girl thoroughly denies the social and sexual norms which govern a young woman’s behavior, and it seems
clear that the intent of the novel is not to “entertain” the reader in the conventional sense.
6
Not including theses which mention Kurahashi, but do not deal exclusively with her work.
6

The most significant and useful critical approaches to Kurahashi’s work are found
in two of the works I have mentioned above: Sakaki’s The Intertextual Novel and the
Interrelational Self and Napier’s The Fantastic in Japanese Literature. Sakaki argues that
Kurahashi can be classified as a postmodernist, asserting that “Kurahashi’s novels unite
two presently popular fields of critical inquiry” – that is, performative femininity and
performative or intertextual writing – “and may be illuminated by reference to
poststructuralist critical texts” (22). In The Fantastic in Japanese Literature, Susan Napier
argues that Kurahashi’s work may be classified as fantasy according to Napier’s modified
version of a definition of the genre put forth originally by Kathryn Hume: “fantasy is any
conscious departure from consensus reality” (9). According to Napier, Kurahashi’s work
also fits into the trend toward subversive, “anti-realist,” anti-modern Japanese fiction.
Other authors Napier sees as exemplifying this trend include Natsume S ōseki, Izumi
Ky ōka, Murakami Haruki, and Abe K ōbō. It seems to me that both approaches are valid;
in her attempts to create texts which cannot be definitively interpreted, which deliberately
avoid presenting concrete solutions to problems, Kurahashi does seem to sympathize with
poststructuralist concerns, and she also consistently uses fantasy as a means of negating
“consensus reality,” as will become apparent in the course of this discussion.
It is not my intent to definitively categorize Kurahashi’s literary or philosophical
stance. In fact, it could be said that one of Kurahashi’s primary aims is to deny the
significance of such categories. As she puts it, “When speaking about what kind of novels
7

I write, it is necessary above all else to discuss what my novels ‘are not’” (“Sh ōsetsu no
meiro to hiteisei” 285). Yet perhaps the reason Kurahashi takes such a consistently
negative stance toward literary, social, and behavioral norms is because, as Sartre puts it,
“to posit the world as world and to ‘nihilate’ it are one and the same thing” (The
Imaginary 184). To avoid the trap of this negativity, Kurahashi negates the world.
As I will show, Kurahashi has been deeply influenced by European existentialism,
and an understanding of its basic tenets will serve to illuminate her thematic concerns
(Schierbeck 168). Throughout this introduction, I will make repeated reference to Jean-
Paul Sartre and Jean Genet. In particular, when Genet writes, “Repudiating the virtues of
your world, criminals agree hopelessly to organize a forbidden universe,” he makes the
link between his own treatment of criminal behavior and Kurahashi’s concept of the anti-
world impossible to overlook (The Thief’s Journal 5). But above all else, Kurahashi’s
fiction privileges freedom from fixed interpretive and ideological approaches. In her
thorough negation of all types of established norms, Kurahashi is completely honest with
the reader about what she sees as the ultimately incomprehensible dilemma at the core of
human existence: that of unknowable, absolute freedom. I know of no other author who
stares so boldly into this frightening nothingness, and I hope this thesis will contribute
positively to the reevaluation of Kurahashi’s work.

8

Denial

First, I will return to the concept of denial, to the idea that “to posit the world and
to ‘nihilate’ it are one and the same thing” (The Imaginary 184). The reality is that
negating the world also involves negating oneself, and all three stories demonstrate this in
one way or another.
“The Holy Family” begins with a denial: “I think that maybe our father and
mother are aliens. No, not just maybe, says my brother – they’re aliens, no doubt about it.
Anyway, he says, the two creatures we saw that night were definitely not humans”
(111).
7
This is perhaps a common sentiment among children, yet here, the negation of
similarity is carried to extremes. Theoretically, there should be no one closer to a child
than his or her mother and father, but in this family, the reality (or the perception of
reality) is very different.
The children have reached this conclusion upon witnessing their parents in the
midst of a sexual act which is likewise described by them as unnatural and inhuman. This
is what the children see when they peer inside their parents’ bedroom on a sleepless night:

Our father and mother were locked in an embrace. Even I knew that couples did
this sort of thing, but knowing something and seeing it in reality are completely
different. They held each other’s naked bodies, and that was all, but the shape

7
Citations of the original language version of “The Holy Family” are made from Kurahashi Yumiko,
“Seikazoku” [“The Holy Family”], Kurahashi Yumiko no kaikish ōhen [Strange Tales by Kurahashi
Yumiko], (Tokyo: Shinch ōbunko, 1985) 109-17.
9

they formed was so complicated that it was impossible to explain what was going
on, as if the two of them had transformed into a single ghostly spider with eight or
more arms and legs. This big, white-skinned spider, its arms and legs tangled up
with each other, squirmed into and out of various shapes. (113)

This is an excellent example of the literary technique referred to by Viktor
Shklovsky as “enstrangement.” The purpose of enstrangement “is not to draw our
understanding closer to that which this image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive
the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere
recognition” (10). Enstrangement “changes [the form of something] without changing its
essence” (6). To Shklovsky, enstrangement makes an object unfamiliar so that the reader
may appreciate it anew. Enstrangement is what distinguishes art from factual description.
Kurahashi, however, so thoroughly “enstranges” that it is impossible for the
reader to appreciate the reality that underlies the description. Her intent is not to
illuminate facts but to obscure them, to bring the reader further from and not closer to the
act described. This is a consistent aim of Kurahashi’s fiction. As Sakaki notes,
“Kurahashi declares that she does not use words as ‘tools for communication,’ but writes
novels and stories with poetic words which are rather ‘an objective in themselves’”
(Sakaki 6). In this case, parents are transformed into aliens, and an act of pleasure
transgresses the ordinary boundaries of the human form. It should be noted that this is
occurring from the viewpoint of the children, unreliable narrators by definition,
8
and that

8
In her essay “The Anti-Novel” [“Hansh ōsetsuron”] (1972), Kurahashi points out, “It should be obvious
that literature is a task for mature humans, and if this is so, then literature by children is an oxymoron. Put
simply, children cannot write literature” (30). Kurahashi is asserting that while her intent is to write fiction
that escapes from the adult world, this can only be done from an adult’s perspective. In other words, an
10

Kurahashi avoids condemning or endorsing their view. In other words, her aim is not to
clarify the issue, but to confuse it, to present and not to resolve a problem.
After the children describe the grotesque scene they have witnessed, there is a
shift in narration, and the second half of the story is told from the father’s perspective.
The father is aware that he and his wife have been seen by their children. He asks a
psychiatrist friend what measures he should take. The psychiatrist tells him this is a case
of “the primal scene” as described by Freud;
9
the children have suffered trauma upon
witnessing their parents in the midst of pleasure. This diagnosis offers a comforting sense
of definition much like that the children must have gained upon concluding that their
parents were aliens, but it does not offer a concrete solution to the problem. In fact, the
psychiatrist admits that there is no cure for the trauma of the primal scene.
At this point, I would like to briefly examine Kurahashi’s views on
psychoanalysis, to the extent that they can be determined. It is clear that Kurahashi is
familiar with psychoanalytic theories, as several are specifically referenced in “We Are
All Friends” and other stories, but it is less clear whether she accepts these theories as
plausible explanations for human behavior. Kurahashi mentions psychoanalysis in her

anti-novel is not a nonsensical novel – it is a self-aware, consciously produced attack on reality which is
necessarily performed by an adult.
9
Freud first describes the primal scene in From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. Freud determines that
a patient’s severe obsessional neurosis, which manifests itself most disruptively as a dream in which
wolves threaten the patient from a tree outside his window, is rooted in his experience of the primal scene.
At the age of about one and a half, the patient glimpsed his father and mother in the midst of pleasure. He
did not understand the scene and his father’s posture suggested to him that of the wolf in the fairy tale “The
Wolf and the Seven Little Goats.” Wolves came to terrify the patient because he associated them with the
confusion and terror he felt when he witnessed the primal scene.
11

essay “The Anti-Novel” [“Hansh ōsetsuron”] (1972), pointing out that it resembles other
narrative techniques in that it “provides explanations and attempts to deconstruct the
whole into its constituent parts” (23). She cites a passage from the Ise monogatari [Tales
of Ise]
10
and discusses its psychoanalytic implications. It is safe to conclude that
Kurahashi sees psychoanalysis as a useful approach toward literature. However, she
points out that psychoanalysis can turn people into “automaton[s]” and that “a pure
psychological novel would resemble nothing so much as a financial analysis report” – in
other words, that it would cease to function as literature (“Hansh ōsetsuron” 33).
Kurahashi clearly feels that the Freudian approach has its limits, and it is difficult to say
whether the mention of psychoanalysis in “The Holy Family” is intended as a
condemnation. Perhaps it could be said that Kurahashi appreciates psychoanalysis as a
kind of fiction, that she is interested in it in the same way and for the same reasons she is
interested in a child’s belief that his or her parents might be aliens.
In any case, the father makes the decision to spy on his children at night as they
have spied on him, and he witnesses them in the midst of what is apparently a bizarre act
of incest:

Their bodies had completely transformed (all that remained is what
appeared to be their faces, so it was possible to tell them apart from each other),
bringing to mind a sea cucumber. Ken was inside Yuko like a sword in a sheath –
or maybe it would better to say that the two of them resembled a partly peeled
banana. Their arms and legs had shrunk to the size of fins.

10
A Heian period collection of tanka poems and prose narratives. See Helen Craig McCullough, Tales of
Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968).
12

These were not humans. If the word "monster" is out of favor, then I will
have to refer to them as “aliens.” (116-7)

An event has taken place which cannot be described in ordinary human language,
and the father can only give it definition through obtuse metaphors. To rid himself of
anguish,
11
he denies his own children, characterizing them as aliens. The utter lack of
warmth in the familial relationships depicted here should be noted. The father actually
discusses killing his own children to resolve his uncertainty: “In the worst case, I might
have to consider disposing of them with my own hands” (117). In an essay entitled “A
Mother is a Goddess” [“Hahaoya wa joshin de aru”] (1969), Kurahashi discusses the
complications of bringing up an “other” which is yet produced from one’s own flesh,
noting, “to a mother, the fact that she has birthed a child itself becomes a sort of
unavoidable original sin, and to erase this, she is forced to eliminate her child from the
world” (393). In other words, the only way to definitively resolve the unanswerable
question “who are you?” (“are you me, or are you you?”) which one might ask toward
one’s own child is to eliminate the child entirely, although it should be pointed out that
this solution fails to solve the problem of anguish which itself never actually existed in
the concrete sense.

11
I am using this word in the existential sense. Writes Sartre, “Man first exists: he materializes in the world,
encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself… He will not be anything until later, and then he
will be what he makes of himself” (Existentialism is a Humanism 22). Anguish is the struggle to decide
what to do with absolute freedom and absolute uncertainty. Anguish is not equivalent to fear, though it
could be said that anguish is associated with fear of the undefined or the unknown.
13

In “The Holy Family,” children and their parents attempt to define each other as
outsiders, to achieve self-definition through denial of the other, and the story proceeds
from the assumption that each view relies upon the other, that an affirmation anticipates
and brings about a denial. This is what Sartre is referring to when he says:

Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him
as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is
trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other
seeks to enslave me. (Being and Nothingness 364)

At the end of the story, in order to distance themselves from the problem, the
parents engage in what is by any definition a very bizarre sexual act (the third depicted in
the story), resulting in the man growing a number of “psuedopods” and his wife sprouting
“more than sixteen nectar-filled cavities” (117). The human relationships here, if the
parties involved are in fact humans, clearly oppose sexual and social norms. In “The Holy
Family,” Kurahashi depicts an existential crisis in which denial overcomes affirmation, in
which children and their parents exist on opposite sides of a chasm of negativity and
emotional coldness.

“We Are All Friends” also depicts parents in a struggle with a child whose
behavior escapes clear definition and their control. At the beginning of the story, Aiko, a
“shy, serious-minded, eighteen year-old” girl, suffers a mysterious attack resembling an
14

epileptic seizure (73).
12
The rest of the story details the attempts of the adult world to
define Aiko’s illness, to control her “insanity,” to give definition to her essentially
indefinable nature.
First, I will discuss Aiko’s parents, who, like the mother and father in “The Holy
Family,” behave coldly toward their daughter and toward each other. The family does not
eat meals together. The father is preoccupied by a sexual perversion whose nature is not
explicitly defined in the story, but he keeps what is by all indications a wooden phallus
(“an unnamable, life-size wooden thing”) hidden inside his desk drawer (74). This is part
of a “collection” of similar items, but it is unclear what they are or what exactly is done
with them.
Works by Karl Marx, such as Grundrisse and Das Kapital,
13
are placed atop the
father’s desk at all times, perhaps to distract the observer from the collection secreted
within. Despite the father’s assertion that “‘all economists except Marx are frauds,’” he
does not seem to take Marxism seriously – at least not seriously enough to get rid of the
family’s servant girl, or to turn down his university’s offer of a car and driver to serve his
family (84). Again, the father’s public definition of himself is basically a denial of reality.

12
Citations of the original language version of “We Are All Friends” are made from Kurahashi Yumiko,
“Aiko-tachi” [“We Are All Friends”], Kurahashi Yumiko zensakuhin [Complete Works of Kurahashi
Yumiko], Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Shinch ōsha, 1975) 71-89.
13
Marx wrote Grundrisse as a series of seven notebooks from 1857-61 when he was in the midst of a
decade-long study of economics. He never intended the notebooks for publication. Das Kapital is, of course,
Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism which asserts exploitation of labor as its driving force. The first
volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867.
15

He is not a sincere Marxist, nor is he even a sincere pervert, since he does not fully
commit to and take public responsibility for his vice, whatever it is.
At this point, I would like to briefly discuss Kurahashi’s views on Marxism – to
determine whether she believes it is even possible to be a sincere Marxist, and to gain an
understanding of the role of Marxist ideology in her work. A reader need look no further
than her celebrated story “Partei” [“Parutai”] (1960), in which a woman makes detached
observations on the communist party which she considers joining, but ultimately does not,
to clarify her views. The story’s plot fulfills in literal terms the premise of the anti-novel,
in which “somebody who is no one, for no reason, is about to do something – and in the
end does nothing” (“Sh ōsetsu no meiro to hiteisei” 286). A decision on the heroine’s part
to join the party clearly would not fulfill the condition that the protagonist “in the end
does nothing,” but she remains unattached to any ideological structure and the premise is
thus fulfilled. The heroine is a heroine because she accepts and enacts freedom.
Kurahashi also asserts:

If it is the case that there are many ideological flags in the world – here Marxism,
there Maoism – and that people are required to swarm beneath one of them in
order to continue living, then a person cannot help but embrace one or more
ideologies. […] People should be able to walk freely among this assemblage of
flags without believing in ideologies. (“Hansh ōsetsuron” 14)

As well, Kurahashi’s novel The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q [Sumiyakisuto Q no
bōken] (1969) is “a satire on radicals and their futile efforts to incite revolution”
(Schierbeck 169). The protagonist Q, who subscribes to a fictional revolutionary
16

philosophy called Sumiyakism which greatly resembles Marxism, attempts to foment
revolution among a group of children at a reformatory, but utterly fails to win them over.
To the very end, the children remain hostile elites. They do nothing, believe nothing, and
are nothing, except in Q’s mind. Though physically bound by a system that controls their
behavior (while making absolutely no attempt to actually reform them), they are
spiritually and psychologically free, while the adults are enslaved by various ideologies
and perversions.
14

While her father is preoccupied with an ideology Kurahashi regards as a trap,
Aiko is an elite who successfully avoids definition by the adult world. It could be said
that Aiko’s “illness,” which resembles multiple personality disorder
15
but which could in
fact be “simulated psychosis,” is an attempt on her part to achieve a certain kind of
freedom from the restrictive expectations of her parents, while proving a source of great
embarrassment to them. Of course, Aiko’s parents wish to deny her this freedom, and it
could be said that this is the reason they take her to the mental hospital. When the doctors

14
A brief review of the preoccupations of some of the adult staff at the reformatory: Q is enslaved by
Sumiyakism; Q’s roommate F, a theologian, flagellates himself; the rector of the reformatory enjoys being
shaved all over by his wife, who has castrated him to make the task easier; a character named the Doktor
sodomizes his “patients”; etc.
15
“Insanity corresponds to aberrations in the stability of language. As insanity advances, so does a
breakdown in language, so that patients in the final stages of multiple personality disorder, for instance,
cease to be animals which use language. In other words, they cease being social animals, and humans in
this state become beast-like creatures toward whom the word ‘human’ no longer seems to apply, so that no
words are permitted to accompany their insanity. At this point, literature disappears as well”
(“Hansh ōsetsuron” 34). It would seem that Kurahashi’s intent in depicting Aiko’s multiple personality
disorder in this story is to illustrate such a breakdown and to assert it as its own solution, at least in the
context of the anti-world depicted in the story.
17

apply their medical standards and arrive at the conclusion that Aiko might have catatonic
schizophrenia, Aiko’s mother responds in a manner that exposes her fixations:

“But not even one person in our family has ever had that illness.”
Aiko’s father was fifty-two years old, a professor at ____ University; her
mother was forty-five, a graduate of ____ Women’s College; her eldest brother
was a teaching assistant at the same university as her father; her younger brother
was studying abroad; her father’s eldest brother was the president of ____
University; her mother’s older brother was the president of ____ Bank… (74)

Not in my family, Aiko’s mother insists. The worldly structures in which the family
participates insulate it from such outlandish disruptions as “catatonic schizophrenia.” In
order to uphold this definition of herself and her family, Aiko’s mother is forced to deny
her daughter’s illness.
When the decision is made to commit Aiko to a mental hospital, her mother
ensures the family’s driver is kept ignorant about their true destination. The driver is told
that they are going for a swim at a public beach. When her mother steps out for a moment,
Aiko informs the driver that they are actually going to a mental hospital and that she is
the patient, tricking him into leaving for the hospital without her mother. It could be said
that Aiko is the only member of the family who has no secrets.
Later in the story, when Aiko escapes from the mental hospital and is recaptured
by the police, her mother refuses to take any responsibility for her. It is her doctor, Dr.
Miki, who goes to the police station to claim her. And when Aiko is at last released from
the hospital, she immediately attempts suicide. Dr. Miki rushes to her home to see her,
but Aiko’s mother tells him:
18

“Aiko took a few too many sleeping pills, that’s all. By no means was she
trying to commit suicide. Aiko would never do something so disgraceful. But if
word were to get out – well, that would cause problems. So please, I ask you,
don’t think too hard about it.” (87)

Though Dr. Miki insists that Aiko’s intent was certainly to commit suicide and that she is
still in grave danger, Aiko’s mother is more concerned with keeping the incident under
wraps. Thus, all parties except Aiko – and possibly Dr. Miki – are engaged in fervent
denial of reality. And this denial is accomplished through definition, through labeling: not
me, and not my family.

“The Children Who Played Butcher” once again depicts the adult world
struggling against threatening behavior on the part of children. This is, in part, a retelling
of a fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm in their collection Kinder-und
Hausmharchen.
16

Two brothers witness their father slaughtering a pig, and when their father steps
out, they decide to imitate the killing. The older boy uses a knife to slice open the
younger boy’s throat. Their mother witnesses this scene, goes half-insane, and kills the
older boy. Meanwhile, her baby drowns to death in a tub full of water. In despair, the
mother hangs herself. When the father comes home, he glimpses the terrible scene and

16
Though included when the collection was first published, the tale was stricken from subsequent editions.
See “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete
Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam, 2003) 101-3.
19

immediately dies of a heart attack which is apparently brought on by shock. Some other
children repeat the gruesome butcher game, and the whole town explodes into an uproar.
The remaining portion of the tale, which describes the attempts of the adults in the
town to process the horrendous events that have occurred there, is not found in the
Brothers Grimm version and is purely the invention of Kurahashi. Though it is clear that
someone must be held responsible for what has happened, the adults of the town are
confused about whom to punish. These bizarre, cruel, inexplicable killings must be
condemned so that ordinary life in the town can continue – but how to condemn the
killings if the responsible party cannot be identified?
The townspeople first blame the parents of the child who played butcher in the
second iteration of the game; the parents of this child blame the teachers and officials at
the child’s school; the school principal, at a city council meeting, blames the practice of
publicly killing pigs; and the city council blames the mayor. The people defer to the king,
who blames the child who instigated the second game of butcher, publicly executing him.
This story is taken from a collection of Kurahashi’s tales entitled Cruel Fairy
Tales for Adults [Otona no tame no zankoku d ōwa] (1984). Every story in the collection
is given an explicit moral, like those found in the Aesop fables. The moral of this story is,
“Justice is created by popular opinion” (71).
17
Another way of stating this moral would
be, “affirmation is denial.” All these judgments, according to Kurahashi, are arbitrary. A

17
Citations of the Japanese language version of “The Children Who Played Butcher” are made from
Kurahashi Yumiko, “Kodomo-tachi ga butagoroshi o mane shita hanashi” [“The Children Who Played
Butcher”], Otona no tame no zankoku d ōwa [Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults] (Tokyo: Shinch ōbunko, 1984)
67-71.
20

judgment is necessary to give some definition to the uncertainty of troubling events, but
no judgment is absolute. Every judgment is an “opinion” which serves a worldly function
but does not ultimately resolve the uncertainty at the heart of the crisis situation that
arises when the unknowable intrudes into the known.

None of these stories presents a clear solution to the dilemma of how one thing
can be affirmed without denying something else. What is existence if not unknowable,
unfamiliar, strange? What can truly be said to exist, except uncertainty? To Kurahashi,
who is on a quest to find out just what really does exist, nothing exists except the
nothingness at the core of any act of definition.

21

Oneness

Kurahashi’s novels and stories make frequent use of the motif of incestuous
siblings, often twins and often named “K” and “L.” While the twins in “The Holy
Family” are not named, it is clear to any long-time reader of Kurahashi that these are in
fact K and L (or that at least they are consciously intended to evoke K and L), the very
same siblings whose exploits are detailed in stories like “The Scorpions” [“Sasori-tachi”]
(1963), “An Extraterrestrial” [“Uch ūjin”] (1964), and “The House of Sunflowers”
[“Himawari no ie”] (1968), among others.
Kurahashi writes of K and L:

Plato explains that man and woman once embraced each other, forming a single
body, but according to my own mythology, K and L once embraced each other
within the same womb. […] After birth, they separated into two bodies, but their
consciousnesses are composed of the same elements and they possess the same
memory of the time they spent embracing in amniotic fluid. Though this memory
is ordinarily absorbed into their bodies, they can excrete it like an invisible gas at
any time and become one again. In other words, the consciousnesses of K and L
are able to embrace in a non-physical sense. This is my mythic love, my Platonic
love. This is supremely vulgar love, and of course, it is impossible. […] The
defining attributes of these twin gods which appear in my novels can be summed
up by stating that they are beings which aim toward non-existence, or rather that
they are passive yet aware. (Sakuhin n ōto 245-6)

Victoria V. Vernon notes that K and L “are totally detached from [a] relationship
to the world, consider themselves an elite of two, and develop a private code of
complicity that substitutes for morality in the amoral world of the conscious manipulation
of sexuality” (122). Most often, K and L consciously manipulate sexuality by engaging in
22

incest. All these attributes are on clear display in “The Holy Family,” in which the twins
share a special, possibly supernatural relationship lying totally outside the bounds of
normal human interaction.
The twins sense natural phenomena differently than ordinary people. It is the
occurrence of an earthquake that alerts them to a disturbance in the home. They “hear
vibrations in the air which are imperceptible to ordinary people, taking in the sound with
the skin of [their] whole bodies” (112). This description makes it clear that the twins
share a special form of communication and that their senses are finely attuned to any
disturbances that might impinge upon the otherworldly unity they share in their duplicity.
In addition to the earthquake, the twins sense another vibration – that of their
mother and father engaging in a bizarre act in the darkness of their bedroom. “Ordinary”
human sexual behavior is thoroughly unnatural to the twins, who, as their father puts it
later, “love each other in a completely different way” (117). The twins are so shocked by
the scene that they run from it in a daze. They return to their room and share in what
seems to be a sort of telepathic union. Later, the father glimpses the twins in the midst of
a bizarre, possibly sexual act (the description of which has been quoted previously) which
is clearly in opposition to ordinary conceptions of both romantic and fraternal
relationships. The father observes, “Setting aside the question of whether or not to call it
incest, it is beyond my power to explain the shape they formed” (116).
At this point, I would like to discuss the nature of the union that exists between
the twins, to examine the motif of incest as Kurahashi employs it in this work and others.
23

It is important to note that, as Sakaki says, “Kurahashi is not attempting to justify
incest” in works using this motif (98). In an essay entitled “On Incest” [“Insesuto ni
tsuite”] (1966) Kurahashi asks, “Is incest evil?” and answers herself, “Of course it is evil”
(255). Thus, a particular moral belief about incest does underlie Kurahashi’s treatment of
the subject. It could be said that Kurahashi is interested in incest because it is a sordid act.
Yet her intent is not to shock the reader by glorifying incest; in fact, she takes pleasure in
using her imaginative powers to describe incest as not only acceptable but beautiful in the
context of a fantasy which transforms nothingness into somethingness, i.e. an anti-world.
As she puts it:

Incest as it actually occurs in society is almost without exception nothing but a
vile, filthy incident (or so goes my stubborn prejudice) and the reason I write
novels about incest is because I feel drawn to the topic of how to sanctify it.
(“Insesuto ni tsuite” 254)

The topic of sanctification will be discussed in depth in the third portion of this
introduction. For the time being, suffice it to say that Kurahashi’s incestuous twins create
a sealed, special love which cannot be intruded upon by other, lesser human relations. It
is a world that is completely interior, that admits nothing unknown, and that reacts with
violence to the intrusion of hostile outside forces.
The incestuous love of the twins is basically narcissistic. That is, in the other, they
love only themselves. In this way, their love is like the self-love of Jean Genet as
described by Sartre: “The ‘double sensation’ of flesh touching itself, of two fingers of
the same hand pressing against each other, gives us a phantom otherness-in-unity” (Our
24

Lady of the Flowers 12). This seems to be exactly what Kurahashi is describing when she
says that participants in the crime of incest “find absolute homogeneity in each other”
(“Insesuto ni tsuite” 255). Kurahashi’s intent, again, is not to propose solutions to a social
problem. Instead, it is to circumvent the entire basis of the problem by ripping the ground
out from under it, to resolve a crisis in belief by constructing a fantasy.
It could also be said that this Kurahashi’s concept of incest resembles that
described in Anais Nin’s work The House of Incest:

In the house of incest there was a room which could not be found, a room without
window, the fortress of their love, a room without window where mind and blood
coalesced in a union without orgasm and rootless like those of fishes. (52)

The incestuous love between K and L represents absolute, impossible freedom. It
transcends earthly restrictions. It is insular yet its narcissism envelops everything,
realizing an unearthly unity.

Aiko in “We Are All Friends” also achieves an otherworldly oneness through
multiplicity. Kurahashi carefully shows that Aiko’s multiple personality disorder,
whether invented or not (in fact the question itself seems irrelevant, merely a game
played by the adults), is a thoroughly sane reaction to her situation. Even the doctors at
the mental hospital comment that “the daughter is the only one in the family who’s
anything like a normal human being,” indicating that her “illness” is the only logical way
for her to deal with the deeply contradictory nature of a family in which every individual
25

is exactly that – an individual who bears the burden of precisely defined secrets and the
accompanying doubt, shame, and guilt (85).
This interpretation is supported by a scene in which Aiko touches herself, but
remains unfulfilled by masturbation. As she puts it later, “’I couldn’t even love myself.
I… I was scared. Of my dad and mom’” (86). Sakaki makes the following observation
about Kurahashi’s use of the motif of masturbation:

In the act of masturbation, the self and other are merely roles to be performed by
the same subject. Seen from the opposite perspective, masturbation dissolves the
substantial identity of the self, by making him/her play a divided role. Thus,
masturbation demonstrates the plurality and performativity of the subject. (Sakaki
14)

Aiko’s fear of her mother and father keeps her from finding wholeness within and
with herself because her parents are obsessed with drawing borders around the unknown,
with defining the indefinable, with covering up secrets. Living this way has resulted in
Aiko’s identity itself fracturing into multiple, clearly delineated, performative selves,
each of which exemplifies some quality the others are not permitted to have. Because
Aiko’s household is precisely regimented and the unknown never mixes with the known,
Aiko looks for the unknown in herself.
18
And she finds it in Maiko, Miiko, and Milla, all
of whom are unknown to the “well-behaved Aiko,” who does just as her parents ask, who

18
This recalls Kurahashi’s conception of “the other inside me” (watashi no naka no kare), for whose
benefit she claims to write her novels and stories (“Hansh ōsetsuron” 10). In other words, she writes in order
to find wholeness in herself, to make contact with the unknown parts of herself. (As she clearly states, her
intent is not to communicate practical, useable information or to record biographical details about herself.)
26

is in fact the type of girl who would never burden her family by developing an unwieldy,
obtuse illness like catatonic schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder or whatever
name the adult world assigns to her affliction. In fact, in a certain manner of speaking, all
Aiko’s incarnations are well-behaved – even Milla when she scratches the hospital
director’s hand, even Miiko when she escapes from the hospital. Aiko is only imitating
the fractured nature of the hostile world around her.
It seems fairly clear that the divisions between Aiko’s personalities are, to a
certain extent, arbitrary. These particular personalities are all responses to the world
around her, and they are all imaginary. Yet Aiko’s father does not seem to be quite right
when he says, “‘If you ask me, my daughter is only pretending to be crazy’” (84). Aiko
clearly suffers from a diseased imagination which cannot distinguish the real and the
make-believe, but the world around her, that is her family, also seems thoroughly
wrapped up in similar preoccupations. That is, the illusory world Aiko believes in is, in
fact, the real world; the real world is a world of delusions.
The story makes some interesting attempts to illustrate Aiko’s delusions in a very
literal way. In particular, the portion of the story that describes Aiko’s escape from the
hospital takes place in a setting decidedly separate from everyday reality:

It was evening. All alone, Aiko sat in her room. Someone seemed to be calling her
from the room next door, but there was no one staying in that room. When she
went to have a look, it was as empty as a freshly gutted bird. One door opened to
another, and when the final door swung open at the end of a hallway darker than
the vacant innards of a snake, it was evening and the sun was still shining. (77-8)

27

Aiko
19
proceeds to walk through a wall and escapes from the artificially bounded
world of the hospital. She meets a rattlesnake and an alligator who take her to a “wild
party.”
20
Aiko removes her clothes, dances the twist, and apparently has sex with a boy,
though the description of the actual sexual activity is extremely vague. It could be said
that Kurahashi is attempting in this thoroughly non-realistic scene to transform a delusion
into reality. In her essay “The Anti-Novel” [“Hansh ōsetsuron”] (1972), Kurahashi says:

In writing a novel, the author is permitted to pretend to destroy her control over
the prose… The reader understands that this is a type of mimicry. In other words,
the reader understands that a crazy character speaks crazy words, and there is no
need for the reader to understand the content of these words. (33)

It could likewise be said that there is no need for the reader to understand why an
alligator and a rattlesnake suddenly appear, why Aiko becomes able to walk through a
wall, etc. It is possible to interpret the entire scene symbolically, since reptiles could be
interpreted as a symbol of evil in keeping with the Old Testament, etc. However, these
thoroughly non-realistic events may be most fully appreciated not as symbols but as

19
At this point Aiko has transformed into Miiko and is referred to as such in the story, but for ease of
reading, I will continue referring to her as Aiko.
20
This strongly recalls the opening scene of Kurahashi’s novel The Saint Girl [Seish ōjo] (1965) in which
the main character, Miki, accepts a ride from a group of young male delinquents on an ill-intentioned
joyride. There are several other parallels between “We Are All Friends” and The Saint Girl: the gang of
delinquents in The Saint Girl robs a house, tying up the occupants in a manner very similar to that reported
in the newspaper article that concludes “We Are All Friends.” As well, the novel contains a “wild party”
scene. Recounts one of the novel’s multiple narrators, the delinquent boy who offers Miki a ride, “Even at
that crazy party at the Mikl House in Yokohama, Miki stood on the sidelines the entire time, glaring at us
like a queen from some far-off land” (35). In other words, Miki, like Aiko, is the embodiment of “cool”;
both heroines achieve complete separation from the everyday world.
28

illustrations of a breakdown in the functioning of the logical world, as elements of a
fantasy in which reality and imagination merge completely.
It is should be noted that music, specifically modern jazz, plays an important role
at the “wild party.” Bud Powell and Ornette Coleman – a pianist and saxophonist,
respectively - are mentioned by name. Says Kurahashi in an essay entitled “Something
Else: Me and Jazz” [“Samushingu erusu: watashi to jazu”]
21
(1964):

Superior modern jazz sets aflame a ‘freedom’ that sleeps not in the flesh or the
mind but in the lower half of the body. One’s consciousness (or rather one’s
unconscious) is expanded, and one’s imagination emerges on the other side of the
world, so that one falls into something like a hole of evil. (156)

Thus, the wild party scene depicts a ritualistic merging with and denial of the world
accomplished through music, dance, and sex. Of course, all this is in complete opposition
to the values of adult society. In the eyes of adults, this is evil behavior. When Aiko
comes to her senses in a police station, her mother, utterly mortified by the incident,
refuses to claim her. It is Dr. Miki who escorts her back to the hospital.
The story also makes an interesting reference to a motif which appears in several
of Kurahashi’s other stories and seems intended to illustrate a similar concept – that is,
the motif of the “midnight sun.” Aiko discusses this with Dr. Miki as the two of them sit
together in the hospital courtyard:


21
Something Else!!!! is the title of a 1958 album by Ornette Coleman.
29

“The moon and the sun are both in the sky at the same time. Look how close they
are,” said Aiko, looking upward. […] “It’s like someone cut away part of the sky,
leaving an empty void. A round void shaped like the moon... what is it, Doctor?
The sun is burning red and I can see this other thing lined up right beside it…”
(85)

In a story entitled “The Passage of Dreams” [“Yume no kayoiji”] (1988), a
character uses the phrase “the midnight sun” as a euphemism for sex with her husband;
the two ordinarily sleep in separate rooms, and their unions occur only in the depths of
the night. The couple preserves a kind of fetishistic separateness so they can enjoy the
illusory pleasure of secret meetings which are not really secret. In this way, their
meetings encompass opposites such as known and unknown, openness and secrecy.
Also, in a story entitled “The Midnight Sun” [“Mayonaka no taiy ō”] (1966), a
male narrator addresses a vanished lover named M, ruminating about the reasons for her
disappearance. The narrator describes a relationship between M and an older man named
K
22
who also struggles to cope with M’s absence. The narrator and K share the same
anguish, desiring to bring M back, yet it is clear that M was always absent even when she
was present, that she was an elite being who could never truly love a man. In the end of
the story, the narrator observes, again addressing M:


22
In this story, K is not an incestuous twin. In stories like “The Midnight Sun,” “The Monastery”
[“Ky ōsatsu”] (1962), “The End of Summer” [“Natsu no owari”] (1961), and others, the character K is a
man who interrupts or complicates a relationship between two lovers or (incestuous) siblings, forming the
third segment of a love triangle.
30

You have not gone to K, and you will probably never come back to me. Even the
most severe depression is not hard enough to crush your absence. Your absence is
my sun. It does not exist. Only K and I can see this midnight sunrise. (214-5)

The midnight sun is an embodiment of nothingness, of anti-reality, and an
obsession with anti-reality is the definition of insanity – yet the contradiction between
being and non-being lies at the core of the sane world. The fact that Aiko sees the
midnight sun though Dr. Miki does not indicates that she, like the incestuous twins K and
L, perceives the world in a unique way and completely transcends separations between
being and nothingness, even though in the eyes of the world, she is “ill” (or alternately,
“evil”).
In the same scene, Aiko reveals that she has developed a romantic attachment to
Dr. Miki. It seems that at last Aiko is seeking out a real-life union instead of reveling in
the fractured nature of her various personalities, indicating that she may be cured. This is
what is referred to in Freudian therapy as the moment of transference. The analysis brings
a repressed desire to the surface and the patient mistakenly transfers this desire onto the
therapist.
23

It is also mentioned that at this point, Dr. Miki believes he has “successfully
realized Frankl’s ‘logotherapy’” (86). Austrian psychologist Viktor E. Frankl theorizes

23
Freud writes that transference is “a frequent, and indeed in some analyses a regular, occurrence.
Transference on to the physician takes place through a false connection. I must give an example of this. In
one of my patients the origin of a particular hysterical symptom lay in a wish, which she had had many
years earlier and had at once been relegated to the unconscious, that the man she was talking to at the time
might boldly take the initiative and give her a kiss. On one occasion, at the end of a session, a similar wish
came up in her about me. She was horrified at it, spent a sleepless night, and at the next session, though she
did not refuse to be treated, was quite useless for work” (Breuer 302-3).
31

that a “will to meaning,” rather than a “will to pleasure,” is the “primary motivational
force in man” (104). This distinguishes Frankl’s logotherapy from Freudian
psychotherapy. If Dr. Miki has successfully realized logotherapy with Aiko, this indicates
that he has led her to discover the meaning of her existence. Interestingly, logotherapy
theorizes “existential frustration” as a cause of neurosis. In other words, patients suffer
neurosis (which, according to Frankl, does not always equate with true mental illness)
because they stare into the unknowable freedom of existence and are unable to find any
meaning there.
In any case, Dr. Miki responds by rejecting Aiko’s advances, telling her:

“I realize that you’ve never experienced this kind of situation with anyone else.
You’ve found a situation in which you can love another person. By chance, within
this situation, you’ve begun to love me – me, the only you you’ll ever know. But
this love is mistaken. We’re a doctor and a patient who are bound by a treatment
relationship.” (86)

Dr. Miki responds to Aiko’s desire for him by reasserting a boundary, by reminding
Aiko that, in a certain sense, she is not cured because she is not permitted to freely pursue
connections with other human beings, because she does not have license to disregard
boundaries such as those society erects, or doctors themselves erect, between doctors and
patients.
But then, what is a cure? By the end of the story, Aiko seems to be cured in her
own way: “According to Aiko, all of her, all these previously disconnected parts, had
32

become multiple forms of herself which were now able to communicate with each
other…‘We are all friends - all the Aikos’” (88).
Then why does Aiko attempt suicide? Maybe even this cure is not a real cure.
The story ends with a fictional newspaper article detailing a certain incident in
which Aiko is involved. She and her dancing partners invade her home (the notion of
Aiko breaking into her own home is ironic), tie up her parents and their maid, and dance
the twist on the second floor for a number of hours. They also smash her father’s desk
and steal a “treasured possession” (89). The incident is committed to print and revealed to
the public. By the end of the story, all secrets have been bared. But has Aiko’s problem –
her fractured nature, her lack of oneness - been solved?

The murderous children in “The Children Who Played Butcher” also embrace a
delusion, a delusion which turns against the adult world that birthed it and self-destructs
with a clear sense of illogical purpose that evades the townspeople who are left to deal
with the aftermath.
Through their actions, the children assert absolute separateness from the world –
yet they are only imitating behavior they have every reason to believe is ordinary and
permissible, since they have seen their father performing it. The problem is that the
children take the premise that killing is acceptable to an extreme. While it is clearly
permissible to kill pigs in the society the children inhabit, it is not acceptable to kill
humans.
33

Why not? Why was it wrong for the children to do what they did? Any reasonable
person knows that murder is unacceptable, but try to explain the reason in rational terms,
and the complication becomes clear. The question creates an unsolvable dilemma because
it posits absolute morality in rational terms, yet human rationality rejects the absolute.
Answering such a question, and answering it honestly, forces one to directly face the
purest form of existential anguish. The mind thinks for a moment that it may actually be
all right to kill people, but immediately rejects this conclusion. The absolute freedom, the
absolute moral vacuity of such a conclusion is too much to bear. There is no immediately
apparent justification for the notion that certain actions are acceptable or unacceptable in
themselves. The children in the story are simply performers who act out in the most
extreme terms imaginable the dysfunctional nature of popular morality: that it is not
absolute. They behave in extreme and absolute terms, yet this extreme behavior results
only in the nihilation of the world. Only in a state of nihilation can oneness be achieved.
In other words, in perfect oneness, separation is upheld.

34

Sanctification

“The Holy Family” [“Seikazoku”], written in 1985, revisits several themes first
explored by Kurahashi in her novel The Saint Girl [Seish ōjo] (1965). The titles of the
works
24
make this thematic link explicit. In both works, Kurahashi makes attempts to
“sanctify” sordid behavior, specifically incest, in the context of a fictional anti-world. She
says of The Saint Girl, “In this novel, I have attempted to transform the impossible form
of love known as incest into a chosen love, to sanctify it” (Seish ōjo 297). “The Holy
Family” also makes an attempt to sanctify incest in the context of a fictional anti-world,
25

but in this case the attempt is undermined by Kurahashi’s deliberate demonstration that
the incestuous love of the children can only be considered sacred or absolute in terms of
its contrast with the behavior of the adults.
Kurahashi is making conscious reference to the process of sanctification of crimes
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s work Saint Genet,
26
which presents writer Jean Genet as not only a
vagabond and a criminal but a martyr, and in the works of Genet himself. In her essay
“The Anti-Novel” [“Hansh ōsetsuron”] (1972), Kurahashi asserts, “we should recognize
that there may be such a monstrous thing as a novel which resembles a false poem written

24
Written 「聖家族」 and ｢聖少女｣, respectively. The character ｢聖｣, which is used in both titles, means
“holy” or “sacred.” I have translated this as “saint” in the case of The Saint Girl and “holy” in the case of
“The Holy Family.”
25
As Sakaki notes, “Fiction, for Kurahashi, is an anti-world in which the moral constructions of society
may be put into play, in which crimes may be sanctified and yet still remain as crimes” (98).
26
Translated into Japanese as ｢聖ジュネ｣, using the character ｢聖｣ as a translation for “Saint.”
35

in false prose; it could be said that Jean Genet wrote such novels” (33). Kurahashi draws
this terminology directly from Sartre, who states, “Genet’s works are false novels written
in false prose” (Saint Genet 425). There is an obvious affinity between Genet’s attempts
to escape from the world by committing crimes and Kurahashi’s attempts to create an
anti-world; as previously mentioned, Genet makes this impossible to ignore when he
states, “Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals agree hopelessly to organize a
forbidden universe,” i.e. an anti-world whose constituents stand in opposition to the
values of society (The Thief’s Journal 5). Kurahashi has indicated her admiration for both
Sartre and Genet
27
and has stated that she regards borrowing or copying as a “royal road”
(Sakaki 37). A basic review of Sartre’s idea of sanctification in the life and works of
Genet will thus be useful in understanding the role of sanctification in the works of
Kurahashi.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Sartre was infatuated with Jean Genet, or
at least with a particular facet of Genet, devoting an entire book to expounding upon the
saintliness of his decidedly un-saintly behavior. Genet was a beggar, a thief, a
homosexual, a radical political activist, a rebel. In 1939, while he was serving a prison
term, Genet began to produce countercultural writings celebrating antisocial acts and
depicting criminals as heroes. In his 1943 debut novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet

27
In her essay “The Labyrinth and the Negativity of Fiction” [“Sh ōsetsu no meiro to hiteisei”] (1966),
Kurahashi says, “The list of authors who have influenced me, whose work I love and whose ‘style’ I would
like to steal is as follows: Sade [referring to Marquis de Sade], Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil,
Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Julien Gracq, André Breton,
Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Alaine Robbe-Grillet…” (291).
36

describes in glorified terms the Parisian underworld of thieves, tramps, and murderers,
and for the rest of his career, the “sanctification” of antisocial behavior continued to be
his persistent thematic concern. Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and others recognized Genet’s
talent as a writer and petitioned successfully to have Genet’s life sentence, based on
multiple convictions for various crimes, set aside.
Why was Sartre so extraordinarily fascinated with Genet? To fully understand this,
one would have to actually read the voluminous (625 pages in English translation) Saint
Genet in its entirety. Briefly, though, it seems that Sartre held such a deep appreciation of
Genet because Genet was uncompromising, because his persona was one of absolute,
unreserved evil. Yet in its absoluteness, Genet’s absolute evil is absolute good. Through
persistent denial, Genet achieves a particular sort of confirmation:

To will his being is, for him, to will nothingness. Therefore, to attempt to coincide
with the fullness of his being is to try to attain “the impossible nullity.” But,
inversely, the rigorous asceticism he practices, the successive amputations which
he inflicts on himself, cause him (in bringing him little by little closer to the
animal, to protoplasm, and then to absolute nonbeing) progressively to attain
saintliness, that is, pure being. (Saint Genet 335)

In this passage, Sartre clarifies that the process of sanctification unifies being and
nothingness, resolving a crisis state in which the nature of existence can only be
perceived in relative terms - that is, a state in which a person can only know him or
herself in another. Self-love resolves the crisis of denial and resulting affirmation,
affirmation and resulting denial. Genet knows himself in himself. This self-knowledge is
37

a performance which, when executed consistently and with absolute confidence, gives
rise to ultimate authenticity, yet its authenticity is eternally and utterly artificial.
It should be clear that Kurahashi’s incestuous twins achieve such artificial
authenticity, that their behavior is sacred in exactly the same sense as Jean Genet’s acts of
theft, promiscuity, etc., that it unifies opposites, that it admits no doubt, that in its
narcissism it embodies the purest love. Incest is of course a repugnant act, and Kurahashi
recognizes it as such even while denying or questioning the social norms by which the act
might be condemned. It might be said that Kurahashi is in agreement with K (that is, the
delinquent boy who falls in love with Miki) from The Saint Girl when he expresses, as he
begins to confess to Miki an act of incest he has committed with his sister L, “Why have I
tried so hard to avoid this word [incest]? I must believe that incest is evil. But when I
think about why it’s evil, I can’t understand it…” (161).
This confusion can be resolved in the context of a “holy family” which is
permitted to cross the line between good and evil, which embodies the absolute, which
commits sanctified crimes. K goes on to explain to Miki:

Long ago, there were fathers who loved their daughters, mothers who loved their
sons, brothers who loved their sisters. This was the special privilege of the royal
family. Commoners were not entitled to commit incest. […] Members of a
spiritually royal family love only each other and are permitted to compete with
God, insisting that they are a part of God’s family. (162-3)

Incest is an act of forbidden unification. It is a secret, sacred love. To attain it, the
incestuous twins K and L commune with each other by means of a “secret door.” Says
38

the female half of the incestuous couple in “The Holy Family,” “I used the ‘secret door’
beneath my desk and made my way to my brother’s room” (111). Says K in The Saint
Girl, “There was a time when our old lady bought an apartment and gave us each one
room to ourselves, but we broke through the wall and made a door between the two
rooms” (165). The twins break down physical barriers just as they break down spiritual
and psychological barriers. They create a forbidden portal between the supposedly
irreconcilable conditions of being and nothingness, sanctification and profanity, morality
and immorality. The twins are like Miki when she looks into the mirror and muses that
she has a “delicate and vicious face, half beast, half saint” (Seish ōjo 20). They are
allowed to freely negotiate completely opposed states of being.
It should be noted that the twins in “The Holy Family,” “sanctified” though they
may be, are as artificial as Genet. In both cases, there is a clearly specified reason behind
this artificiality. Sartre notes that Genet, the illegitimate son of a prostitute who
abandoned him soon after his birth:

…is a fake child. No doubt he was born of a woman, but this origin has not been
noted by the social memory. As far as everyone and, consequently, he himself are
concerned, he appeared one fine day without having been carried in any known
womb: he is a synthetic product. (Saint Genet 7)

It could be said that Genet is the product of a certain kind of virgin birth. The siblings in
“The Holy Family” are also synthetic products in a very literal sense. Notes their father,
“The twins were born at a university hospital, the product of an artificially inseminated
39

manmade womb” (117). The twins are not of this world. They threaten the world. They
belong, in their utter separateness, not to a worldly family but to God’s family.
“The Holy Family” notes that the adults are in pursuit of a similar goal. They
would like to believe that only their own behavior is sacred, that the children are so far
from the norm that they must be monsters, that the form of love they know is completely
and utterly “different.” This is of course the mirror image of what the children believe.
By showing that the concept of sanctification is itself a changeable and relative norm,
Kurahashi questions even her own questioning of ordinary social behaviors. In the end,
the reader is left with this question: what exactly is sanctification? It would seem that the
answer is beyond even the reach of aliens and monsters, that any concept of sanctification,
even a concept of sanctification that denies sanctification, must be demolished – or rather
that the inherently dualistic conception of sanctification nihilates itself.

It should be noted that Aiko as well is part of a long line of Kurahashi heroines
who maintain an elite distance from the world, who have achieved complete liberation,
who, ultimately, are “able to walk freely among [an] assemblage of [ideological] flags
without believing in ideologies,” whose opposition to worldly values sanctifies their
behavior (“Hansh ōsetsuron” 14). Several important similarities between The Saint Girl
and “We Are All Friends” have already been noted: two scenes from The Saint Girl seem
to be directly drawn from “We Are All Friends,” which was published just before The
Saint Girl and was most likely written concurrently with or immediately before it (see
footnote 20 on page 28). As well, the heroines themselves parallel each other in many
40

ways, and a brief outline of Miki’s character in The Saint Girl may shed some light on
Aiko’s character in “We Are All Friends.”
Miki in The Saint Girl is an uncontrollable and unknowable young woman who
rebels against social norms in a very extreme manner. She initiates a relationship with a
much older man who may or may not be her father (and who, interestingly enough, is a
dentist, like Kurahashi’s real-life father); she practices erotic asphyxiation in the context
of a lesbian relationship with a female friend; she kills her mother, perhaps with some
degree of deliberateness, in a car crash which injures her as well, resulting in amnesia;
and her memory loss ensures that no clear definition can be given to her intentions or her
emotions. In fact, the novel primarily details K’s attempts to define Miki, whose past can
be known only through a possibly fictional diary written before the car crash. However,
K finds that ultimately, Miki is unknowable. She has succeeded in obscuring herself
completely, and can never be definitively interpreted. This is also true of the novel itself.
As Sakaki points out:

No interpretation within the text can claim to be authentic, just as no reader’s
interpretation of the text can be. Or rather, [The Saint Girl]
28
demonstrates that
narratives are, by definition, nothing but interpretations, or retellings, made by the
narrator and narratee, and are thus contextualized. (Sakaki 97)

Though (or perhaps because) her biological family is absent, because she has
transformed herself into an artificial product, Miki is a member of a holy family, an

28
Sakaki uses the English translation Divine Maiden.
41

unearthly being who cannot be understood by the world. In this respect, she is also like
the vanished heroine of the story “The Midnight Sun” [“Mayonaka no taiy ō”] (1966).
The male narrator of that tale, who also seeks to understand the mysterious heroine,
observes, addressing her:

The mysterious smile in your eyes… I remembered only later that it closely
resembled the smile of a female saint I had seen in a reproduction of a religious
painting. I do not hesitate to assert that at that moment, what lay beside me was
the body of a female saint. It had been fully surrendered to me, yet it exceeded my
ownership. (208)

These are but two additional examples of a theme Kurahashi has very consistently
pursued – that of the sanctified female elite. Aiko fits very clearly into this pattern.
Because her personalities are fragmented, she has no definitive self. Her behaviors are a
series of thoroughly artificial performances which, in their very artificiality, achieve
ultimate authenticity. As Aiko herself observes of herself and Dr. Miki, “It’s like we’re
on some kind of stage” (85). Yet Aiko’s relationship with Dr. Miki is the most authentic
human relationship she has ever experienced, as she expresses to him during the moment
of transference.
Dr. Miki is also, in the spiritual sense, Aiko’s savior. This is clarified in the
following scene:

Miki lightly pushed Maiko away and stood up, yet somehow Maiko’s slim
wrist remained in his hand. It was like the grip used to take someone’s pulse, and
in fact the rush of Maiko’s blood reached Miki like the sound of a church organ.
This pulsation of a young girl’s existence pleasured him, and he stood as if frozen
42

in place. Maiko, her wrist still surrendered to him, stood warily, as if she might
topple over. Miki suddenly thought of an altarpiece by Hieronymus Bosch, The
Garden of Earthly Delights – a depiction of the Garden of Eden in which Christ
grips a naked, slender young Eve by the wrist. (77)

This description also suggests that while Dr. Miki intends to rescue Aiko, his desire to
accomplish this is mingled with desire for her. Although, as previously mentioned, he
rejects her advances on one occasion, he seems to come close to accepting them when
Aiko visits his private quarters and causes him to put out a cigarette on her thigh. When
he realizes that Aiko is Aiko and not Maiko, who has consistently behaved in a
suggestive manner toward him, he feels “a sense of relief mixed with disappointment”
(87). After thanking Dr. Miki for everything he has done, Aiko leaves the room on her
own volition. “Come back anytime, Miki started to say, but his tongue froze in his
mouth” (87). But why would Dr. Miki even think about inviting Aiko back to his room?
What would he accomplish there? Medical treatment does not take place in a doctor’s
private quarters.
Later, when Aiko returns to the hospital after her suicide attempt, she asks if she
can spend the night in her old room, and Dr. Miki assents. Dr. Miki then visits her room
to check on her:

When Miki went to have a look, she was already asleep. Her sleeping face was
like that of a child who was neither male nor female. Glimpsing this slumber from
which the shadow of anxiety was absent set Miki’s mind at ease. It’s like the face
of an angel. And if that’s so, then maybe she’s really cured. (88)

43

Perhaps Dr. Miki only goes to check on Aiko due to concern for her medical condition,
but in any case, it is clear that doctor and patient are at this point freely visiting each
other’s private quarters and have thus crossed a certain kind of boundary. The fact that
both parties are permitted to transcend this boundary at will seems significant. Perhaps
therapy has given Aiko access to a kind of “secret door” by which she can travel between
sickness and health.
At this point, Georges Didi-Huberman’s work in The Invention of Hysteria may
prove useful in understanding the nuanced relationship between Aiko and Dr. Miki. Didi-
Huberman explicates the invention of mental illnesses in the late 19
th
century, pointing
out that at the Parisian Salpêtrière sanatorium for incurable female inmates, patients and
doctors performed specific roles, that doctors took photographic images of hysterical
patients in order to invent the illness of hysteria. Clearly, Didi-Huberman regards hysteria
as the creation of man, but he also states that “inventing is a kind of miracle” (4). It
would seem that an invented miracle is exactly what Dr. Miki accomplishes in his
therapeutic efforts with Aiko – that, again, Aiko and Dr. Miki achieve a completely
artificial yet fully authentic relationship.
Didi-Huberman also writes about the role of desire in a treatment relationship
between a male doctor and a female patient. He observes:

In a certain sense, the hysteric foments the desire of the Other. But she
hallucinates it, knotting the recognition of this desire to her own desire for
recognition, and she naturally deludes herself (neurotic capitation) as to the
meaning of the other’s desire. (169)

44

The female hysteric masochistically objectifies herself so that the doctor can gain a kind
of scientific mastery over her: “For the hysterics, seducing consisted in always further
reassuring their physicians by confirming their concept of hysteria” (170). Didi-
Huberman also regards Freudian transference as “repetition
29
in the sense of a theatrical
rehearsal… theater, in the hard-core sense of smut” (171). Hysterics seduce their doctors
in order to prove that they can be cured. If they do not do so, they lose the grace
bestowed upon them by their doctors, are branded “incurables” and are “hidden away,
forever, in the dark,” no longer allowed to perform (170).
Didi-Huberman’s ideas about mental illness greatly resemble those underlying
Kurahashi’s depiction of the relationship between Aiko and Dr. Miki. It would be fair to
say that this is a performative, sexually charged, control-centered relationship. Aiko
exhibits masochistic tendencies when she causes Dr. Miki to put out a cigarette on her
thigh. As previously mentioned, she notes of herself and Dr. Miki that “It’s like we’re on
some kind of stage” (85). And when she considers really, truly seducing Dr. Miki, she
realizes that she can only do this by turning into Maiko: “Turn into Maiko. Turn into
Maiko and seduce Dr. Miki. Aiko chanted these words like a mantra” (87). Aiko is
seeking several things from Dr. Miki, things like love, self-knowledge, a cure,
sanctification. It could in fact be said that all the various things Aiko seeks are differing
facets of the same goal.

29
A note in the text indicates that Didi-Huberman uses the French word répétition, indicating both
“repetition” and “rehearsal.”
45

In the end, the question remains: what is a real cure? If mental illness itself is a
performance, is the cure also a type of performance? Does an “invented” illness have a
“real” cure? In the end, the reader is left floundering in the same undefined crisis state
that envelops Aiko when she collapses on the floor and suffers a “hysterical” attack at the
beginning of the story. The only “truth” the reader is left with is the authenticity of
complete artificiality.

It is interesting to note that the crisis situation depicted in “The Children Who
Played Butcher” corresponds very closely with “literary anthropologist” René Girard’s
theory of the sanctified scapegoat. It is unclear whether Kurahashi is familiar with this
theory, detailed in Girard’s 1982 work The Scapegoat (“The Children Who Played
Butcher” was published in 1984), but Girard applies it broadly to myth, history, literature,
and spirituality, and it is useful in gaining an understanding of this story.
Girard asserts that human beings are driven by mimetic desire, a drive to acquire
things possessed by others. This mimetic desire inevitably brings about a crisis state in
society, which responds by singling out a responsible party, a scapegoat, forcing this
individual to take the blame for the crisis. While everyone in the society believes that the
foundations of the society are absolute, that the society encompasses all types of
“difference,” it actually excludes certain “different” individuals. In Girard’s words:

The signs that indicate a victim’s selection result not from the difference within
the system but from the difference outside the system, the potential for the system
to differ from its own difference, in other words not to be different at all, to cease
46

to exist as a system. […] Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying
because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, its mortality.
(21)

In other words, lack of difference creates a crisis state because the system maintains unity
through differentiation. Crimes which threaten differentiation in this way include
bestiality, which transgresses the distinction between man and animal, and incest, which
erases distinctions between individuals society insists are not permitted to be joined with
one another. (Kurahashi makes use of both these motifs in her efforts to deny/question
social norms.)
Truly recognizing that the system maintains only an illusory oneness leads to a
consciousness of its moral vacuity, as mentioned earlier. The persecutors must have
“faith in the evil power of their victim” (42). From the standpoint of the persecutors, this
faith is entirely logical; the assumption that the scapegoat truly is evil closes a gap in the
system, allowing it to function again, at least until the next crisis. Girard discusses
extensively the role of the scapegoat in various myths, stating that the identification and
punishment of a scapegoat often brings about “the birth of a completely new order in the
religious union of a community brought to life by its experience” (42). The persecutors
cannot take credit for the resumption of order. Instead, they credit the sacred: “In order
not to renounce the victim’s causality, he is brought back to life and immortalized,
temporarily, and what we call the transcendent and supernatural are invented for this
purpose” (44).
47

Identifying a scapegoat is clearly what the townspeople are attempting to do when
they blame first the parents, then the teacher, then the school principal, then the practice
of publicly killing pigs, then the city council, and finally the child. It could be said that
the townspeople bring the child back to life and “immortalize” him in the form of the
statue they erect in the town square – the one that depicts him as his neck is about to be
sliced open by the king’s sword. In this way, the townspeople make their judgment sacred.
The statue is a reminder that this ritual has been completed, that the act has been
sanctified.
Yet Kurahashi is careful to point out that the execution of the child does not
provide the townspeople with the needed closure. “In fact, many of them resented it, and
their sympathy coalesced around the child executed by the king. However, they could not
defy the king directly” (71). Is the statue ultimately intended to condemn the actions of
the child, or of the king? Perhaps Kurahashi intends to assert that by denying one of its
constituents (the child), the social system simultaneously denies its own foundations
(represented here by the king). This is the reason why such crises arise again and again,
and this is also essentially the point Girard is making when he asserts that societies
maintain unity through exclusion.
In any case, the erection of the statue is designed to ensure that “‘the past will
never be repeated’” (71). This sentiment is immortalized, made sacred. Yet the literal,
explicitly stated moral of the story is, as mentioned previously, “Justice is created by
popular opinion” (71). Can a created thing really be sacred? This is a return to the theme
that “inventing is a kind of miracle” (Didi-Huberman 4). We may sanctify such
48

judgments, but they are not sacrosanct. In their artificiality, they are absolutely authentic.
This is the wonderful contradiction at the heart of Kurahashi’s fiction.
49

Chapter 2: Translations

The Holy Family

I think that maybe our father and mother are aliens. No, not just maybe, says my
brother – they’re aliens, no doubt about it. Anyway, he says, the two creatures we saw
that night were definitely not humans. I can’t deny that the scene was a big shock to me,
too.
There was a small earthquake in the middle of the night. I think it was close to
one AM. Frightened and fascinated by the science fiction I’d been reading, I couldn’t get
to sleep, and as I lay stiff in bed, continuing to read even in the midst of a dream, the
ground began to shake without warning. The frozen air cracked like glass, and the
fragments showered my face.
Before long, the ground stopped trembling, but I couldn’t get back to sleep alone.
I used the “secret door” beneath my desk and made my way to my brother’s room. My
brother (my twin brother, that is) lay staring at the ceiling, his eyes open wide.
“That was some earthquake.”
“I know. But what was really strange was how the air started vibrating before the
earthquake.”
“I wonder what made it do that,” I said, crawling into my brother’s bed, lining up
my body with his, and folding my hands on top of my chest like a dead person, sensing
50

the same odd vibration
1
my brother had mentioned. Our five senses are especially sharp,
and we can hear vibrations in the air which are imperceptible to ordinary people, taking
in the sound with the skin of our whole bodies. That odd vibration, the one which was
separate from that of the earthquake, began again.
“That’s it!” my brother exclaimed softly.
To me, it was as if air had turned into something wobbly like soft meat or jelly,
and violent sobs wracked it while it trembled, which was definitely abnormal - either that,
or some unimaginable creature had come to spy on us. All I could say for sure was that
something out of the ordinary was occurring. In my brother’s opinion, the “epicenter”
was the area where our parents slept.
“We’ve been invaded.”
2

“Invaded?”
“You know, by thieves.”

1
In this instance, I have used the word “vibration” as a translation for 「気配」(kehai) . ｢気配｣ literally
means “sign” or “hint” – in other words, a vague indication of something. The use of the word “vibration”
here unfortunately removes the distinction between this type of vibration and the physical trembling of the
earthquake, for which terms like ｢振動｣ (shind ō) and ｢振るえ｣ (furue) are used. My hope is this word will
communicate the subtle implication that the twins are engaged in some form of metaphysical, otherworldly
union – which, as it becomes clear later, they are.
2
In the original, the brother specifies that in his opinion, it is 「賊」(zoku) which have broken into the
household. This word can be translated “burglar,” “bandit,” “rebel,” or “traitor.” Zoku is a vague term that
does not have an exact English translation, yet it is clear that a zoku would not be a welcome presence in
one’s home. I felt that translating zoku would inevitably rob the term of its vagueness and mislead the
reader, so I have chosen not to translate it at all. A more literal translation of this line of dialog and the two
that follow would be:
“Maybe bandits have broken in.”
“Bandits?”
“You know, thieves.”
51

My opinion was different, but what my brother said was not unthinkable, so we
decided to take the long way around and peer into the room from the balcony.
The first room you reach belongs to our father, but this was pitch black and
absolutely silent. The skin of our entire bodies strained to catch any sound, but there was
no mistaking it – there was no one inside. Next was our mother’s room. A thin light
seeped from the window. There was a gap in the curtains. We pressed our faces, one
above the other, against the glass, and took a look inside the room. It was then that we
witnessed that bizarre scene.
At first, we had no idea what was happening. Our father and mother (or the naked
animals that made us think of them) were inside. We could see our mother’s face, and we
guessed that she was with our father. We couldn’t see our father’s face, so this is only a
guess. At first, the disturbing thought that this was not our father but someone else
flashed through our minds. Our father and mother were locked in an embrace. Even I
knew that couples did this sort of thing, but knowing something and seeing it in reality
are completely different. They held each other’s naked bodies, and that was all, but the
shape they formed was so complicated that it was impossible to explain what was going
on, as if the two of them had transformed into a single ghostly spider with eight or more
arms and legs. This big, white-skinned spider, its arms and legs tangled up with each
other, squirmed into and out of various shapes.
Just then, our father’s face appeared from the side of this jumbled mass that was
nearest us. It was definitely our father. His eyes were open (for some reason, our mother’s
eyes were closed as if in pain) and he looked our way, apparently having noticed us. I
52

grabbed my brother by the arm, giving a sign. We suppressed the urge to scream out in
horror and fled back to our room in a daze.
We turned out the light, wrapped our arms around each other, and checked our
breathing. Fortunately, there was no indication
3
that our father was coming after us. Then,
as we always did (at least since entering middle school, anyway) we “fused together” and
exchanged opinions about the scene we had witnessed. My brother insisted gravely,
“Those creatures are not humans. They must be aliens.” It was true that I liked science
fiction, but even I was unable to accept this view. What shocked me was the discovery
that an act of love between a man and woman seemed to bring on such a hideous
transformation.
“You’re kidding yourself,” my brother said. “No matter how crazy they get, two
people have eight arms and legs. I counted them and came up with ten.”
“Then you counted wrong,” I said for the sake of saying it, but I felt like the blood
had drained from my body.
From then on, when we looked at our father and mother, we couldn’t shake the
feeling that they might be aliens. Our father and mother seemed to know something too,
and they looked at us with different eyes – the eyes of aliens who suspect that their true
forms have been discovered. There is nothing as sad and terrible as having parents who
are not normal people. I have the feeling that in the course of all this, we may be made to
disappear.

3
Again, the word ｢気配｣(kehai) is used here.
53

Ever since the earthquake, the children have been behaving strangely. They look
at us as if we are weird, exotic animals. I’m certain that the children saw into our room
that evening.
Several days afterward, at a college reunion, I spoke with Okada, who works as a
psychologist.
“It seems the children saw us the other night.”
“Ah, yes - the primal scene.”
4

“What’s that?”
“According to Freud, the primal scene occurs when children glimpse adults,
particularly their parents, in the midst of pleasure.”
“It must have been a big shock to the children. Perhaps that’s why they’ve been
acting so strangely. What should I do?”
“You should do nothing,” Okada answered, his expression regaining its
seriousness. “That’s my opinion, anyway. Time is the best physician in such cases.”
We parted that day without being able to have a detailed discussion, but my wife
was even more concerned about the problem than I, so much so that she could hardly face
the children.
“The children are up late every night, and they seem to be discussing something,”
my wife said nervously.

4
See footnote 9 on page 10 of the introduction for a discussion of the primal scene. Kurahashi’s views on
psychoanalysis are discussed on pages 10-11.
54

“Let’s try to find out what the children are doing at night.” I made the decision,
and despite some opposition from my wife, I secretly installed a security camera in the
children’s room. Due to the nature of my job, I am particularly adept at such technical
tasks.
I can’t imagine anything more unsettling than what I saw as a result. I have not
yet told my wife about it. I have the feeling that it would be best not to tell her. How do
you inform your wife that her children are having an incestuous relationship? Yet the
reality of it was not that simple. Setting aside the question of whether or not to call it
incest, it is beyond my power to explain the shape they formed.
Their bodies had completely transformed (all that remained is what appeared to be
their faces, so it was possible to tell them apart from each other), bringing to mind a sea
cucumber. Ken was inside Yuko like a sword in a sheath – or maybe it would better to say
that the two of them resembled a partly peeled banana. Their arms and legs had shrunk to
the size of fins.
These were not humans. If the word “monster” is out of favor, then I will have to
refer to them as “aliens.” Recalling that these were not our biological children, I was
again amazed. The twins were born at a university hospital, the products of an artificially
inseminated manmade womb. What were they, really? In the worst case, I might have to
consider disposing of them with my own hands.
Putting aside the problem, that night I visited my wife’s bedroom for the first time
in quite a while. My wife has absolutely no responsibility for the fact that the children are
55

monsters. We discussed everything and came to the conclusion that it would be best to
take corrective measures, at which point I found myself possessed by a sense of calm.
Before the discussion, my wife approached me in an unusually aggressive manner,
and I accepted her advances. Of course, so as not to be seen again, we took every possible
precaution.
From the beginning, my wife was excited, and her reaction was quick. Temptation
led me to fly in one huge burst up toward ecstasy. My body sprouted many more
pseudopods than usual - I think there must have been more than sixteen of them. On my
wife’s part, more than sixteen nectar-filled cavities opened to meet the caress of my
pseudopods.
When it ended, I began to think. People, whatever kind of men and women they
are, do basically the same sort of thing. Being seen is, in itself, no cause for concern. The
real problem is that the children are strange creatures who love each other in a completely
different way…
56

We Are All Friends
1

Today, Aiko was Aiko - a shy, serious-minded, eighteen year-old Aiko.
Three days ago, Aiko went out of her mind, suffered an attack and was carried
away to the psychiatric ward at a university hospital.
On that dry August afternoon, the city wind blew whitish grains of sunlight
through the window, and Aiko’s whole world suddenly contracted like the pupils of a cat
when exposed to light. From that point on, she was no longer able to make sense of
anything. Her mother heard a sound like an animal howling and came upstairs to find
Aiko in spasms on the floor, her body stretched tight as a bow.
“Aiko, is this some kind of an act?” her mother asked, but Aiko only foamed at
the mouth, her face crablike, her body convulsing wildly. “Maybe it’s a hysterical
attack,” her mother surmised, immediately calling in her father from his study next door.
“Call a doctor, a doctor. Calling me won’t do any good,” her father said irritably,
making no move to rise from his desk.
Her father was a professor at a famous university, and a first edition of Das
Kapital or a thick copy of Grundrisse
2
lay open atop his desk at all times. The topmost
drawer remained partly open because the professor’s hurried attempt to nudge it closed

1
This is a non-literal translation of the original title of the story, ｢亜依子たち｣ (“Aiko-tachi”). “Aiko” is,
of course, the heroine’s name, and the suffix -tachi indicates a group of people which includes the
individual named. “Aiko and the Others” or “Aiko and Her Friends” would be a more literal translation of
the title.
2
Both economic treatises by Karl Marx. See footnote 13 on page 14 for a brief discussion of these texts.
See pages 15-6 of the introduction for a discussion of Kurahashi’s views on Marxism.
57

with his belly had failed, and his wife deliberately looked away, stabbing her husband
with an ice-cold glare. Within that drawer, a secret collection lay hidden as if shrinking
from prying eyes. It was kept ordinarily under strict lock and key. When the students in
the professor’s seminar came to visit, they snickered, “Well, Hegel was the same way.
They found all kinds of interesting pictures and writings in his study after he died.” His
wife had simply turned pale and flashed them a contemptuous look. At that moment, she
had looked something like a white fox.
Like a sleepwalker, Aiko stumbled into her father’s study. The attack seemed to
have ended.
“What was that all about?” Aiko’s mother asked, staring at her daughter with eyes
in which suspicion still lingered.
“I don’t know,” Aiko said in a voice that was higher than normal. When she
glanced sidelong at her father and mother, all traces of her usual timidity had vanished,
and her eyes sparkled with the brazenness of a seductress. Frightened, her mother took
one step backward. Stepping through the opening, Aiko approached her father, saying,
“You’re always studying so hard, Professor.” She sat down on her father’s lap, inserted
her hand into the desk drawer and grasped an unnamable, life-size wooden thing. While
pounding on the desk, she began to tunefully recite Das Kapital in German with the lilt of
a sutra.
Aiko had become Maiko. This is the name she herself offered. And when she
turned back into Aiko, Aiko remembered nothing. About the attack, or about Maiko.
58

The following day, Aiko’s mother took her to the university for a psychological
evaluation. On the way there, Aiko’s eyes were gray and she remained sunk in an
irritable silence. This, also, was not the ordinary Aiko. As soon as she entered the
examination room, Aiko ran to the blackboard and wrote

MILLA

in a thick scrawl. The doctors looked puzzled. “It’s my name,” Aiko pronounced,
annoyed. She sat as if glued to her chair, stared at the wall without moving a muscle, and
refused to answer any questions. We suspect it may be catatonic schizophrenia, the
doctors informed Aiko’s mother. When she glimpsed the word “catalepsy” on Aiko’s
medical chart, Aiko’s mother turned pale and her face sharpened, so that it began to
resemble that of a fox.
“But not even one person in our family has ever had that illness.”
Aiko’s father was fifty-two years old, a professor at ____ University; her mother
was forty-five, a graduate of ____ Women’s College; her eldest brother was a teaching
assistant at the same university as her father; her younger brother was studying abroad;
her father’s eldest brother was the president of ____ University; her mother’s older
brother was the president of ____ Bank…
The doctors admitted that they could find no fault with any of this.
“Anyway, let’s go home,” her mother said, extending her hand. Milla scratched
the back of her mother’s hand like a hissing cat with its hackles raised. Her eyes were
59

open wide, yet from inside she saw nothing but a wall. The wall was stained, and cracks
ran across its surface. Bit by bit, the cracks expanded, and a golden spider emerged.
“God!” Milla cried, but no one heard her. The spider was God. God worked its
hairy legs, burrowing deep inside Milla’s mind. “Ah! God is eating my brain!”
Because placing Aiko in the hospital at her father’s university would present
problems, her mother and father agreed to admit her to an inconspicuous private hospital.
A distant relative of Aiko’s mother ran a large psychiatric hospital in K City.
“Aiko has tired herself out with all that studying – her entrance exams kept her
busy until spring. It would be best for her to take it easy at ____’s place in K City this
summer. The ocean is nearby, and it’s in a pine forest so it’s nice and cool.”

Today, Aiko was a well-behaved Aiko. She rode in the car with her mother to K
City. Aiko was convinced that she was being led like a blindfolded kitten to a far-off
place where she would be abandoned, and she had the feeling that her chest might
collapse. She found her attention drawn repeatedly to the large beads of sweat that had
formed on the back of the elderly driver’s neck. The car belonged to the university. Since
her father was the department head, he was allowed to make free use of both the car and
the driver. But it doesn’t seem right to use it with the driver to travel so far on my account,
Aiko thought. Shall I pull out a handkerchief and wipe the back of his neck for him? Of
course, she could not do this in front of her mother. It seemed that she was not even
allowed to make small talk with the driver. When he tried to strike up conversation, her
mother reflected his words with the cold grimness of a shield.
60

They arrived at the seashore. At the entrance to K City’s public beach, the tanned
thighs of young boys and the flower-colored swimsuits of young girls covered the
steaming sand. “Let us out here,” said her mother. The driver had been informed that
they had come for a swim. When they got out of the car, Aiko’s mother spread open a
parasol and Aiko put on a straw hat with a wide crease in the top.
“Go straight back to Tokyo. My husband has a meeting at the student union at
four.”
“But there’s plenty of time left. Why don’t you take a rest and have something
cold to eat?”
Her mother remained silent, offering no instruction to the driver, who was too
timid to get out of the car. Aiko felt dizzy. Sweat dripped down her back.

Before she knew it, Aiko had turned into Maiko. Maiko spun around, ran to the
rest house, bought a cold cola and an ice cream cone and thrust them upon the driver.
Then she pointed to the rest house and said, “Go ahead and take a rest, mother. I’ll be
right along.”
After ensuring that her mother had turned the other way, Aiko climbed into the
passenger seat.
“Let’s go,” said Aiko, inserting the straw from the cola bottle into the driver’s
mouth. “To ____ Psychiatric Hospital. That’s where they’re sticking me. They say I’m
crazy. My mother is an upstanding, normal person, so let’s leave her over there.”
61

____ Hospital stood atop a hill not far from the beach. It was bounded to the left
and the right by a pine forest. A swath of forest had been chopped down so that this pure
white building could be constructed in its midst. It’s just like a boat, thought Maiko. A
passenger boat that had been painted white. Atop the white pavement, Maiko’s white
figure looked as if it would dissolve into the wavering heat. Maiko ducked beneath the
gate, removed her sandals and, dangling them in one hand, proceeded down the hallway.
The shouts of the nurse at the front desk followed along behind her. She opened a door
that smelled of fresh varnish and found three doctors sitting around a table drinking a
strawberry-colored beverage.
Circling them with the supple gait of a cat, Maiko said, “You’re all here to judge
me, aren’t you? But God seems to have skipped your little meeting.”
“And who are you, Miss?”
“Maiko Makabe.”
“Oh yes, we heard today that you were on your way. You’re Dr. Makabe’s
daughter,” said a bald-headed doctor. This was the hospital director.
“I hate bald old men. I want a young, handsome doctor to treat me. Like that one
over there,” said Maiko, throwing the lasso of her gaze about a young doctor who must
have been close to thirty.
“My name is Miki,” said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders. “And I take it
you’re Dr. Makabe’s daughter, Aiko.”
62

“No, I’m Maiko,” said Maiko, approaching the wall and writing MY-KO
3
in big
letters with her finger. “It’s not I, it’s MY. Don’t get mixed up.”
“I see. And where is your mother? Didn’t she come with you?”
“My mother turned into a white fox. The wind from the ocean is strong today, and
the moment we got out of the car the wind blew up and tore the wig right off my
mother’s head. It just kept blowing away, and when she went off chasing it she looked
like a monk with a hairless, shiny head. I doubled over laughing and my mother glared at
me. Her eyes slanted and she turned into a white fox. I’ll have a cigarette, Doctor.”
The director and another middle-aged doctor walked out, leaving only Miki and
Maiko. Without warning, Maiko planted herself on Miki’s lap, bringing her face close to
his. The scent of a young girl’s hair and the odor of sweat closed in on Miki. Her bare
arm brushed coolly against Miki’s like a long, slender reptile.
“They’ve gone to get the armor, haven’t they?”
“The armor?”
“The armor and the arm and leg shackles and the heavy chains. They’re going to
put me inside a suit of armor so I can’t move around, aren’t they?”
“You mean a straitjacket? Those aren’t used anymore.”
Miki lightly pushed Maiko away and stood up, yet somehow Maiko’s slim wrist
remained in his hand. It was like the grip used to take someone’s pulse, and in fact the
rush of Maiko’s blood reached Miki like the sound of a church organ. This pulsation of a

3
Atsuko Sakaki points out that “‘Mai’ is one of the female names which Kurahashi uses frequently,
rendered in a variety of Chinese characters. The primary reason for this preference is that ‘Mai’ is
phonetically identical with ‘my’ (270). In the same manner, the names of all Aiko’s various personalities in
this story are phonetically equivalent to a first-person pronoun.
63

young girl’s existence pleasured him, and he stood as if frozen in place. Maiko, her wrist
still surrendered to him, stood warily, as if she might topple over. Miki suddenly thought
of an altarpiece by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights
4
– a depiction of
the Garden of Eden in which Christ grips a naked, slender young Eve by the wrist.
Aiko’s mother arrived, pale with anger. Maiko jumped abruptly onto the table and
began to chant, “The white fox is here, the white fox is here.”
It was decided that Aiko, as Maiko, would remain at the hospital for continued
treatment.

Today, Aiko turned into Miiko and escaped from the hospital.
Neither Miki nor any of the other doctors anticipated Aiko’s transformation into
Miiko. After all, it was the first time she had ever turned into Miiko, and since her
hospitalization Aiko had remained her lonesome, quiet self, obediently taking walks
through the forest with Miki or her nurse each day.
It was evening. All alone, Aiko sat in her room. Someone seemed to be calling her
from the room next door, but there was no one staying in that room. When she went to
have a look, it was as empty as a freshly gutted bird. One door opened to another, and
when the final door swung open at the end of a hallway darker than the vacant innards of

4
The Garden of Earthly Delights is the most famous work by Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch
(c.1450-1516). It is a vast work, measuring about seven feet high by thirteen feet wide. According to artist
and critic Celia Rabinovitch, it “presents an excess of sensuous and psychologically disturbing images that
point the way toward the power of the dream and the imagination to create a new reality – a surreality” (61).
Because of the subject matter of this and other works, it has been speculated that Bosch may have belonged
to a heterodox religious sect that believed in a “millennial vision of earthly paradise, a new Jerusalem
established in the present moment” and which “advocated free conjugal love and nudity in worship” (61).
64

a snake, it was evening and the sun was still shining. But the light seemed fake somehow,
like a drawing. Aiko had turned at some point into Miiko. She put on rubber flip-flops
with her jean pants and stepped out into the sun.
The wall was Miiko’s entire world. Miiko was walking inside a wall. Even sights
that were familiar to Aiko were strange to Miiko. The forest that lay beyond the back
yard was a coil of black parallel lines, and the evening sun was a circle drawn in red
chalk. As she marched through the wall, Miiko muttered irritably.
“What a thick wall! When will it ever end?”
Yet beyond the forest lay a road and some sand dunes and an ocean that had been
painted blue. Miiko rubbed her lips together viciously and dabbed at the horizon with her
finger. Her heart was filled with clay like that used to build a wall. Her face was bone-dry
and caked with powdery indifference.
“I am so cool,” Miiko muttered, swaying her hips. The world itself seemed
contort a little.
“Hey, you wanna ride?” asked a rattlesnake wearing sunglasses, extending its
head. An alligator which had been painted bright red slithered up beside her.
5

“That’s a Porsche, isn’t it?” said Miiko, stroking the alligator’s long snout.
The Porsche purred happily, its body quivering.
Miiko took a seat amid a group of gangly young men. Their legs were as long as
those of spider crabs and their heads were small, so that when they shook it made a sound

5
As noted in footnote 20 on page 27, this scene strongly recalls the opening scene of Kurahashi’s novel
The Saint Girl.
65

like a dried nut. The boys were always passing around sleeping pills and their minds had
melted and the drippings had collected inside their pelvic cavities. While they danced the
twist with abandon, their brains sloshed around inside.
The car hurtled along but went nowhere at all. Walls surrounded them to the front,
the rear, and the sides, seeming to thicken by the moment. Miiko had no past and no
future. Only a now like caustic lime filled her body to the bursting point. Her eyes were
clear, but they resembled the eyes of a dying dog, reflecting nothing. They were no
different than two holes bored into a wall.
“Have you heard about the wild party?” asked the boy who was driving the car.
Miiko and the others entered a building like a sunken battleship. Miiko saw the
words “___ Condominiums” written on the wall. The room was full of people with no
faces. Some of the men wore beards which managed only barely to set off the contours of
their faces from the surrounding walls. The two holes in their faces needed to be covered
by something, so they wore sunglasses. Several of the men spoke to Miiko, asking her
name and introducing themselves. All their names were codes made up of one or two
initials, like “K” and “J.J.” and “D.B.” The girls had painted their lips the hue of violets,
apparently having coordinated this color scheme in advance, and blue shadows
surrounded their eyes, which were fringed with lashes as sharp as thorns. They spoke to
each other in low voices, but no one was interested in what anyone else had to say and
every conversation topic was like a solo that broke off after a few beats.
66

“Have you heard about the October Revolution that happened in New York last
year?”
6

“Yeah. Ornette Coleman’s been playing violin and trumpet lately.”
“Bud Powell disappeared again.”
They gathered like this almost every day, knowing nothing about each other’s
families or lives or real names, and stared at each other through discs of black glass.
When they parted they were left with nothing to think about and a state of withdrawal
swallowed up all vestiges of awareness. They believed that they were “living cool.”
A twist record started to play. Although Aiko had never danced before, Miiko had
no trouble dancing about wildly. One of the boys had buttoned his shirt just above his
navel, but as he danced about his lower half was completely exposed. The boy in front of
Miiko unzipped his jeans and started to dance, and an arrow emerged and pointed straight
at the ceiling with hideous stoicism. Miiko followed the other girls in removing her shirt
and baring her breasts. These two fleshy fruits swung with such lewdness she couldn’t
believe they were hers, and she worried that they might tear off from her chest. Don’t
ever touch your partner, just look at your partner and twist like a maniac. The world
dissolved, and Miiko sensed that she was alone. Her sweaty jeans clung damply to her
thighs and shone like freshly burnished leather, then began at last to gleam like steel. A

6
The “October Revolution in Jazz” was a four-day event which took place in 1964 and was “organized by
trumpeter-composer Bill Dixon to showcase the avant-garde (participants among the twenty-odd acts
included Jimmy Giuffre, Sun Ra, Paul Bley, Charles Moffatt, Milford Graves, John Tchicai, and Roswell
Rudd)” (Gennari 254). For more on the role of modern jazz in this scene, see page 28.
67

comet flew in from some infinitely far-off place and collided with her jeans. This lifeless
husk of a star gave off an acrid odor.
All around, couples embraced each other on the sofas and the floor. Miiko leaned
against the wall, her chest heaving, and took in the scene around her with wide eyes.
Some of the couples huddled like beasts and some of them embraced while standing up.
In some cases, men embraced other men. Miiko soon lost interest. A boy with a red shirt
wrapped around his neck beckoned Miiko. She followed him and lay flat on her back on
a carpet that stank of sweat and feet. The boy began to tug on Miiko’s jeans. This made a
sound like an animal being skinned alive, and Miiko screamed. Miiko was no longer
Miiko. Her body stretched tight as a bow, and her hips were contorted by spasms more
intense than any twist.
“She’s incredible!”
A number of young boys gathered to watch this demonically “cool” twist.

The next thing she knew, Aiko was Milla. Milla lay curled up sullenly in a room
at the police station. She remembered being interrogated at this type of place before,
when her mother took her to the university hospital for the medical examination. Other
than this, Milla remembered nothing. She did not remember Aiko or Maiko or even
Miiko.
It was Miki who came to claim Milla. Her mother absolutely refused to enter the
police station. She had (in Milla’s words) turned into a white fox. She waited outside,
68

trembling with anger. Miki stated that Milla was in treatment for a mild case of
obsessive-compulsive disorder, submitted a written apology, and led Milla outside.
“Do you remember me?”
Without looking at Miki, Milla shook her head.
“Who are you? I’m Milla,” she said.
“You didn’t tell them our names, did you?” This was the first thing Aiko’s mother
asked Miki when the two of them emerged from the police station.

It had been hot since morning, and Aiko had a mild headache, but when she woke
from her nap that afternoon, Aiko had turned into Maiko.
Maiko went to Miki’s room, where she celebrated her transformation into Maiko
by smoking two cigarettes.
“Doctor, do you know who I am?”
“You’re Maiko,” said Miki, preparing to write a memo. “That’s an odd necklace
you’re wearing today.”
Maiko glared. “No. Don’t take notes,” she said, her expression blank. “I made it
with my teeth.”
“Really? Open your mouth and let me have a look.”
Maiko closed her eyes and stuck out her chin. Miki cupped it in his hand. Maiko’s
chin seemed very fragile. Miki gently pulled downward, but Maiko showed no sign of
opening her mouth, so he turned back her upper lip to reveal a sparkling set of teeth,
including a pair of sharp canines.
69

“Don’t lie to me. You still have all your teeth, Maiko.”
“Actually, Doctor,” said Maiko, taking hold of Miki’s hand in which her chin
continued to rest, “this necklace is made of someone else’s teeth. Whose do you think
they are? Aiko’s. They’re Aiko’s teeth.”
“Who’s Aiko?” asked Miki, wearing a deliberately puzzled expression.
“You mean to tell me you don’t know? I guess you’re going senile. Something
must have happened between you and Aiko.”
“No, I haven’t met any Aiko.”
“She’s my twin sister.”
“That’s news to me.”
“We’re identical twins. Our faces are exactly alike, Doctor, so you wouldn’t be
able to tell us apart. But Aiko is a fraud.”
“A fraud?”
“A fraud. A phony. Unlike me, Aiko is stupid, but she studies all the time so she
can get good grades and mom and dad will like her. She’s a hypocrite. She studies hard,
but she has a dark side. And Aiko is jealous of me – because of you, Doctor,” said Aiko,
placing Miki’s finger against her canines and gazing into his eyes.
“Enough of this pretending. You’re Aiko. Stop playing games with me.”
“You’re the one who’s playing games with me, Doctor.” Maiko gripped Miki’s
wrist in both her hands. “Aiko is Aiko. She has nothing to do with me. But Aiko has a
thing for you, too, Doctor. When I come to visit her here, she puts on a disgusted face and
70

shuts herself away in her room. That’s what she did last time, wasn’t it? Oh yes, that’s
right, the white fox was with us then...”
“Let go of my hand.”
“No! There’s something I want to ask you. Who do you like better, me or Aiko?
Tell me. Well… if you won’t tell me, then I’ll bite you.” Maiko bit Miki’s finger. “If you
tell me you like Aiko, I’ll bite you even harder.”
“I like you the best, Maiko,” said Miki, quickly pulling his hand free. Bite marks
had been imprinted in it. “What a set of teeth. They’re like the teeth of a wild animal.”
Maiko grinned and said, “I like you. I like you a lot, Doctor. To show you how
much I like you, I’ll give you a kiss.”
“That’s not necessary.”
Maiko hung from Miki’s neck and, like a baby bird in the act of feeding, brushed
her pouting lips against his. Then she began to cheerfully inspect the room. Miki sat
down in a chair and observed Maiko’s apparent euphoria. There was something artificial
about her cheerfulness.
Maiko ran her fingers across the academic volumes that lined the bookshelf, from
time to time reading off a title in an exaggerated tone that seemed inappropriate to the
book itself. At last, Maiko pulled out several books and stacked them up before Miki.
“Medard Boss, Binswanger, Frankl, Minkowski, Kretschmer.
7
I’ll be borrowing
these.”

7
All these psychiatrists, with the possible exception of Ernst Kretschmer, advanced theories which were
informed to some extent by existential philosophy. For further information, see Herbert Spiegelberg,
71

“What are you going to do with them?”
“I’m going to have Aiko read them. She’s a little crazy, you know. She has to
research her own illness so she can understand it. Doctor, where is Aiko?”

By nightfall, Aiko had turned once again into Aiko.
Aiko’s eyes were sad. Aiko’s eyes were always this way before she went to sleep
at night. No one in her family knew about this. When Aiko thought of her father and
mother, she felt as if she had been stuffed inside one of those terrible “iron maidens”
from the middle ages and the blood was being squeezed from her chest. Because of the
pain in her chest, Aiko knelt down, pressed her chest against the bed and hid her face.
Then she felt someone’s icy stare on her back. Somebody is watching me.
It was her father. Her father’s face was as thin as an ascetic’s, and his eyes were
pale. They were a snake’s eyes, and they shone with cruelty even when her father was in
the midst of one of his abstract academic arguments. Aiko had never looked directly into
her father’s eyes.
The day her mother brought her to the hospital, her father stood in the entryway
and demanded, “What inevitability
8
led to your illness?” His tone was that of a scholar on
a relentless search for truth. But as Aiko remembered it, his mouth had an ugly twist. He
hates me for getting sick. When Aiko realized that not only had her father never loved her,

Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1972).
8
A deliberate use of a Marxist term. Marx held that socialist revolution was an “inevitability.”
72

but had also never seemed to hate her or even scolded her, a chill ran down her spine. It
felt as if a cold blade had buried itself in the nape of her neck. Aiko jumped to her feet. It
was a silver moth. It seemed to have fallen after colliding with the electric light. Its
apparently lifeless husk lay utterly still. But this disgusting creature is only pretending to
be dead. With extreme repugnance, Aiko found her mother’s facing filling her vision like
a moth spreading out its wings to suffocate her. It looked like the face of a female corpse.
Aiko could not remember having ever seen her mother smile. Aiko, too, was the
type of girl who rarely smiled when she was at home. From time to time, she would
practice smiling in front of the mirror, but it never looked quite right. But Maiko smiles
all the time and talks about whatever she wants with Dr. Miki, Aiko thought. Maiko
makes me sick, going off and making friends with Dr. Miki… this was jealousy.
Aiko got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chest. Her arms stuck out of the
covers, forming a parallel line with her shoulders. She was in the habit of sleeping like
this no matter how cold the weather. When she was small, her mother would often come
and pull her arms out of the futon as she drifted off to sleep. Aiko felt some unnamable
thing welling up inside her, and to fend off her memories, she stuck both arms beneath
the covers. Aiko found her own warm body there. When she placed her arms atop her
stomach and her hands touched her center, her body opened up all on its own. A shiver
ran down her spine, and she felt herself break out in a sweat.
Aiko took a deep breath. Why is it wrong to do this? Abruptly, as if to banish her
mother’s face, Aiko tossed off the covers. When she exposed her sweaty chest and
extended her bare legs from the bed, she felt as if her heart had opened to the outside
73

world for the very first time. I’ll tell Dr. Miki everything. Even about the embarrassing
thing that happened tonight… This revelation made her body feel feverish, and she was
unable to sleep.

At the suggestion of the hospital director, Aiko was subjected to electric shock
therapy and phased injections of Cardiazol. However, the results were unsatisfactory.
Over the course of several hours, Aiko transformed repeatedly into Miiko, then into Milla.
“Hey, you,” Miiko called to Miki, telling him in a low, “cool” voice that she wanted
some dope. After dancing the twist for a while, she fell down and turned into Milla. Milla
was as irritable as a pregnant cat, and she scratched the director’s hand.

After about a week, Aiko’s father came to visit her in the hospital. When she
heard the news, Aiko turned immediately into Maiko, danced over to her father and
greeted him with a serious expression.
“Nice to meet you. My name is Maiko. Aiko is resting up from her attack… May
I ask your name?”
“Your daughter’s symptoms are as you see them here,” Miki explained to
Professor Makabe. “At this point, she has five personalities which appear in turn. The
first is Aiko, that is, your daughter as she is normally. The second is Maiko. The third is
Miiko. The fourth is Milla. And the fifth – well, perhaps it’s less a personality than an
attack that appears at first glance to be a seizure. The different personalities have no
recollections of each other. This is, of course, a case of multiple personality disorder.”
74

“If you ask me, my daughter is only pretending to be crazy,” said the professor.
“So you’re saying this is a case of simulated psychosis – that she’s faking her
illness?” said Miki. “Our observations tell a different story. Your daughter is not
consciously pretending to be crazy. You’re familiar with the English word ‘simulation.’
As you know, this word is now often used in economics and operations research…”
“I don’t know anything about popular economics. All economists except Marx are
frauds.”
Miki observed the odd light that tinged the professor’s eyes, but he couldn’t bear
to gaze directly into them for long. The look in those eyes was one he saw often around
the hospital.
“My apologies,” said Miki. “It seems you’d rather believe that your daughter is
pretending to be crazy.”
“That’s a logically incorrect statement. Why would I have a preference? In either
case, I still couldn’t show my face to the world. I’ll take my daughter home before school
starts. At least a good home will be a better environment for her than this place.”
After the professor left, the director spoke with Miki.
“That man’s wife is a distant relative of mine. The whole family is weird. The
patient says that she doesn’t remember her family sitting down together for a meal, not
even once. Her mother or the maid cooks the meal and they take the food to their rooms
and eat it when they like. If you ask me, the daughter is the only one in the family who’s
anything like a normal human being.”

75

Several days passed, and Aiko was still Aiko. She was to return home the
following day.
Dinner had ended, and Aiko sat with Miki on a bench in the courtyard. The
courtyard was surrounded by a low corridor and the white-walled ward, and within it the
sun still shone, projecting a red rectangle onto the ground. In the midst of this horribly
artificial light, Aiko began to think. It’s like we’re on some kind of stage.
“The moon and the sun are both in the sky at the same time. Look how close they
are,” said Aiko, looking upward. Aiko blushed at the slight affectation in her voice.
“I can’t see the moon,” said Miki, anxiously knitting his brow. “Can you really
see it?”
“Yes,” declared Aiko. “It’s not my imagination. There’s a thing in the sky that
looks like a hole.”
“In the sky?” Miki brought his face close to Aiko’s, trying to see the thing from
her perspective. Aiko shifted her body.
“It’s like someone cut away part of the sky, leaving an empty void. A round void
shaped like the moon... what is it, Doctor? The sun is burning red and I can see this other
thing lined up right beside it…”
“You haven’t turned into Maiko, have you?”
“No, I haven’t. Do you want me to turn into Maiko, Doctor?”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
76

“I’ve never told you this before, Doctor, but I’m very sad. It’s always been this
way, ever since I was born. Maybe that’s the reason I see this void. I’m looking into my
own heart… I can tell you anything, can’t I, Doctor?”
Miki touched Aiko’s shoulder. It was sharp and awfully rigid.
“Relax,” said Miki. “Don’t be so tense. Loosen up… now, tell me about it.”
“Doctor, I’ve never loved another person. I could never manage to do it. Even
though I wanted to very badly, there was nobody I could love. I couldn’t even love
myself. I… I was scared. Of my dad and mom. I couldn’t even touch my own body…”
Tears welled up in her eyes. She turned her face aside, letting the tears fall into
the upturned palms which rested on her knees. Then Aiko abruptly turned these eyes full
of sparkling tears directly on Miki. Her body as well turned sharply in his direction.
“But I’m not scared anymore. I know now that there’s someone I can love… and
that’s you, Doctor. I love you.”
Aiko’s heart was open. Miki felt that over the course of these three weeks, during
which these many “Aikos” had appeared in turn, the psychotherapeutic conditions he had
created – that is, listening to her, allowing this accumulated story-telling to open Aiko’s
heart like a burst of fireworks – had successfully realized Frankl’s “logotherapy.”
9

However, Miki recognized the danger in the burning flame that leapt from Aiko’s heart.
She’s aiming for the wrong target…

9
See pages 30-1 for a brief discussion of logotherapy.
77

“If you fell in love with me, that would cause a lot of problems,” said Miki in as
soft a voice as he could manage. “I realize that you’ve never experienced this kind of
situation with anyone else. You’ve found a situation in which you can love another
person. By chance, within this situation, you’ve begun to love me – me, the only you
you’ll ever know. But this love is mistaken. We’re a doctor and a patient who are bound
by a treatment relationship. You understand, don’t you?”
“So a patient is all I am to you? Is it wrong for me to love you?”
“That love is a dead end.”
“But if you accepted it…” Aiko gave Miki a determined look. “Or do you hate me
because I’m always turning into Maiko or Miiko?”
“I like all of you, Aiko.”
“I know you’re married, Doctor. But it doesn’t matter.”
“If you don’t stop obsessing over it, terrible things are going to happen.”
“I’d rather obsess over it and go crazy, like Julian Green’s Adrienne Mesurat.
10

I’d rather go crazy, Doctor.”
Aiko’s eyes gleamed ominously. She was beginning to turn into Maiko. Turn into
Maiko. Turn into Maiko and seduce Dr. Miki. Aiko chanted these words like a mantra.
But Aiko was still Aiko. Miki, who watched carefully over Aiko, laid a hand on her
shoulder in relief.

10
Julian Green (1900-98) was a French-born American author who is remembered primarily for his French
language works on faith and religion. Adrienne Mesurat is a 1927 novel whose titular heroine becomes
murderously obsessed with a middle-aged doctor.
78

That night, as Miki lay in bed smoking a cigarette, Aiko came in. He imagined at
first that she had turned back into Maiko. Her gait was like a sleepwalker’s. She seemed
to have just emerged from the bath, and her calves sparkled beneath her yukata.
“Doctor, I’m sorry about before,” said Aiko. Her voice and tone were obviously
those of Aiko. Feeling a sense of relief mixed with disappointment, Miki reached to put
out his cigarette in the ashtray – and found that he had extinguished the cigarette on
Aiko’s thigh.
“What are you doing?!”
“This is how I want it,” said Aiko, fixing her yukata. “I was stupid to say
something so embarrassing to you. This is my punishment. I won’t get sick and cause you
problems anymore, so there’s no need for you to worry. I appreciate all you’ve done.”
Aiko was smiling. She smiled as if her diaphragm were being ripped apart. Come back
anytime, Miki started to say, but his tongue froze in his mouth.

The next day, Aiko was released from the hospital. She attempted suicide that
night. She swallowed some sleeping pills, but she was taken to the hospital right away,
and nothing came of it. Miki rushed from K City to Aiko’s home in Tokyo. He met
Aiko’s brother and other relatives as well as her parents. The maid had been dispatched to
the hospital. Miki himself felt some responsibility, and he had prepared himself for all the
criticism he expected would be brought to bear upon him, but no one blamed him. Aiko’s
mother only smiled mysteriously and said the following.
79

“Aiko took a few too many sleeping pills, that’s all. By no means was she trying
to commit suicide. Aiko would never do something so disgraceful. But if word were to
get out – well, that would cause problems. So please, I ask you, don’t think too hard
about it.”
“No, it was obviously a suicide attempt,” Miki railed indignantly. “I know the
reason. Aiko is still in danger. You must let me visit her.”
But in the end, Miki was not allowed to see Aiko.

Two months later, Aiko came to visit Miki in the hospital one October day,
looking happy. She wore a white wool suit and carried a traveling bag. Miki met Aiko in
the courtyard.
“Do you know who I am now, Doctor?” said Aiko, tilting her head adorably.
“Well,” said Miki, his eyes settling on Aiko’s face, which was even more
beautiful than before, “you’re not just Aiko, are you?”
“That’s right,” said Aiko, picking up a cigarette and saying in Maiko’s voice,
“I’m all of me. Now I’m Maiko – see? And I can turn into Miiko, or Milla. Like this.”
Then Aiko threw off her high-heeled shoes and began to twist in her bare feet.
Her hair ruffled, her eyes “cool,” the fallen leaves on the rock swirling around her.
“Wanna dance?”
“I’m no good at the twist.”
“What a bore. Well then, I’ll turn into Milla.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
80

According to Aiko, all of her, all these previously disconnected parts, had become
multiple forms of herself which were now able to communicate with each other.
“We are all friends - all the Aikos.”
“It was thoughtful of all of you to come back here,” said Miki, wearing a smile
which displayed an awkward mixture of anxiety and reminiscence.
“If my old room is open, I’d like to spend the night. I’ve just gotten back from a
trip, and I’m tired,” said Aiko sweetly, flashing her teeth. Aiko climbed right into bed.
When Miki went to have a look, she was already asleep. Her sleeping face was like that
of a child who was neither male nor female. Glimpsing this slumber from which the
shadow of anxiety was absent set Miki’s mind at ease. It’s like the face of an angel. And
if that’s so, then maybe she’s really cured.

“Doctor, Doctor,” called the nurse, emerging from the night duty room with a
newspaper in her hand. “Take a look…”
The following article appeared in the evening edition of the paper under the
headline “Bizarre Break-In at Professor’s Home.”
Last night around 11:20 PM, a gang of several young males broke into the
residence of Shin’ichiro Makabe (52, ____ University School of Economics chair) at
____-ku, ____-cho, number ____, tying up Shin’ichiro, his wife Misao
11
(45), and their

11
This is also the name of the mother of the heroine of Kurahashi’s novel The Saint Girl [Seish ōjo] (1965).
The character used to write it, ｢操｣, can mean either “chastity” or “manipulate” (in the sense of a puppet, a
machine, etc.). In The Saint Girl as well, Misao is depicted as rigidly conservative and emotionally cold.
81

domestic helper S (16). After ransacking the residence, they made their getaway at
approximately 4:00 AM. All the suspects were around twenty years old and allegedly
danced the twist on the second floor of the home for approximately five hours. It is
reported that while no cash was taken, the drawers of Shin’ichiro’s desk were destroyed,
and the intruders made off with a treasured possession. Shin’ichiro denies that a break-in
occurred, but the ____ police station confirms the incident.
Further, according to S, Shin’ichiro’s daughter A (18), who may have assisted the
intruders, took part in that night’s “twist party.” It is said that A has recently been
suffering from neurosis, and it appears that she may have invited her dance partners to
commit the crime. The police are searching for A, who is believed to have been a
perpetrator and to hold the key that will unlock the case.

Incidentally, Kurahashi’s own mother was named Misae, only one syllable away from “Misao” (Mulhern
199).
82

The Children Who Played Butcher

Long ago, in a small town in Holland, two young boys watched their father
butcher a pig, and as soon their father went out, the boys decided to imitate the
slaughtering. The older boy said to the younger, “you be the pig,” and used a knife to
slice open his brother’s throat. Their mother heard the screams and came running. The
sight sent her into frenzy, and in an instant she had grabbed the knife from the older boy’s
hand, stabbed him in the heart, and killed him. She returned to her senses, remembering
that she had been giving the baby a bath in a tub full of hot water. When she went to have
a look, the baby had drowned to death in the tub. The mother went half-crazy and hung
herself. Before long, the father returned, glimpsed the awful tragedy that had occurred in
the home, suffered another of his chronic heart attacks and followed in his family’s
footsteps.
The following day, some children who had watched the butchering game got
together and decided to play butcher themselves. They forced the child they always
bullied to play the role of the pig, binding his arms and legs and stringing him up by his
feet, at which point the “bully” sliced open his neck. The girl who played “sausage
maker” collected the blood in a bowl. A city councilman passed by and observed this
brutal scene, and soon enough, the whole town was in an uproar.
This part of the tale is recorded in The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, but in
fact, the trouble did not end there.
83

The child who played butcher was called in and asked why he had done such a
thing. The child answered that he was only imitating the butchering game he had seen the
children of a local family playing. An investigation revealed that everyone in that family
was dead, so the parents of the child who played butcher were called in, and the
authorities demanded to know how on earth they had raised their child. The parents
responded that they had no idea why he would do such a thing, and they blamed the
education the child had received at school. The authorities pursued the child’s teacher,
but the teacher promptly fled the town and disappeared.
The mayor was left with no choice but to fire the school principal. The principal
objected, insisting that it was the fault of the adults for killing pigs in public, and that the
children had only learned from the adults – this was his testimony at the city council
meeting. After a long-winded, rancorous debate, the council arrived at the conclusion that
the mayor was responsible, and it was decided that he would be dismissed, but of course
the mayor refused to accept this resolution.
It so happened that a patrol led by the king was on its way to the town. The mayor
appealed to the king, asking him to hand down a fair judgment. When the king heard
what had happened, he immediately seized the child who had played the role of the
butcher, strung him up by his feet and sliced open his neck, just as this child had done to
the “pig.” Then he had the child’s parents hung.
This judgment did not satisfy the townspeople. In fact, many of them resented it,
and their sympathy coalesced around the child executed by the king. However, they could
not defy the king directly. The people gathered together, vowing as one that the past
84

would never be repeated, and in the end a bronze statue of the child who had played
butcher and was executed by the king was erected in the public square.
From that point on, the town refrained from killing pigs, cows, and sheep, stopped
eating meat entirely, and issued a “Municipal Anti-Meat Eating Proclamation.” However,
after several years passed, opposition toward the prohibition against eating meat
strengthened, and many people began to leave the town. The prohibition ultimately lost
its hold, and it was felt widely that purchasing and eating livestock butchered in other
towns would cause no great harm.
The bronze statue still stands in the town square. The statue shows a child whose
neck is about to be sliced open with a sword, and a close examination reveals a royal
crest carved into the sword. The phrase “The past will never be repeated” is engraved into
the rock beneath the statue.

Moral: Justice is created by popular opinion
85

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90

Appendix: Translations of Kurahashi’s Works into English

The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q [Sumiyakisuto Q no b ōken]. Trans. Dennis Keene. St
Lucia, Queensland, New Zealand: University of Queensland Press, 1979.

“The Boy Who Became an Eagle” [“Washi ni natta sh ōnen”]. Trans. Samuel Grolmes
and Yumiko Tsumura. New Directions in Prose and Poetry 29 (1974): 116-33.

Divine Maiden [Seish ōjo]. Trans. Bertha Lynn Burson. Divine Maiden: Kurahashi
Yumiko’s Seish ōjo. Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 1989. 1-252.

“The End of Summer” [“Natsu no owari”]. Trans. Victoria V. Vernon. Daughters of the
Moon. Berkeley, California: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, 1988. 229-40.

“The House of the Evening Faces” [“Y ūgao”]. Trans. Ian MacDonald. Two Lines. 2002:
127-37.

“The Little Girl with the Silver Hair” [“Shiroi kami no d ōjo”]. Trans. Kumiko Nakanishi.
The Life and Works of Yumiko Kurahashi. MA Thesis San Diego State
University, 1987.

“The Monastery” [“Ky ōsatsu”]. Trans. Carolyn Haynes. The Showa Anthology, Volume
2. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985.

“Partei” [“Parutai”]. Trans. Samuel Grolmes and Yukiko Tsumura. New Directions in
Prose and Poetry 26 (1973): 8-22.

“Partei” [“Parutai”]. Trans. Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson. This Kind of Woman.
Ed.Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson. Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1982. 1-16.

“Three Stories” (“Beneath the Blossoms” [“Hana no shita”], “Blossom Room” [“Hana
no heya”], “The Castle in the Sea” [“Kaich ū no shiro”]. Trans. S. Yumiko Hulvey.
Manoa 15:1 (2003): 119-29.

“To Die at the Estuary” [“Kak ō ni shisu”]. Trans. Dennis Keene. Contemporary Japanese
Literature. Ed. Howard Hibbett. New York: Knopf, 1977. 247-81.

91

“Two Tales from Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults” (“A Mermaid’s Tears” [“Ningyo no
namida”], “The Love Affair of Issun B ōshi” [“Issun B ōshi no koi”]). Trans. Marc
Sebastian-Jones and Tateya Koichi. Marvels & Tales 22:1 (2008): 171-82.

“Ugly Demons” [“Sh ūma-tachi”]. Trans. Lane Dunlop. Autumn Wind and Other Stories.
Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1994. 201-21.

“Ugly Demons” [“Sh ūma-tachi”]. Trans. Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura. New
Directions in Prose and Poetry 24 (1972): 55-67.

“Week for the Extermination of Mongrels” [“Zatsujin bokumetsu sh ūkan”]. Trans.
Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura. Mundus Artium: A Journal of
International Literature and the Arts 14.1 (1983): 103-13.

The Woman With the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko. Trans.
Atsuko Sakaki. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Day, Michael (author)

Core Title Children of the anti-world: confrontations between children and adults in the fiction of Kurahashi Yumiko

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 05/08/2009

Defense Date 03/31/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Japanese literature,Kurahashi Yumiko,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bialock, David T. (committee chair), Hayden, George (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email mday@usc.edu,michaelday83@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2216

Unique identifier UC1105844

Identifier etd-Day-2814 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-238008 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2216 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Day-2814.pdf

Dmrecord 238008

Document Type Thesis

Rights Day, Michael

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu