午夜剧场

After giving birth, there was a time I got off the train midway and breastfed on a station bench. At that moment, I felt severed from the civilized world and was struck by a primitive sensation of connecting with Paleolithic humans, or rather, all mammals. There is no place in this city for us, wet and slimy as we are. I gradually fell into an aphasic state.

Among postpartum women, some wander the boundaries between self and others. This state of undifferentiated self and other is also a mental dissociation, and there are other mothers having the same experience. I began to want to find the words for it.

A series in the literary magazine "Subaru" began in the form of interviews with mothers close to me, including Saho Terao and Chiaki Soma. As the reporting progressed, I began to feel that what I was questioning was not limited to childcare. While writing, I arrived at the core of what care is and what emotions are born when reaching out to those who are hurting or weak. It also connected to the scenery I saw when I took a three-month leave of absence from society to care for my mother, which began before I gave birth.

The subjects of my interviews gradually expanded to include those who had adopted children, and not just mothers but also fathers like Dominique Chen, Lang Lee from South Korea who has decided not to have children, and Leiko Ikemura who is devotedly engaged with students in Germany. I came to feel that I had to deconstruct the clichéd concepts of "mother" and "motherhood." Then, I encountered the concept of "mothering."

"Mothering" is defined as "the act of caring for and protecting children or other people," meaning it is not restricted by gender. Furthermore, in Western research, it was treated as a radical concept that counters capitalism.

In today's individualistic world, "dependency" is spoken of with a negative impression. However, as everyone experiences life and death, no being is not vulnerable, and society has over-nurtured the illusion that one can exist without depending on others. In the past, there may have been more diverse words for the threshold states of birth and contact with death. Could mothering not be a light in today's world, which seems to be established by alienating life? This is the book I wrote with that thought in mind.

Yuko Nakamura

Shueisha

312 pages, 2,200 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.