| Sumario: | Motherhood in any culture comes with a set of ideologies that restrains women's own desires and needs. In Japan, women with young children have recently coined the term,Mama-tomo, or ‘Mum-friends’, and formed loosely connected communities through their daily parenting routines. Kirino Natsuo's novelHappiness, originally published in instalments between July 2010 and October 2012 in women's magazineVery, depicts the social machinations of a particularmama-tomogroup in Tokyo's aspirational waterfront suburb. While the novel addresses contemporary women's issues and motherhood in particular, it also explores the map of Tokyo that engenders imaginary class distinctions. In this article, I follow the trail that the novel leaves on this map and identify the implications of that trail. In doing so, I draw on the concept of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ spaces, as theorised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in their critique of capitalism and modern living. Writing sympathetically to the women protagonists – and hence to the readers of the magazine – Kirino is nonetheless critical of the women's belief in the imaginary values of an elite class and their willingness to submit to the imposed ideology of motherhood. In this sense, the novel repudiates the consumerist lifestyle models constructed for sale throughVeryand the popular media at large. It is my contention that the beliefs critiqued in Kirino's novel have their source partly in the spatial imagination of the Edo period (1603–1868), during which the rulingsamuraiclass facilitated a systematic social segregation. It is ironic, however, that the segregation in turn underscored the demarcation of theOtherspace, a liberated dynamic space outside the strictly regulated habitat of the ruling group. Endorsing thisOtherspace, Kirino redraws a map of Tokyo through this novel to show the young generation of mothers a way of exiting the captivity of imposed ideologies of motherhood, class, and consumerism.
|
|---|