Backlist publishing has grown more popular these days, and the trend is welcome – it helps to take a breather from constantly chasing new titles and rediscover what’s been good for a long time. Taeko Kono’s stories were first published in post-war Japan in the 1960s, translated into English in the 90s, and now W&N (@orionbooks) have included the ’Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories’ collection into their Essentials list, and the book is again out on sale today. 

The themes of these stories are anti-socially dark: there is fetishisation of children, desire for violation, misogynistic attitudes of husbands and dutiful self-sacrifice of wives. Taeko Kono (or Kono Taeko in the Japanese order) is fearless and unsparing in her exploration of human psyche, and yet her prose is precise and quiet, wrapped in the logic of everyday life. Even though her protagonists often seem to resemble one another – they are mostly middle-aged women, in a romantic relationship or married but without children – and there is a trope of masochism present everywhere, still each story is distinct and explores motherhood and femininity from completely different angles. 

‘Night Journey’ is about a couple paying an unexpected visit to their close friends, who didn’t turn up for their first scheduled partner swinging date. In ‘Snow’ a grown-up woman, Hayako, shares terrible snow-caused migraines with her stepmother, who, many years ago, in a fit of temporary insanity, buried her crying baby in snow. ‘Crabs’ is a story about Yuko, recovering from tuberculosis on the Sotobo coast, who promises her visiting nephew to find a crab if he would stay overnight and keep her company when her husband arrives the next day. In ‘Final Moments’ Noriko is given 26 more hours to live, and after she sorts out the chores (throwing away dirty clothes, tidying up, writing notes) she starts wondering whether peaceful romantic co-habitation with her husband is indeed a proper marriage, or they are ‘simply lovers living together’. 

‘Toddler-hunting’ is probably the most well-known story of this collection, the one that put Taeko Kono on the Japanese literary scene in 1961, published in the litmag Shinchōsha. Hayashi Akiko, a misanthropic woman who detests girls’ aged three to ten years old’, finds boys of the same age intoxicating and her encounters with them ‘intensely pleasurable’. She would buy clothes for acquaintances’ toddlers, give them as presents and request the kids to try them on in order to watch a boy ‘wiggling his rear end,… twist around struggling his hardest, revealing his tight round belly full to bursting with the food he ate every mealtime’. In her daydreams she would imagine a father punishing a son, whipping him, making ‘lines of blood, as if racing each other, trickle steadily down’.

The ominous tales reveal a deeply skewed society structure and silent suffering behind the facade of politeness. Obliged to conform, restricted in their choices, female protagonists crave destruction in order to see their desires fulfilled. Unsettling and impossible to forget, these stories are now introduced to a new generation of readers who aren’t strangers to subversive literature, only to leave them shocked and in awe.