Mercenary mamas and rising sons: The figure of the controlling mother in modern Japanese literature

This dissertation explores how writers and directors in modern Japan have utilized the figure of the "controlling" mother to articulate various inequalities that have accompanied Japan's ongoing negotiations with the sociopolitical and epistemological authority of the West. Locating mother-son depictions in narratives from three different periods in Japan's modern history, I show how this trope was sometimes used to represent the maturation of the individual and at others the development of the nation. In Chapter One, which examines works by Meiji Period (1868--1912) writers Futabatei Shimei and Higuchi Ichiyo, I show how sons are depicted as being reluctantly pulled by their mother figures into new worlds revolving around financial concerns. These depictions reflected discomfort with the rapid societal changes taking place at the time. Chapter Two moves to early postwar works, where mothers exerted control over their sons not by forcing them toward an uneasy future, as they do in the Meiji works, but by beckoning them toward the safety and comfort of a childhood past. I interpret these narrative formulations as responses to the emphasis on patriarchal authority found in what had come to be seen as universal definitions of "normative" psychosexual development in Freud's version of "Oedipus." Perhaps because a model of normativity based on a powerful father figure proved ill suited for the case of a recently defeated Japan, this period saw a re-envisioning of Japanese culture along matricentric lines. I show how Yasuoka Shotaro, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Yoshida Yoshishige grappled with this tendency by re-enacting, rebutting and even mocking the Oedipal myth. Although these works expose how Western epistemological discourses reinforced existing hierarchies between Japan and the West, their resistance was undercut by the complexity of their narratives. Such an ambivalent stance is also present in later postwar works, which I discuss in Chapter Three. Filmmaker Masumura Yasuzo, for example, expresses his ambivalence by employing the mother-son dynamic as a metaphor for and diagnosis of the "social pathology" plaguing postwar Japan, at once critiquing the materialism of the 1960s and providing a cautionary tale that sees normative heterosexuality as a casualty in Japan's rise to economic power.