- Convenor:
-
Anna Specchio
(University of Turin)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel explores representations of care in contemporary Japanese literature, focusing on young carers, invisible reproductive work, night economies, and iyashi. It examines how care is redistributed across family, labor, and marginalized spaces.
Long Abstract
This panel explores literary representations of care as a relational and frequently invisible practice unfolding across family life, gendered expectations, and marginal social spaces. Rather than treating care as a stable moral category, the panel frames it as a contested field shaped by unequal distributions of responsibility, affective dependency, and silencing, asking how literature makes care legible precisely where it is strained, displaced, or rendered unrecognizable.
The first paper examines care in a super-aged society through Kamimura Yutaka’s Are You Being Saved?, focusing on the figure of the “young carer.” It analyzes how caregiving for an ill parent is naturalized as a filial obligation for daughters while its emotional and developmental costs remain obscured. Tracing the protagonist’s attempt to distance herself from imposed familial roles, the paper uses humor to interrogate responsibility within the family and to reveal underlying power asymmetries.
The second paper turns to Kobayashi Erika’s Trinity, Trinity, Trinity and “Shedding,” which exemplify her “invisible visible” aesthetics. By rendering imperceptible phenomena, such as radiation and unpaid care work, perceptible, Kobayashi conceptualizes care as both material and affective, inseparable from uncertainty and erasure. Her works resist narrative resolution, inviting readers to remain with ambiguity and vulnerability and reframing care as an unstable, ongoing process.
The third paper focuses on Kawakami Mieko’s Sisters in Yellow, where a runaway teenage protagonist assumes caregiving roles within a fragile “family of choice.” The novel depicts how care circulates among young women living under conditions of precarity, transforming domestic space into a site of both protection and confinement, and revealing the structural limits placed on care in contexts of poverty and exclusion.
The final paper examines Suzuki Suzumi’s Gifted and Graceless, situating care within the night economy and the adult film industry. Through fraught mother–daughter relationships and practices of emotional attentiveness, Suzuki foregrounds iyashi as a form of care that exceeds normative family models while remaining vital to the characters’ endurance and survival.
Together, these contributions propose a rethinking of care as fragmented, embodied, and relational, challenging dominant assumptions about where care belongs and who is expected to provide it in contemporary Japan.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Kawakami Mieko’s Sisters in Yellow, where a teenage protagonist assumes caregiving roles within a fragile “family of choice.” The novel depicts how care circulates among young women living in precarity, revealing the structural limits of care in contexts of poverty and exclusion.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines Kawakami Mieko’s Sisters in Yellow (2023), where a runaway teenage protagonist assumes caregiving roles within a fragile “family of choice.” The novel depicts how care circulates among young women living under conditions of precarity, transforming domestic space into a site of both protection and confinement, and revealing the structural limits placed on care in contexts of poverty and exclusion.
Set during the financial downturn of 1990s Tokyo, the novel follows a young protagonist named Hana, who grows up in poverty in a single mother household. Her mother, a bar hostess, is fun and loveable, yet childish and irresponsible, and the responsibility falls on Hana to fend for herself from preparing meals to earning money through minimum wage jobs. When her mother abandons her for a new boyfriend, Hana drops out of school and goes to live with Kimiko, who appears to be an adult figure that would give her the care that she had never received in her life. Together they open a shabby bar called Lemon, where Hana finds happiness and fulfillment for the first time. Yet, it quickly becomes clear that Kimiko has troubles of her own, and her unnamed disability requires care from those around her.
Soon, Hana is living with Kimiko, and two other girls around her age, Ran and Momoko—not blood relations, but a family of choice. The “yellow house” (kiiroi ie) that they share first appears to be a haven, but Hana’s caregiving turns into fanatic control driven by an obsession with money. The fate of Hana and the various women in her life reveal Kawakami’s critique of the neoliberal paradigm, showing that their choices are never actually independent or individual, but deeply embedded in systemic inequality, creating a downward spiral that traps the women in a life of poverty and crime. Yet, it is in the seediest of worlds where Hana finds love and security, no matter how precarious. Through its depictions of various forms of care, Sisters in Yellow questions the meaning of independence and female solidarity for women who exist on the fringes of society.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines how Kobayashi Erika’s “invisible visible” aesthetics offers a critique of contradictions of social reproduction, especially the relationship between unpaid care labor and the social environment in neoliberal Japan, through Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019) and “Shedding” (2020).
Paper long abstract
Japanese novelist and artist, Kobayashi Erika (b.1978) employs what she calls the “invisible visible” aesthetics in her multimodal works to visualize or verbalize something difficult to perceive, such as radiation, and to present the invisible as it is. This paper examines two works, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019; trans. 2022) and “Shedding” (DAPPI, 2020; trans. 2023, in Sunrise), which exemplify this aesthetic approach. Through these texts, Kobayashi offers a multilayered critique of Japan’s state-managed pronatalist policies and exposes the social inequalities produced in neoliberal Japan. I argue that Kobayashi’s “invisible visible” aesthetics operate through two interrelated dimensions: the resistance of the invisible and the oscillation between the visible and the invisible. The “invisible” encompasses a constellation of overlapping sites—radiation, non-(re)productive labor, unpaid care work, marginalized populations, intergenerational female relationships, cyclic bodily loss (menstruation and ova), and cyber violence on social media platforms—revealing how structural erasures are both material and affective. I further situate this aesthetics in relation to the concept of “negative capability,” defined as the capacity to remain with uncertainty, accepting a state of ‘being in midair’ without pretending to understand, while empathizing with and emotionally allying with others. In this presentation, I explore how Kobayashi’s works illuminate contradictions of social reproduction in neoliberal Japan, while briefly examining how imagination functions as a momentary practice of consolation for anxiety and as an embrace of negative capability.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Suzuki Suzumi’s Gifted and Graceless, showing how care emerges in ambivalent forms shaped by stigmatized labor and strained maternal ties. Through iyashi and non‑normative caregiving, the novels reveal fragile, embodied practices essential to the protagonists’ survival.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines the multiple, often ambivalent forms of care depicted in Suzumi Suzuki’s Gifted (2022) and Graceless (2023), focusing on how these narratives unsettle normative understandings of caregiving by foregrounding experiences of emotional intimacy, interdependence, and troubled maternal relations in contexts that are frequently rendered invisible. Both works center on women whose lives are shaped by work in sectors of Tokyo’s sex industry and by difficult, unresolved relationships with their mothers.
In Gifted, the narrator navigates the simultaneous demands of working as a hostess and living alongside her terminally ill mother, a dynamic in which care cannot be neatly separated into the domestic and the professional. Expectations surrounding motherhood, filial obligation, and bodily closeness are repeatedly frustrated. Although the daughter is conventionally positioned as the caregiver, it is the mother who insists on remaining with her and who ultimately performs a final act of care by gifting her daughter a poem, an expression of maternal love that contrasts sharply with the protagonist’s persistent inability to care adequately for either her mother or herself.
Graceless shifts focus to the backstage environment of the adult film industry, following a makeup artist whose work consists of tending to performers’ physical appearance and emotional fragility. Here, care is practiced through touch, attentiveness, and emotional calibration, yet remains socially unacknowledged. The protagonist’s relationship with her mother is marked by absence: this fractured maternal bond produces a complex affective structure in which care circulates through substitution, memory, and quiet endurance rather than through direct maternal presence.
Within a Japanese cultural context, the concept of iyashi, often associated with emotional soothing or healing, offers a useful framework for understanding these forms of care. In Suzuki’s works, practices of iyashi emerge as a form of care that exceeds normative family models yet remains essential to the characters’ survival.
By reading Gifted and Graceless together, this paper argues that Suzuki presents care not as a stable moral ideal but as a contradictory, deeply embodied practice shaped by stigmatized labor and strained intergenerational ties, prompting a reconsideration of how care is recognized, valued, and lived.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores care and family in Sukuwaretenjaneyo by Kamimura Yutaka, where a teenage girl struggles with her own well-being while caring for her ill mother. It examines the emergence of “young carers” and the role of humor in representing power dynamics between caregivers and care receivers.
Paper long abstract
Having transformed itself from an “ageing society” into an “aged society,” Japan is known as the oldest society in history. It therefore comes as no surprise that, in such a super-aged society (chōkōreishakai), the theme of care for older adults has attracted considerable attention in literary and film studies. In both reality and fiction, caregiving is commonly perceived and depicted as a family matter. Care is most often provided in the form of home care; consequently, the burden falls on the nuclear family, and particularly on women. An analysis of representations of care in literature is therefore essential to recognize the burdens borne by caregivers and to open discussion on new forms of caregiving and care-receiving that are not exclusively tied to traditional gender roles.
Furthermore, the lingering influence of a patriarchal family system, combined with increasing care demands in an aging population, has led to the emergence of “young carers.” While there is no legal definition of a young carer, the term generally refers to children under 18 who take on adult-like caregiving responsibilities, facing risks to their education, wellbeing, and rights.
This paper explores Sukuwaretenjaneyo (Don’t think you’re off the hook, 2025) by Kamimura Yutaka (b. 2000). The story follows a seventeen-year-old girl who attends high school while caring for her mother, who suffers from a serious incurable illness. At home, caregiving dominates her daily life, leaving her little space to think about school or her own future. Caught between her love for her mother and the unspoken pressure from her family and society that she should provide care simply because she is a daughter, she suppresses her own emotions and desires. The narrative traces her journey from being submerged in caregiving to seeking to distance herself from familial roles and reclaiming her own sense of self.
In this presentation, I examine how Sukuwaretenjaneyo depicts relationships and conflicts within the family, and how it raises questions about who within the family should bear responsibility for the care of adults. I further explore the role of humor in representing power dynamics between caregivers and care receivers.