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Paper short abstract

This paper reads Inoue Areno’s Namakawa: Aru sekusharu harasumento no kōkei (Raw Skin: A Scene of Sexual Harassment) (2022) through the recurring images of “membrane” and “raw skin,” examining how psychological, social, and interpretive conditions can obscure sexual violence, and how disclosure can leave victims exposed to renewed injury.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Inoue Areno’s Namakawa: Aru sekusharu harasumento no kōkei (Raw Skin: A Scene of Sexual Harassment) (2022) through its recurring images of a “membrane” (maku) and “raw skin” (namakawa). The novel begins seven years after Kokonoe Sakiho, a former student in a creative-writing class, was subjected to sexual violence by Tsukishima Koichi, a former literary-magazine editor who worked with distinguished writers and is now a popular lecturer. Moving between past and present and among the perspectives of victim, perpetrator, family members, students, and social-media users, the narrative asks how the same event can appear radically different depending on one’s position.

I argue that the image of a “membrane” captures the psychological, social, and interpretive conditions that make violence difficult to recognise: the languages of literary mentorship, intimacy, and consent, together with professional authority and everyday forms of complicity—such as silence, laughter, or accommodation—can all obscure unequal relations. At the same time, the title Namakawa, literally “raw skin,” evokes the condition of being painfully exposed after one’s protective layer has been stripped away. This metaphor becomes particularly significant in relation to the Japanese expression hitokawa mukeru, “to shed a layer of skin,” which positively signifies growth or maturation. Tsukishima believes that literary development requires stripping away protective surfaces, yet the novel exposes the ethical difference between helping someone “shed a layer” and forcibly stripping away another person’s skin. Through this contrast, Namakawa represents secondary victimisation as both prolonged vulnerability and renewed exposure after disclosure.