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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.