Taeko Kono

was a Japanese writer who was active during the latter half of the 20th century. Kōno belonged to a generation of female Japanese writers who became more well-known in the 1960s and 70s. She established a reputation for herself as an acerbic essayist, a playwright, and a literary critic.

By the end of her life, she played a role in Japan's literary establishment and one of the first female writers to serve on the Akutagawa Literary Prize committee. As a child, she suffered from poor health.

After the war, she finished her economics degree at Women's University (currently Osaka Prefecture University), graduating in 1947. Kōno has written about the new sense of freedom and the high hopes she had after the war. Sadomasochism, for example, figures in "Toddler-Hunting," "Ants Swarm" (1964), and her novel Miira-tori ryōkitan. Kaiten tobira (Revolving Door, 1970) features spouse-swapping.

More specifically, her writings explore "the struggles of Japanese women to come to terms with their identity in a traditional patriarchal society." Most of her female characters "reject traditional notions" of femininity and gender roles, their frustration "leads them to violent, often antisocial or sadomasochistic ways of dealing with the world." For example, in "Yōjigari," or "Toddler Hunting," one of her most famous stories, she investigates one woman's dislike of children. The protagonist, Akiko Hayashi, is repulsed by little girls but obsessed by little boys: she even imagines a little boy being beaten by his father to the extent that his innards spill out. She also takes pleasure in the sadomasochistic sex she has with her adult partner. One critic has written that the story "turn the myth of motherhood on its head" while another argued that Hayashi was a representation of demonic women who threatened patriarchy itself. In Fui no koe (1968), which one critic has called a "modern woman's Hamlet," Kōno presents the story of Ukiko, whose dead father haunts her. His ghost instructs her to murder the people who are controlling her life. At the end of the story, it is revealed that all of these incidents are only taking place within her mind and she is "trying in her twisted way to bring meaning to her everyday relationships."

Selected list of works

English translations Kōno, Taeko. Toddler-hunting & Other Stories. Trans. Lucy North. New York: New Directions, 1996. .