Mothering: The Place of the Modern Mother

March 17, 2021

After giving birth, I once got off a train midway and breastfed on a station bench. At that moment, I felt severed from the civilized world and was overcome by a primitive sensation of connecting with Paleolithic humans, or perhaps all mammals. There is no place in this city for us, wet and slimy as we are. I gradually fell into an aphasic state.

Among postpartum women, some wander the boundaries between self and other. This state of undifferentiated self and other is also a psychological dissociation, and there are other mothers having the same experience. I began to want to find the words for it.

A series began in the literary magazine Subaru in the form of interviews with mothers close to me, including Saho Terao and Chiaki Soma. As the reporting progressed, I began to feel that what I was questioning here was not limited to childcare. While writing, I arrived at the core of what emotions are born when reaching out to those who are hurting or weak, and what care truly is. This also connected to the landscape I saw when I took a three-month leave of absence to care for my mother—which began before I gave birth—and stepped away from society.

The scope of my interviews gradually expanded to include those who had adopted children, Dominique Chen as a father rather than just a mother, Lang Lee from South Korea who has decided not to have children, and Leiko Ikemura, who is devotedly engaged with students in Germany. I came to feel that I had to deconstruct the hackneyed concepts of "mother" and "motherhood." Then, I encountered the concept of "mothering."

"Mothering" is defined as "the act of caring for and protecting children or other people," meaning it is not restricted by gender. Furthermore, in Western research, it was treated as a radical concept that counters capitalism.

In today's individualistic age, "dependence" is spoken of with a negative connotation. However, as everyone experiences life and death, no being is not vulnerable, and society has over-cultivated the illusion that one can exist without depending on others. In the past, there may have been a greater variety of words for the liminal states of birth and contact with death. Could mothering not serve as a light in today's world, which seems to exist by alienating life? This is the sentiment with which I wrote this book.

Mothering: The Place of the Modern Mother

Yuko Nakamura

Shueisha

312 pages, 2,200 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.