Turning into a Shadow: Textual Management of Sexual Violence in Taketori Monogatari

This paper is an integral part of an ongoing doctoral research which examines the varied textual representations of sexual violence in Heian and Kamakura monogatari. The first part of this dissertation, opening with the section presented here, addresses the three mid-ninth to mid-tenth century texts, Taketori, Utsuho and Ochikubo monogatari, whose representations or misrepresentations of sexual violence shaped Murasaki Shikibu’s own, in the eleventh century Genji monogatari. The present study focuses on the Taketori text and its management of sexual violence; it traces the work’s textual lineage and underlines the consistent and sustained attempts to sanitize its content by eliding such undesirable elements as sexual violence. Furthermore, it closely examines the only incident of sexual violence in the Taketori text, showing how an ingenious management of the topic resulted in a quasi-successful diffusion of the threats it might pose directly, to the tale’s heroine, or indirectly, to its readers. The textual analysis is framed by a theoretical discussion of fairy-tales in the European literary tradition, to which early monogatari like Taketori are often compared. By relying on the works of scholars and critics such as Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar and Kawai Hayao, this paper attempts to answer questions related to the origins of the monogatari tradition, the relationship between authorship and gender, the Taketori tale’s role as vehicle for and promoter of hegemonic gender scripts, as well as its potential for subversion and reinterpretation