luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)'s Reviews > Toddler Hunting and Other Stories

2 ½ stars

Toddler Hunting and Other Stories is an unnerving and subversive collection that doesn’t shy away from depicting perverse desires, sickening fixations, unhealthy appetites, and troubling relationships. The collection opens with a very tame story that, surprisingly enough, actually ended up being the only one I really appreciated. I found the quiet unease permeating this first story far more effective than the graphic portrayals we get later on of women who want to act out their sadomasochistic fantasies or children being physically and emotionally abused. This story has a seemingly simple premise, that of a married couple heading out to visit some friends of theirs, that is elevated by the ‘clandestine’ nature of their visit and by the subversion of our expectations in regard to how the night will pan out. It had this disquieting dreamlike quality that I have come to associate with the work of David Lynch and Kazuo Ishiguro.

The other stories are mostly populated by women who want their partners to whip/flog them as they find physical pain to be a source of pleasure. Given that these stories were published in the 1960s, the author’s unflinching exploration of her character’s sexual desires, their bodies and psyches, these stories were definitely avant-garde, transgressive even, and they can still be seen as such given that many of the women in these stories express or envision depraved fantasies.

The title story is the most ‘shocking’ one given that we follow a woman who out of a mixture of self-hatred or internalized misogyny finds girls repulsive. However, she seems to feel quite differently about little boys and finds ways to watch them undress or eat. Other women in this collection seem to find it arousing to scold children or imagine someone else scolding, or even brutally beating up, children. Some of Taeko Kōno’s women brought to mind Jean Rhys’ passive heroines, as they also find themselves drawn into other people’s volatile marriages (people who are rather 'unattractive' and 'unpleasant'). Others instead made me think of Mariana Enríquez and the infamous Humbert Humbert.

Certainly, Kōno has no trouble presenting her readers with discomforting scenes or delving into taboo subjects as grooming, sadomasochism, strange malaises, abject bodies, cruelty to children, self-abnegation, and unnerving portrayals of motherhood are motifs of this collection. While I am usually drawn to this type of restrained prose and morally dubious characters, I was, despite the stories’ graphic contents, bored. I found the stories too-samey, repetitive even. The women in these stories, despite their disruptive and ambiguous desires, were not particularly fascinating to me and I do not attribute depth or value to graphic content alone. I need something else, something, apologies to my fellow vegans, ‘meatier’ to sink my teeth into.

Some of my friends here on GR seemed to have had a more rewarding experience with this collection so if you are interested in reading I recommend you check out their reviews instead. Maybe I shouldn't have read this collection all at once, maybe then the stories would have felt more distinct from one another, so I am open to revisiting Kōno's work in the future.