Embracing women: affective power and transformative empathy in Kirino Natsuo’s Daku onna and Murata Sayaka’s ‘Kakusei suru itami’
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Kirino Natsuo’s novel Daku onna (Women who Embrace, 2015) follows its protagonist, Naoko, as she struggles to find her place within the student movement and women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) during the early 1970s in Japan. This article also considers Murata Sayaka’s commentary on the novel, ‘Kakusei suru itami’ (‘Awakening Pain’, 2018), in which Murata claims to relate to and share Naoko’s pain. This paper argues that the pain of this historical moment—mediated through fiction—resonates affectively across generations, eliciting readers’ empathy and sharpening their sense of historical injustice towards women. Daku onna encourages readers to embrace Naoko’s subjectivity and plight alongside their own, while creating empathic linkages, or ‘coalitions’, between characters in the novel, and between readers and writers too. This article identifies narrative and contextual strategies that augment the novel’s affective power among Kirino’s readers. First, I analyse the novel’s paratextual, metatextual, and historical dimensions—including its title, cover, promotional discourse, narrative’s context—emphasising the significance of the events in 1972. I then draw on feminist theorisations of empathy as transformative to explore how textual features in Kirino’s novel and Murata’s essay invite readers to engage affectively with Naoko’s pains as a means of processing generational trauma. Finally, I reposition affective power and transformative empathy within a global perspective, writing as a reader situated in ongoing struggles against a neocolonial and neoliberal patriarchal order.
Source: Japan Forum
Author: Juliana Buriticá Alzate
Language: English
Topic: Japanese History and Culture
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7204205155