"Swaddling Clothes" by Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima is recognized as a prolific Japanese literature figure of the 20th century, preoccupied with political subjects and with criticizing the Western societies, which he considers the reason for the Japanese society depravation. In fact, this is the theme of the “Swaddling Clothes”, published in Japan in 1955.1
Toshiko is the main character of the novel and in her world there are soft, fluffy blankets meant to protect and to caress the human beings and to offer them the needed comfort for a proper social development. The “Swaddling Clothes” is a symbolic representation of Toshiko’s phobia of human decay. The novel’s action takes place in the post World War II Tokyo.2
The women highly appreciates the moral virtues, as she was born and raised with them. She is shocked when she understands that the nurse that she hired to take care over her own son was pregnant. She condemned the nurse for her vulgarity of having an affair, remaining pregnant and for not being able to offer her baby a comfortable and careless life, because of her condition and lack of consideration. Toshiko remains puzzled when she sees the doctor that came to assist the nurse to her birth covering the nurse’s fresh born son into papers, as his swaddling clothes.
The moment she sees the newspapers on the new baby’s body she begins her transformation. She witnesses and explores a metaphor of life, being deeply focused with the new born baby’s destiny. She associates his newspaper swaddling with a life of misery , with a tormented existence that will hunt the baby. “Those soiled newspaper swaddling clothes will be the symbol of his entire life” 3
Throughout the novel, Toshiko experiences different emotions and attitudes towards human condition. In the first stage of her transformation she considers herself responsible for informing the baby about the fact that he was covered in newspapers at his birth, at a proper time. In the meantime she changes her mind about this, considering that she would definitely ruin a man’s life with such a story, discouraging him forever.
However, despite her shock and disapproval of the nurse’s incident, she becomes fully trapped in this story and her inner self assiduously explores the results and consequences of a life that occurred accidentally. She perceives this with fear and somehow with disgust, as she would not want her baby to ever meet the nanny’s baby ever when they would grow up.
“Say twenty years from now, when our boy will have grown up () one day by a quirk of fate he meets that other boy, who () stabs him with a knife”4
She feels that the nanny’s baby is already the expression of desperation, of vulgarity, the future miserable drunk. She offers the new baby no chance. In fact, she herself is the expression of the society, as she condemns the baby to a life of misery from his early existence.
The doctor’s gesture, of wrapping the child into newspapers has negatively impressed her, because she could not perceive a new human form being treated like this. Nevertheless, she has solid roots in the social standards that she was accustomed with and she cannot liberate herself from thinking differently than her peers about the lower classes.
The fact that the woman is willing to analyze the problem, thinking of it through her taxi ride and as she walks back home implies the fact that she is willing to understand the problem closely, to deeply analyze it. This makes her a new character, a curious person wanting to know more about the world outside her circle.
She blames her husband for joking about the nanny incident. She blames the doctor for wrapping the new born baby into bloodstained newspapers and for living him on the floor, without his mother’s attendance. She blames the nanny, the baby’s mother for not seeing the cruel injustice of having the baby wrapped in papers from the beginning of his life. She tries to remove the thought of newspaper swaddling and dresses in proper swaddling, from fresh flannel.
“Overcoming her disgust at the entire scene, she had fetched a brand-new piece of flannel from her cupboard and, having swaddled the baby in it, had laid it carefully in an armchair”5
This might look as if the woman is different than the rest of her society and that she gives a chance of a normal living to the new baby. But is this really so? Is this not just the social hypocrisy, copied from the Western societies, making the woman devoted to this cause? Or probably just the shock of seeing that the nanny was giving birth to a baby without knowing that she was pregnant? The fact that she is constantly thinking that the nanny’s son is going to stab her son when they will be in their 20s reflects a depraved thinking of her society, which without knowing, and probably unwilling, she had adopted.
As she enters the dark streets of the unknown that she wants to discover (the world of the others, the ones who are doomed to live a miserable life), she sees a reflection of her fears. “It seems to Toshiko that all her fears and premonitions had suddenly taken concrete form”.6 The 20 years miserable drunk young man was not only her imagination. It seems that the new born baby travelled through time and became the appearance of the perception that the woman had upon him. As he was trapped in her thoughts, the drunken young man, who was covered in newspapers, serving him as blankets, followed the woman’s ideas and fears and did exactly as she imagined: stabbed her.
References
E-notes, “Swaddling Clothes”, accessed February 4, 2012, http://www.enotes.com/swaddling-clothes.
Mishima Yukio, “Death in Midsummer, and other Stories”, New York: New Direction Publishing Corporation, 1996.
Spack, Ruth “The International Story: an Anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Extract from E-notes, “Swaddling Clothes”:
“It would be difficult to exactly locate when Mishima’s works became overtly political and whether or not Mishima even intended his early works to be characterized as such”.
