ABSTRACT
Akiko, the protagonist of Takahashi Takako's (1932–2013) short story ‘Congruent Figures’ (Sōjikei, 1971), is the wife of an oldest son. After the death of her husband's mother, she soon finds that the family house has become her own; its every nook and cranny have become intimately familiar to her, and its spaces have become intimately joined to her own sense of self. ‘With my mother-in-law gone,’ she remarks, ‘everything in this house, all the old furniture and the shapeless old things, bears the stains of my fingerprints and of my breath. I am confident that by this time I have tamed every visible and invisible thing … ’ (Takahashi 1991: 172). This order, however, is disrupted by her young daughter; as the girl matures, she begins to resemble Akiko more and more, and Akiko feels as if every molecule of her identity is being sucked away. Notably, this sense of self-alienation emerges most immediately within and through the experience of domestic space: when Akiko enters a room, the smells of her body, which previously had dominated the sensory landscape, have been displaced by those of her daughter.
