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loveselenade · 5 days ago

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Crisis of the family in n25 (Part 1)

The case of the Daughter’s talent erasing the Father.

Right from the very prologue, Nīgo's story presents us with the idea that Kanade’s family life has been obliterated— with that of her father’s hospitalization and her mother’s demise. The literal, physical absence of her parents serves to map her (more abstract) experience of child abuse through neglect into something visually concrete, as well as highlighting the precarity of her position as a child within the private (heterosexual) couple-based family.

Categories in crisis.

The segments in the main story detailing Kanade’s backstory center her relationship with her father, apparently long after her mother has passed away. Mr. Yosiaki’s status as a widowed freelancer complicates his position in relation to hegemonic masculinity[1]: while he still is the ultimate authority of his household and carries the responsibility of financially maintaining it as the head of the family, he goes from the very image of success— being a heterosexual, married man who’s the sole provider for his family to a certain degree of financial security (if we’re to judge by his equipment)— to a single father struggling to both secure work and successfully complete his client’s requests. As a freelance composer, his ability as a Father is predicated on his talent, and his struggle for this talent to cover his family’s needs threatens his masculinity.

Even after becoming a widow, Mr. Yosiaki rarely participates in domestic life due to work commitments— “the couple-based heterosexual household (is) built upon a gendered division of tasks, not least via the naturalization of particularly intensive mothering[2]”. The gap in reproductive labor (in the form of caretaking and housework) left by his wife’s demise then falls onto his middle-schooler daughter to fulfill. Kanade’s efforts underline her quality as a child: her attempts at cooking involve using pre-made ingredients and food from the convenience store, evidencing her status as a beginner cook. Her efforts to ensure her father’s well-being through cooking and cleaning, monitoring his needs are met and tending to his dejected moods often are politely declined and/or ignored. Even though she’s taking on the (invisible) labor a wife would undertake, she has no real way to influence her father or affect their family life. Furthermore, in the absence of her mother, there is no one left to ensure Kanade’s own needs are met, and she will often spend long periods of time ignored by her father and trying to come up with ways to earn his attention and love.

The place of a Daughter.

The ideal of the family promises the “grasping at a chance of guaranteed belonging, trust, recognition, and fulfillment[3].” This promise keeps Kanade and her Father motivated to continue their beleaguered maintenance of their household. For Mr. Yosiaki, to secure his place in the world as a parenting man that provides for his family and wisely guides and nurtures Kanade; his role as a Father is meant to secure him love, care and fulfillment. For Kanade as a Daughter, to have her material needs provided for and her future potential properly guided and eventually realized. Familial love is supposed to instill in her a sense of security in her place in the world and her agency in it.

What we see in the time the main story takes place is quite literally the opposite: her parents’ literal absence means that she will often neglect herself through denying herself food and rest for as long as possible, not to mention the fact she's a hikikomori whose only source of companionship are her online friends. She is single-mindedly dedicating all her energy and resources to redeem her existence through “creating music that can save anyone.” This attitude didn't originate from her Father's hospitalization, however. During the flashback segments, Kanade is weighted down by the sense she's burdensome: after all, she is the reason her father has to work himself so hard (nearly to the point of karōshi). So, she attempts to ease the burden she represents through being a dutiful daughter dedicated to caring for him and to her studies; she feels responsible for his happiness as the sole other member of their household. Post-hospitalization, she's haunted by the fact she is the reason he can no longer enjoy music (untrue), that she has killed his passion and reason d'etre, robbed him of his place in the world. Rather than fulfilling her role as his Daughter to ensure his happiness and fulfillment, she has failed and made him miserable.

Kanade’s status as a virtually parentless hikikomori highlights two things: 1. The precarity of children's position within the private household, and 2. The untenability of the Family Ideal. With regard to the former, one only needs to remember that there aren’t viable structural alternatives to child care, in Japan or globally. When Japanese children cannot be cared for/live with their parents, they’re more likely to end up institutionalized in state child care institutions[4] than to be fostered or adopted (98% of adoptions in Japan involve adult men)[5]. This is because “parental rights trump those of the child’s even when there is evidence to suggest the child is being abused or neglected by their parents(...);”[6] “parents prefer ‘to have their child placed in an institution than they are for the child to be fostered or adopted…as it allows them [children] to maintain a link with birth parents’.” This facilitates the parent to disengage from “the stresses of child-rearing without giving up their child or their legal rights over their child.[7]” So even in the case of Mr. Yosiaki being unable to care for Kanade due his hospitalization, it’s considered preferable for him to retain custody of her; Kanade’s living situation as a child that lives completely alone with no one to care for her represents the reality of many neglected, virtually parentless children.

(On this topic, the only thing that prevents Kanade from being homeless or institutionalized is the narrative convenience of having someone covering her expenses so that she can remain in her family residence. I might be the only one who cares about this, but I do wonder if it’ll come up more in detail eventually. Also, for more information on a contemporary issue with regards the structural lack of support for neglected and abused children, check this article on Toyoko children. Abusive or neglectful families, bullying and harassment, impossibly high academic expectations, are all considered to be the shared causes behind the phenomena of Toyoko children and hikikomori).

Having it all.

“The hegemonic cultural ideal of the man as husband, father, and provider (...) has traditionally been embodied in the image of the daikokubashira— literally the central pillar of a house, but applied metonymically to the male breadwinner “supporting” the household. (...) (This) ideology (...) defines and determines hegemonic masculinity primarily through work.(...) This notion (can impart) a sense of strength, empowerment and achievement to (...) masculine self-esteem.(...) The “fundamental” qualifications for shakaijin masculinity—becoming a daikokubashira, (are) supporting and looking after a family.”[8]

Even though Mr. Yosiaki’s position as a freelance composer, an artisan with no regular, full-time work hours, complicates his engagement to hegemonic masculinity, that his sense of self and achievement is predicated on his ability to complete his work is undeniable:

Mr. Yosiaki’s diary: “30th. I won the competition. But it seems that I’m not entirely happy about it. It was Kanade’s phrase that was highly evaluated. It’s her song. I cannot say it’s mine.”

His growing discontent over his (in)ability to secure and complete work is not solely predicated on practical concerns about securing their livelihood, but on the growing disruption of his sense of self and his certainty in his masculinity; his confidence on his talent becomes eroded:

Mr. Yosiaki’s diary: “They all laugh that the music I make belongs to the past. Even though it was so refined in that commercial, they say. What am I missing?”

This insecurity is what sparks his jealousy over his daughter��s talent. While he does not express his feelings directly to her, they drive his need to reaffirm and express his ego through his music— and his long hours at work. Despite being a freelancer that, in theory, can define his own working hours since he’s not bound by any company, he still pulls in the typical salaryman work schedule in order to validate his own sense of masculine identity, nearly driving himself to an early grave. However, upon being confronted with the enormity of Kanade’s talent through her gift to him, he becomes convinced he has no place in the present, and like his daughter, loses his sense of place in the world:

Mr. Yosiaki’s diary: “8th. Kanade gave me a song as a gift. Now I finally know. What is missing in my song. Why they laugh that my music is old-fashioned. What I create is merely an imitation of music I heard in the past. But Kanade’s music is different. It touches the hearts of the people who live in the present.”

However, despite his engagement with his own masculinity being very in line with trying to fulfill the image of the daikokubashira, he’s far from the image of the typical domineering father[9]. He shows himself gentle and supportive of Kanade whenever they speak, in spite of his insecurities. His diary confirms his commitment to looking after her despite the sacrifices to his ego this signifies:

Mr. Yosiaki’s diary: “But I still must keep on creating. To make a living. And for the sake of Kanade. I must create music that makes money. Yet is that… the music I want that makes someone happy?”

Even if his words try to establish his daughter, his family, as his reason to continue living, this falls in line with Ueno’s statement “that even today, some men mistake money and success at work for love for their family”[10] (and given Kanade’s grandma ends up supporting all of her expenses after his collapse, it further cements the ego component to his financial struggles). This inability to successfully negotiate his embodiment of the daikokubashira ideal and a redefinition of his masculinity to be more centered around being a Nurturing Father is what drives him into a nervous crisis where his poor health ultimately catches up to him. Narratively, his stasis is portrayed through his partially-amnesiac, convalescing state in which he can only remain himself through limited, sparse recollection of Kanade (and I have to wonder if the resolution —or lack thereof— to his identity crisis will play a role in the climax of Kanade’s own conflicted identity).

"In Everything for Everyone, Abdelhadi explains how (...) “you were supposed to still do all the things everyone was going while also raising the kid or kids, and everyone kind of questioned your work if it wasn’t 100-percent true. If you couldn’t do it all or have it all—which no one could.”[11] This passage captures the heart of the conflict in the Yosiaki household— that is that the couple-based family unit is “overburdened with work and worry about financial security and children’s unfolding lives[12]”, and such an overwhelming amount of labor and needs easily overtook both Father and Daughter’s capacities.

[1] “(Ryōta) is depicted as successful, ambitious and accomplished: an architect at a Tokyo firm, he leads a large team and works long hours. (...) The film establishes the Nonomiya family as a model of conventional gender roles and relations, within which the father rarely participates in domestic life due to work commitments while the mother takes the majority of responsibility for childcare and housework (...). Ryōta is also portrayed as an embodiment of the hegemonic model of masculinity in Japan, the salaryman: the heterosexual, married, white-collar office worker.” Christie Barber, 2018, ‘Beyond the absent father stereotype: Representations of parenting men and their families in contemporary Japanese film’. in Fabienne Darling-Wold (ed), Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media, pp 230.

[2] Sarah Brouillete (2023), Domestic Heteropessimism, as accessed in 06/01/2025 https://post45.org/2023/07/domestic-heteropessimism/

[3] Brouillete (2023)

[4] Alyssa Pearl Fusek (2018a), Life in Limbo: How Japan is Failing its Institutionalized Children. Unseen Japan, 2018. As accessed on 06/01/2025.

[5] Alyssa Peark Fusek(2018b), Why do Adult Adoptions Abound in Japan’s Business World? Unseen Japan, 2018. As accessed on 06/01/2025.

[6] Fusek (2018a).

[7] Idem

[8] Dasgupta, Romit, 2005, ‘Salarymen doing straight: Heterosexual men and the dynamics of gender conformity’, in M. McLelland and R. Dasgupta (eds), Genders, transgenders and sexualities in Japan, pp168,170-171

[9] “Ryōta’s conversations with Keita recurrently consist of instructions or admonishments about such things as table manners or learning piano—- an expression of Ryōta’s general judgement that Keita is unable to meet his expectations and therefore deficient. In these depictions, Ryōta conforms to a model of masculinity that Michele Adams and Scott Coltrane (2005) argue demands that a man not only be in a position of authority and responsibility, but also autonomous and uninvolved with his family.” Barber (2018)

[10] Quoted in: Gordon Matthews, 2003, ‘Can ‘a real man’ live for his family?: ikigai and masculinity in today’s Japan’ in James E. Roberson and Nobue Suzuki (eds), Men and masculities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the salaryman doxa, pp 110.

[11] Quoted in Brouillete (2023)

[12] Brouillete (2023).

#posted it bc jt was driving me crazy to still have it in the back of my mind as something 'pending' lol #might revisit it when I get to Kanade’s first event lol #note: I'm in the middle of the picnic event with Ena and Mzk lol #mfw I started writing this after seeing her backstory bc it was bonkers lol babbling about their place in the world like they were Insights™#ans then knd straight up just said it when talking to mfy smdh I was a bit irritated but it also meant I was right so lol #anyway.#project sekai #kanade yosiaki

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