Swaddling Clothes
... much? Is it because I feel uneasy about the future of my own child? Say twenty years from now, when our boy will have grown up to a fine, carefully educated man, one day by quirk of fate he meets that other boy, who then will also have turned twenty. And say that the other boy, who has been sinned against, savagely stabs him with a knife . . . No, when the time comes I shall take my son’s place, she told herself suddenly.” Based on the above passage, I feel that it would be safe to say that one possible reading of the story is existential in nature; Toshiko, to some degree, believes herself to be responsible for the newborn’s fate. Her motherly instincts oblige her to feel compassion for the child whom her husband and the doctor treat with such contempt. Although she is not directly responsible for the child’s birth and its mocking treatment by her husband and the doctor, she can’t help but feel some attachment to and accountability for its pi...