Unreliable Care: Gynocritical Readings of Pregnancy, Body, and Domestic Power in Ogawa Yōko's Ninshin Karendā

This study examines Ogawa Yōko’s Ninshin Karendā using a gynocritical framework to uncover how the body, pregnancy, relationships, power, and space are negotiated in contemporary Japanese literature. Departing from the limited gynocritical reading of the novel’s text, the study focuses on women as writers and women in traditional writing, with attention to the medium of diaries, language, sensory texts, and women’s psychodynamic authorship. The primary data is the novel Ninshin Karendā (1992) by Ogawa Yōko, published by Bunshun Bunko. This research method is qualitative, and close reading techniques are applied to identify dominant elements typical of gynocriticism, such as style and theme. The collected data are then coded using the thematic use framework by Braun and Clarke. The results show that pregnancy is constructed as a surveillance regime based on upside-down food and aroma, where anxiety becomes a mechanism of control. The unreliable narrator acts as a device of epistemic and empathetic ambiguity, producing ambivalence in the mother’s role and extending the operationalization of gynocriticism to the sensory body. The domestic space is a laboratory that mediates power relations between women, shifting the interpretation of domesticity from solidarity to control.